The storm of media attention circling the recent death of Lisa Marie Presley is something more than the usual hoo-hah surrounding the passing of a pop culture star. Indeed, if we compare the phalanx of stories involving Ms. Presley to those reporting on the death of David Crosby—a far more successful and influential pop star—we can see just how much more significant, in a cultural semiotic sense, the Presley coverage is. For as Crosby fades away from the front pages, Presley’s story continues, with a Graceland memorial event still to come as I write these words. The semiotic question then becomes, “what does all this avid attention to Lisa Marie Presley tell us?” To answer this question, it will be useful to go back to Paul Simon’s Grammy Award winning album Graceland, which used Elvis Presley’s famed mansion as a platform for exploring the uneasy state of America in the 1980s. We saw something similar with Simon’s song “Mrs. Robinson” which invoked the image of Joe Dimaggio as a lost symbol of American unity while America was being torn apart in the 1960s by the Vietnam War and the cultural revolution.  Indeed, in the title song from the album (“Graceland”), Simon gets quite specific about his hopes—what he calls his belief—that he could find in his pilgrimage to Presley’s legendary estate a place not only for the restoration of his own personal sense of dislocation and loss but also a unifying haven for all Americans.  At a time of social, political, and cultural division that surpasses anything this country has seen since the Civil War, “Graceland” is more powerful than ever. What is evident, in the massive media attention to the death of Elvis Presley’s only child, is a kind of desperate nostalgia for a long-lost era when Elvis ruled as “the King” of rock-and-roll. There are many ironies in this nostalgia, of course.  For one thing, the rise of Elvis in the 1950s accompanied (and even facilitated) the suppression of the Black pioneers of rock music, which was hardly a demonstration of cultural unity (one could say that Graceland was segregated). And as the British Invasion and the Summer of Love changed the narrative on rock-and-roll in the 1960s, establishing it as the background music for the cultural revolution, Presley’s place in the pantheon shifted. No longer “the King” of a single rock-and-roll nation, Presley became something of a joke in the emerging zeitgeist—an aging Vegas act courted by the likes of Richard Nixon. For now there were two nations: the pop cultural musical mainstream in which the King had been dethroned, and the generally rural America where Elvis is revered to this day, an icon of a larger movement that can be called the counter-cultural-revolution. This takes us back to Lisa Marie Presley. For her entire life, she was thrust into the role of a princess bearing forth the banner of her father the King. But the kingdom had changed even before the King’s death, and Lisa Marie’s role was always an awkward one. So now, in her death, nostalgia and, perhaps, a little guilt, floods the mass media in a ritual of memory not only for a person but ultimately for a time of American unity—of a common culture—that never was. Photo by Emrecan Arik (2019), used under the Unsplash License. ... View more

  Richard Weissbourd, who directs the Making Caring Common Project at Harvard, notes the difficulty of encouraging or teaching empathy today: “It’s hard to have a shared morality when you don’t have a shared reality,” he says. But for that very reason, Weissbourd and his colleagues see a more-than-ever urgency in trying to do so. And they are convinced we can succeed: “I think learning empathy is like playing an instrument or learning a sport. It’s a lot about practice.” These are heartening words to teachers of writing, who strive to build an ethos of trust and empathy in their classrooms in order to support respectful listening and openness to learning, even from those with differing perspectives—perhaps especially from those with differing perspectives. But teachers know, too, that practicing empathy doesn’t mean always agreeing with everyone, or always being agreeable. As one of my students put it, “I feel for someone I know who is into conspiracy theories that have been proven false and dangerous. But I don’t ‘feel’ for those theories or his argument about them.” In short, being empathetic doesn’t mean simply going along with any old thing. We can—and often need to—state our disagreements very strongly; but we can do so without rejecting the humanity of with whom we disagree. Students probably know empathy when they see it, but in my experience, they have some difficulty in defining it. If you are working to build and practice empathy in your classroom, a little definitional assignment can be one place to begin. Scholars often speak of three kinds or aspects of empathy: cognitive empathy, which attempts to understand other people’s points of view—and why they hold them; emotional empathy, which is the ability and willingness to “walk in the shoes” of another person, to try to experience what they are experiencing; and ethical empathy, which is having compassion and concern for another person. Weissbourd argues that true empathy calls for all three.  The Making Caring Common Project aims to help parents teach their children this three-part empathy, partly by talking openly about feelings and emotions, helping them understand what other people feel (with lots of examples drawn from their own experience), and addressing issues of bias and stereotypes in themselves as well as in others. These are all practices that teachers of writing can and do employ. Earlier in my teaching career, I tended to take empathy for granted, just assuming that my students and I were empathetic by nature. But by the time I had taught for several years, I met students who seemed to be without empathy or the capacity for it. And I began to question my own capacity for empathy as well, noting times in my teaching and in my life when I was anything but “naturally” empathetic. And so I began, slowly, to bring definitions and examples and discussions of empathy into my classes, to ask students to explore the concept with me and to keep a personal log or journal where they could record instances of empathy or its lack in themselves as well as in others. It was very slow going at first, but usually a little beyond midterm, most students were gaining valuable insights into themselves and their behavior toward others. Not all, certainly. But most. We began to look for contributions to our “found empathy” project, bringing in examples of empathy at work in the world around us and writing and talking about it.  I can’t say that I have learned how to “teach” empathy, even now, but I have learned to identify it (and the lack of it) and to define and exemplify and discuss it with students in everyday language. I have learned to spot my own lack of empathy—or misplaced or mistaken empathy, and tried to learn from them. I have encouraged and challenged students to do the same, and to consciously practice empathy.  In these times of deep division—of white supremacy and unbridled racism, of hate speech and deliberate misinformation campaigns—we need to teach critical thinking and critical language awareness. But we also need to teach empathy.   Image by Toa Heftiba reproduced under the Unsplash license. ... View more

Photo by April Lidinsky, 2023  Before heading off on winter break, I read an inspiring post by writer Rebecca Solnit in which she rhapsodized about a Portland hotel that, years ago, held a monthly silent reading hour to encourage the habit of reading for pleasure. She recalled the delight of passing handwritten drink orders to a server so that the only sound in the plush lobby was the turning of pages. I shared the idea on my own social media page, and a tsunami of introverted bookworms responded that this would be a dream come true. What could be better than enjoying community without the pressure of talking, all while nurturing a habit many of us have neglected — uninterrupted immersion in reading? It took very little effort to organize monthly meet-ups that we’re calling “The Reading Hour - South Bend.” Other cities have organized Silent Book Clubs with the same concept, which was covered by NPR. Our first local gathering was last week in the soaring sky-lighted atrium of a hotel. Thirty readers showed up with books and Kindles, smiling and nodding at one another, and dropped into chairs for an hour of silent reading. I noticed that the positive modeling of other readers kept me from reaching for my phone, a habit I fight at home, even when I’m reading for pleasure. Bolstered by my peers, with only the whisper of turning pages around me, I let myself enter the flow of my book, and was astonished by how quickly the hour flashed by. Why is this kind of focused engagement such a rare experience? And what can it tell us about our own students’ relationship to distracting devices when we are struggling to get them to focus in our physical or virtual classrooms? My silent “Reading Hour” book was James M. Lang’s Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It. Lang quickly skewers any standard grumbling about students who “can’t stay off their phones in class” by offering us “A Brief History of Distraction,” shored up by neuroscience. Once we are reminded that humans have survived in part because of our ability to be distracted from hyper-attention to pay attention to predators (or, in today’s world, pings on our devices), it’s harder to be judgy towards our students.  And after you enjoy Lang’s galloping history of pedagogical distraction — from Aristotle noticing that flute playing in the distance distracts students from boring lessons, to no less than Augustine confessing that his mind wanders to fly-catching lizards when he’s supposed to be praying — we can appreciate that any fist-shaking about screens in the classroom is just part of the ongoing story of being distractedly human. And yet Lang doesn’t urge us to give up. Instead, he suggests a perspective-shift by inviting us to consider what happens when any of us are immersed in a “flow.” I find this in pleasure-reading, or while intent on gardening, but for others, the flow might be found in hours of game-play, or a creative hobby. The key is that when flow happens, our attention is focused. For instructors, Lang argues, we’d do well to stop complaining about what’s distracting our students, and start creating more learning situations that will hold our students’ attention. Here’s a question for all of us: When your students are really engaged and their attention is focused on a task, what exactly is going on? What dynamics, arrangements, or tasks have you set up so they are actively working through material, on their own or with one another?  In our book, From Inquiry to Academic Writing, fifth edition, co-authored with Stuart Greene, every reading begins with a headnote that suggests close engagement strategies students could do on their own or in groups. For example, in the headnote for a timely essay by Robin DiAngelo on “The Perception of Race,” students are invited to mark and respond to redefinitions of terms such as “race,” “racism,” “prejudice” and “discrimination,” to launch their own reflections on these concepts and practices.  After every reading, we also offer prompts for “Reading as a Writer: Analyzing Rhetorical Choices.” These activities guide students back into the texts for a variety of close engagement, from reverse-outlining to illuminate structural decisions, to marking examples or quotations in a reading to spark conversations about how and when skillful writers employ these techniques, to looking up more about concepts, terms, or authors. We find that when students are immersed in these methods of paying attention, especially in pairs or small groups, the hum in the classroom is of readers and writers in a communal flow, and rarely do we see the furtive use of phones, unless students are looking up a word, a fact, or a concept (as we all do many times a day). Lang reminds us that the Latin roots of “dis-traction” mean to “drag something apart” (29).  What do you do — in your in-person or virtual classroom spaces — to hold your students together as a community of learners? What captures their attention, keeps them in the flow of scholarly activity, and how might we all do this more? ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by John Hansen. John Hansen received a BA in English from the University of Iowa and an MA in English literature from Oklahoma State University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Summerset Review, One Sentence Poems, The Dillydoun Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Eunoia Review, Litro Magazine, Wild Roof Journal, The Banyan Review, Drunk Monkeys, and elsewhere. He has presented on a variety of topics at The National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD), The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC—Regional), The American Comparative Literature Association, The Midwest Conference on British Studies, and others. He is an English Department faculty member at Mohave Community College in Arizona. Read more at johnphansen.com.   Unknown Impacts: Be Kind Early in the Fall 2020 semester, I sent e-mails to several students who stopped participating in our developmental English course. Ben responded two days later apologizing. Hours later, I answered the phone - it was Ben. Small talk quickly turned to him revealing a recent divorce, eviction, and layoff (due to COVID-19). I chatted with Ben weekly. He became one of the better writers in class. Days before the semester ended, Ben sent an e-mail about how he would have ended his life if he didn't have someone to talk with that day. I've reflected on this and Ben every semester.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

I always look forward to learning what major dictionaries have found to be the most “looked up” or asked about word of the year, or the word they think most captures their readers’ interests. Often I can guess or come close to what those words must be. But as I began to think about 2022, I was pretty much at sea: so many words seemed to have emerged as lightning rods that I just didn’t know what to choose. So it was with great interest that I started tracking reports coming out from dictionaries. The first one I saw came from Merriam Webster, and they chose a word that I had actually thought of: gaslighting. In their announcement, Merriam Webster noted that gaslighting, “a driver of disorientation and mistrust,” is “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage,” and went on to report that during 2022, lookups for gaslighting increased by 1,740 percent. Indeed, I’m pretty sure I looked up the word at least once though perhaps earlier than 2022. But given the events of 2022—and the beginning of 2023—I’d say this was a pretty appropriate choice for word of the year. Dictionary.com took me completely by surprise in choosing—wait for it!—WOMAN—as their word of the year. I was also surprised to learn that lookups for that word increased 1400 percent after Republican Marsha Blackburn asked Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to define “woman” during her confirmation hearing. Jackson said, “No, I can’t.” At any rate, in announcing their word of the year, Dictionary.com noted that “Our selection of woman … reflects how the intersection of gender, identity and language dominates the current cultural conversation and shapes much of our work as a dictionary.” I would like to hear more about just how that shaping is at work! Wordle apparently led the Cambridge Dictionary to choose homer as word of the year after over 65,000 people rushed to the dictionary to look up this five-letter word that they were not familiar with. This informal American English word evoked what the dictionary called “the Wordle effect.”  Over at Collins, the WOTY is permacrisis, about as far a cry from homer as we could hope. In their announcement, Collins defines permacrisis as “an extended period of instability and insecurity.” This isn’t a familiar word to me, but it is one, according to Collins, that captures the sense of ongoing crisis felt in the UK and around the world. It’s interesting to note, too, that the word permacrisis is new this year to Collins Dictionary.  But the most surprising word of the year to me comes from Oxford, who has chosen goblin mode. For the first time in its history, Oxford opened the choice up—and over 300,000 people answered the call. And goblin mode won out! According to Oxford, their WOTY is “a word or expression reflecting the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the past twelve months, one that has potential as a term of lasting cultural significance.” This slang term for a lazy, laid-back, self-indulgent way of being first appeared, according to Oxford, on Twitter in 2009, but “went viral on social media in February 2022," before rising in popularity over the following months as COVID lockdown restrictions continued to ease. "Seemingly, it captured the prevailing mood of individuals who rejected the idea of returning to ‘normal life,' or rebelled against the increasingly unattainable aesthetic standards and unsustainable lifestyles exhibited on social media.” Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, notes that “People are embracing their inner goblin, and voters choosing ‘goblin mode’ as the Word of the Year tells us the concept is likely here to stay.”  This seems to me to be the widest spread of word of the year choices in some time, perhaps ever, and that in itself says something about the difficulty of “summing up” the year we have just been through. Perhaps that’s why the New York Times, in a “Student Opinion” piece by Natalie Proulx, offered an assignment based on word of the year. Students who are 13 and older in the US and 16 and older in the UK are invited to read Proulx’s article and then write an article announcing their own word of the year and responding to several questions Proulx poses about the words chosen by prominent dictionaries this year.  You might want to adapt this assignment for your classes: it would be a particularly effective way to start a class, because it would surely reveal how students are feeling about the world they live in today.   Image by Brett Jordan reproduced under the Unsplash license. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Eileen Curran-Kondrad, Teaching Lecturer, English, at Plymouth State University. Eileen has written her story as a poem.   About the Course   No birdies, no eagles no long drives I slink off the course after the ninth   On the terrace outside the clubhouse college tournament players mill around. I browse the tables brimming with golf swag.   A voice calls out a young man approaches. Remember me? I took your class last year. We read five books that semester. You turned me into a reader. I went on to read  David Copperfield. I just had to tell you.   I roll my clubs to the car chuckle to myself. Did I just get a hole in one?   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Kyle McIntosh, an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Writing at the University of Tampa where he teaches in the Academic Writing and TESOL Certificate programs.   Mirror “The professor always provides such useful feedback. I don’t know how he has time to read each paper so carefully,” wrote a student on my course evaluation last fall. “He never gives us any feedback,” wrote another. “He doesn’t care about students at all.” Suddenly, I wondered: “Are there two versions of me – one good teacher and one bad – who appear to different students in the same class at different moments on different days? And which one is the me who is reading these comments now?” Just to be safe, I shave off my goatee.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

  With so much chaos, cruelty, and suffering in our world, it seems presumptuous to think about happiness. And yet. And yet we do think about it and strive toward it and, especially, we wish happiness for friends, family, and all those beyond.  For me, as for so many others, this is a giving time of year. I have two friends who begin their holiday season by focusing on gratitude, on what they are grateful for, and they don’t stop until they have thought of as many things they are grateful for as there are years on their calendars. So far this year, they are up to 2022-specific gratefulness. Then they move on to focusing on what they can do for and give to others. The kind of giving I have in mind is a giving of ourselves, straight from the heart. A gift thus given is truly received, and reciprocated, in the way described by Lewis Hyde in The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. So as fall term winds down and I peer anxiously toward the new year, I aim to give such gifts as best I can, and to send wishes for a bit of happiness to all. Hanukkah. Kwanzaa. Christmas. The Holy months of Islam. And so many other traditions that make room for the gift of such wishes.  So good wishes especially to teachers and students of writing everywhere. May all the traditions you celebrate bring some respite, some light, and peace, and joy. Happy Holidays, 2022. Andrea   Photo by Sincerely Media reproduced under license from Unsplash. ... View more

  We know the holidays are upon us because we are now surrounded by “sounds of the season,” muzak that begins to wear on my last nerve after about a day. But this year, these ubiquitous melodies have gotten me thinking about sound and how it affects our perceptions of what’s around us as well as our thoughts—and our writing. In the early days of the Stanford Writing Center (now the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking), we held a series called “How I Write” and invited colleagues on campus to talk with our genial host, Hilton Obenzinger, about their writing preferences and processes. (You can read portions of these conversations in Hilton’s How We Write: The Varieties of Writing Experience, published in 2015.) I sat in on these interviews for years, and I now remember how often sound came up as a subject of importance to a number of writers. One colleague I particularly recall, from psychology, said that she always wrote with “soft rock” playing in the background, because she loathed soft rock and it just kept her a little edgy and on her writing toes! Another wrote with sounds of the sea in the background and, as you might imagine, others demanded silence, or as close to it as they could get. A friend who lost her vision about twenty years ago speaks eloquently about the role sound plays in her life. Each morning she opens the door not to the landscape beyond but to the soundscape, to what she hears. She inhabits that soundscape fully, as the sounds, from barely audible and subtle to bold and commanding, literally make her day.  I’ve learned a great deal from this friend and have begun to track my own soundscapes, trying to attend as carefully as I possibly can to the sounds around me. So, I was very interested to read Steph Ceraso’s “Sonic Scenes of Writing” in the March 2022 issue of College English. This article reports on email interviews with 19 faculty members in rhetoric and composition at a number of institutions and across career spans.  A series of open-ended questions elicited information about how these instructors thought about the relationship between their writing and sound as well as about the choices they make in connecting the two. Like the “How I Write” conversations, these interviews provide fascinating insights into what Ceraso calls “sonic scenes of writing.” I was particularly interested in sa faculty member with “significant hearing loss” who used music to reduce, or relieve, negative feelings.  One thing we can be sure of is that our students have rich soundscapes to draw on today. If they haven’t thought much about those soundscapes, now’s a good time for them to do what I’ve been doing: to track what sounds surround them, and especially what sounds they choose to engage and why. A whole-class discussion or “sonic scenes” and soundscapes followed by small-group follow-up can lead to a brief prompt that asks students to reflect on how sound is connected to their writing (and reading) and whether and/or why sound is important to their thinking. Attending carefully to what they are hearing and choosing to hear—even for a few hours, should get them started on an analysis of their individual soundscapes.  And then to compare them to one another’s, and to yours! Some may be inspired to dig in to the burgeoning research around “sound studies” and add their own work to it.   "Cool audio waves" by qubodup is licensed under CC BY 2.0. ... View more

“Insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less.”  -  James Baldwin on struggles of writing and writers. From“The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.”   At the beginning of next year, I will return to teaching first-year writing in-person for the first time since March 2020. In reflecting on this transition, I gave myself a three-part assignment for revising the course, and starting with James Baldwin’s lecture “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.” This semester, as explained in a recent post, I am once again introducing James Baldwin’s lecture/essay “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” as the primary source for the first semester of First-Year English (College Writing 1). Ask why I need to revise the assignment By using backwards planning, I can identify the purpose of the course: to practice reading, analyzing, and writing about difficult sources, and for students to practice choosing sources (beyond Google) to support the most significant points in their own writing. To a certain extent, this English class might seem traditional, and in a sense it is because the course focuses on critical analysis of source materials. However, by sources, I include anything that can be described as multimedia including, as appropriate, students’ intersectional identities,   experiences, and language(s). Students also can refer to interpretations of media of their choosing, such as but not limited to, social media, the arts, and STEM courses. Interpretation is practiced throughout the semester, and culminates in the final assignment. My thought is to invite students to consider the contemporary relevance of Baldwin’s lecture in their own lives and in the lives of their communities.  Listen to, watch, and/or reread the source for the first assignment.  I found myself reimagining what students might need to better understand the language of the lecture. Although I made a brief video early in the pandemic to introduce “Artist’s Struggle” and Baldwin’s work, the video now seemed dated. To revise, I added more details about the connections between Baldwin’s life and work. I also revised the course introduction video to give more emphasis on Baldwin, whose writing we will study throughout the semester. Making and revising the videos helped me understand more about visual and auditory learning, beyond the words on the page or screen, as well as class discussions, group work, and minilessons. The videos compelled me to introduce complicated concepts in a very short time frame, and will allow me to return to and build on those concepts throughout College Writing 1. As I searched for video and audio of Baldwin’s many public speeches, and television (note: content alert for strong language) and radio appearances, I discovered Lofi Hiphop James Baldwin Speeches, more than three hours of Baldwin’s finest works set to lofi music. Since “Artist’s Struggle” wasn’t included in this compilation, I made my own video of “Artist’s Struggle,” set to royalty free ambient music from Bensound.com. For me, the beats of the music helped emphasize the cadence and emotion in Baldwin’s voice, and seemed to slow down the lecture, drawing more attention to specific words and phrases that I might have missed before. Years ago, in grad school, my comparative literature professor emphasized the process of defamiliarizing– making the familiar strange or new. I listen to the words and ambient music as I prepare my class, and as I write blogs– and this practice allows me to defamiliarize the lecture which, in turn, offers a new approach to Baldwin’s work and a renewed approach to teaching. Imagine students encountering this source for the first time Because I have presented Baldwin’s lecture many times, I needed a new way to hear Baldwin’s words so that I could listen more closely. I decided that I would try translation, inviting students to translate and update a 1960s source into language for 2020s readers. My ideas on teaching translation as a first assignment in a first-year writing class are informed by the work of Ayash (2020), as well as Kiernan, Meier, and Wang (2016; 2017). To clarify, here’s what I don’t mean: One-to-one correspondence between the words of the source’s original language into a target language Taking sources from students’ home languages and translating the sources into a target language (usually English) Taking sources from a target language (usually English) and translating the sources into students’ home language By translation, I mean the process of analysis–breaking down a complicated piece by piece, so that the writer and the writer’s audience can create meaning from a complicated source and come to an understanding, in their own words, of the source’s significance. Although students might engage with these practices as part of their own processes of translation, these practices, on their own, will not constitute the whole of their first writing project. What I do mean, as stated above, is taking a source written in 1900s English and translating that source into students’ 2020s languages, including multimedia. In this sense, it is important to note that Baldwin spoke Black English and French, and was steeped in his experiences as a teenage evangelist, and by the novels of the American writer Henry James. All of these languages played a role in Baldwin’s writing.  The structure of Writing Project 1 would look something like this. Note that the processes of translation are not linear, but are numbered here for clarity: What section of “Artist’s Struggle” did you choose and why did you choose it?  What details should the audience look for in the original source? Why are these details significant? After this explanation, copy the original section into your paper. What details should the audience look for in your translation? Why are these details significant? After this explanation, copy your translation into your paper. What processes did you use in creating this translation? What language(s) did you use to give the section meaning? Did you consider your own life experiences as you created the translation? Did you do any multimedia work? If so, send a link with your work, or attach a photo of your work to your paper submission, or email the photo to me. Reflect on your work for Writing Project 1 in general. What did you learn from writing this translation? What skills might be applicable to other courses or life experiences? What was your learning significant?   With these practices, I hope to refocus the affordances of in-person teaching, while at the same time staying mindful of lessons learned online. I look forward to returning to Baldwin’s lecture in the upcoming semester– and to implementing many of the important teaching tools and pedagogy from remote learning to help ground students’ learning and to continue to shape possibilities for teaching in post-lockdown face-to-face classrooms.  ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Dr. Chris M. Anson. Chris is a Distinguished University Professor at North Carolina State University, where he is also the Director of the Campus Writing & Speaking Program.   The Big Reveal On the last day of the semester, the elderly bearded gentleman in my 200-student course on English language and linguistics approached me, smiling. “I have thoroughly enjoyed this class,” he said. “You’re clearly a dedicated and student-centered teacher.” As a newly-minted professor, I took his words as high praise. “You see, I’m retired,” he continued, “but I take one course each semester to keep learning.” “That’s awesome!” I said. “What sort of work did you do?” He smiled. “Until last year, I was the provost here.” Stunned, I realized that his gift was more than his praise; it was waiting until the end to disclose.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

  Ever since Elon Musk announced his interest in acquiring Twitter, the internet has been awash in discussions of Musk’s strong support for freedom of speech and against controlling speech. Critics worried that removing the guard rails Twitter had developed over years would lead, instantly, to enormous abuse by purveyors of misinformation, hate speech, and potential violence. And when Musk eventually purchased Twitter (for $44 billion), many of these predictions came true. As Musk reduced the Twitter workforce by half, dismantled the Trust and Safety division of Twitter, reinstated previously banned groups and people (including The Babylon Bee, a deeply conservative satirical “fake news you can trust” site, and Donald Trump), confusion and chaos reigned, driving away advertisers and users and evoking ever more critical response. Musk’s substitution of the “blue check” verification with a fee-based system that would give a blue check to anyone willing to pay for it gave instantaneous rise to impersonations and chaos, which led to Musk shelving the pay-for-play system for a time. Still, Musk resisted what he viewed as any form of “censorship” in favor of the right “to speak freely within the bounds of the law.” This debate, still raging inside—and far outside—Twitter, seems to me to provide an ideal opportunity to ask students to take up the First Amendment, to investigate its origins, and to do some research on the current debate over what constitutes freedom of speech and where to draw the line when it comes to any forms of regulation.  The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. I’d be inclined to begin by briefly discussing the entire amendment and pointing out potential difficulties in defining what counts as “abridging” and “prohibiting,” before moving on to consider the phrase “abridging the freedom of speech.” Five little words, but what a lot they attempt to encompass! I would then establish some small working groups:  one to research the context surrounding the development and passage of the first amendment;  one to research the most important freedom of speech cases considered by the Supreme Court in the last 30 years;  one to research and summarize the arguments put forward by Musk and others who advocate wide open freedom of speech policies for Twitter and other platforms; one to research and summarize the arguments put forward by those, including Human Rights Watch, who advocate for careful monitoring and regulation of forms of hate speech, and one to conduct some informal polls/interviews with fellow student to gather as many reactions to the situation at Twitter, including their decision to stay with Twitter or to leave.  These research teams will inevitably gather rich material to report to the whole class, and these reports can serve as the basis for whole-class discussion of the issues and for subsequent writing assignments, from low-stakes journaling to formal arguments.  The notoriety of Musk’s takeover of Twitter and the widespread discussion it has generated brings the Constitution and its amendments up close and personal to students today. So why not use the opportunity to engage them in some powerful research as well as some opportunities for speaking and writing—and exercising their own freedom of speech.  Photo by Akshar Dave reproduced under license from Unsplash. ... View more

A recent wintery visit to my home state Colorado reminded me that, while the cacophony of fall foliage has its delights, the subtlety of winter’s colors can draw a person into deep contemplation. This blue spruce against a clear blue sky stopped me on a frosty walk with my father. The nuanced play of azure on blue-gray-green needles held my gaze, inviting me to consider the array of tones I would have missed with a bolder contrast of colors. Because most of my brain these days is consumed with student drafts (yours, too?), this encounter with nature reminded me of the many conversations I’m having in the margins of my students’ writing about the value of nuance in scholarly arguments. New college writers tend turn the dial to 11 (thanks, This is Spinal Tap!) when it comes to constructing arguments. Perhaps this is because of the bombastic models of “argument” we so often hear on political talk shows, where speakers launch arguments like bombs: absolute, totalizing, and designed to demolish the opposition. So, it can be a challenge for students to see nuance and humility in scholarly arguments as a strength rather than a weakness.  Andrea Lunsford reminds us that humility is essential to listening in academic conversations. I have written before, too, about humility as a strength in scholarly ethos. I understand, though, why nervous students might try to over-perform confidence, and bolster their ethos, with outsized claims. You’ve seen these totalizing claims in drafts, too, I’m sure: “College sports are destructive to students;” “Social media is driving adolescents into despair;” “Students want majors that lead directly to jobs.” Without nuance, qualification, or complexity, all these claims remain fundamentally open to critique. In From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Text and Reader, my co-author Stuart Greene and I offer a chapter on building responsible scholarly arguments. Among the guidelines are: Acknowledging points of view that differ from the writer’s own, reflecting the complexity of an issue and, Demonstrating an awareness of the readers’ assumptions and anticipating possible counterarguments. (164) These practices signal to readers that the writer is taking on an issue with nuance and humility, rather than bludgeoning the reader with simplistic bombast. We also provide steps for students to develop a nuanced ethos in their appeals to readers, since cultivating this presence on the page is essential to making effective academic arguments: Steps to Appealing to Ethos: Establish that you have good judgment. Identify an issue your readers will agree is worth addressing, and demonstrate that you are fair minded and have the best interests of your readers in mind when you address it. Convey to readers that you are knowledgeable. Support your claims with credible evidence that shows you have read widely on, thought about, and understand the issue. Show that you understand the complexity of the issue. Demonstrate that you understand the variety of viewpoints your readers may bring—or may not be able to bring—to the issue. (289) All of these habits of mind and practices on the page take time to establish, of course. I’m still honing these skills, myself. What has worked best in your classes as you guide students toward the nuance and humility we value in scholarly conversations?   Photo by April Lidinsky (2022) ... View more

    Some instructors like to have students debate a controversial issue while others feel that having students defend a position that they do not hold, even as a learning exercise, is too artificial. It is always good, though, for students to see different points of view in order for them to understand a subject fully. You can defend best against a position that you take the time to understand. One subject that you can ask students to examine, which is also close to their own recent experience, is whether the SAT should be dropped as a college admission requirement. The COVID pandemic forced colleges to take a closer look at the necessity of standardized test scores for admission. According to the College Board, “Some 1.5 million students in the high school class of 2021 took the SAT at least once, down from 2.2 million in the class of 2020 due to the pandemic.” Now more than 800 colleges and universities have chosen to no longer require the SAT or the ACT. Current college students may be among the first to enter college without having to meet a standardized test requirement and may have a strong opinion on the subject. If you ask students to brainstorm the pros and cons of dropping the standardized test requirement, perhaps writing them on the board as an initial list of ideas to work with, you will probably hear a number of reasons students are glad the tests are on the way out: They put too much pressure on one test. Some people just don’t test well. Students do not perform well because the test is very stressful. Grades for your whole high school career should count more than a single test. Something as important as college admission shouldn’t be based on a timed test. You might want to push students beyond their own personal experience to think about what they may have read or heard about other limitations of standardized testing. They may then bring up, or you can, complaints that standardized tests are biased against certain groups. There is a wide array of good articles that address gender, racial, and economic bias in college admissions tests. One of the best, by Kim Elsesser, appeared in Forbes in 2019. Some schools thought to avoid the problem of bias by making submitting test scores optional, but a judge in California decided that there was still inherent bias in that option. Is there, then, another side to the issue? Is there a reasonable defense for standardized testing? You might ask students why they think the tests were initiated in the first place. This may draw out their thoughts on the purpose of the SAT and ACT. There has never been an easy way to evaluate the grades of students who come from vastly different high schools with vastly different budgets and vastly different student bodies. Are A’s from an elite prep school equivalent to A’s from a small rural school? Maybe, but grade inflation in secondary schools has made it very difficult to predict college success based on grades alone. Colleges also now have a long history of studying the connection between standardized tests score and success in college. If students go on to write about the issue, they can easily research any and all of these pros and cons. Even if they go no further than brainstorming the subject, they will see beyond their own personal perspective to see some of the complexities of the issue. "Exam"  by Alberto G. is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

 The recent implosion of FTX—Sam Bankman-Fried’s now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange—bears echoes of the collapse of Lehman Brothers at the dawn of the Great Recession as well as the fall of the house of Theranos (which, like FTX, came down due to an insightful journalist’s article). It is also reminiscent of the dot.com stock market crash of the early oughts, whereby investors intoxicated by the apparent weightlessness of the burgeoning world of Internet commerce were rudely brought back to earth when the balloon suddenly burst. And just as the dot.com implosion was preceded by an advertising blitz in such venues as the Super Bowl, so too did FTX rocket into the stratosphere in part due to heavy advertising, along with the endorsement of a number of A-list celebrity endorsers (who are now the subjects of a class-action lawsuit on the part of FTX’s many clients who have lost their shirts). What interests me most in this saga of rampant greed upon Fortuna’s Wheel is the way that it exemplifies the almost absolute trust that people hold today in their favorite celebrities: “Surely Tom Brady wouldn’t give me a bum steer,” many must have been thinking, and “Shaq must have my back;” “Larry David’s no dope, you know, and no one is more authentic than Naomi Osaka.” Such trust was crucial to Bankman-Fried’s more-than-arcane enterprise, which he was able to take to a mass public of potential investors (who probably have no idea of just how cryptocurrency works) simply by fronting it with familiar and much-loved faces. Of course celebrity endorsers are nothing new, not even to financial services companies—like E.F. Hutton, which capitalized on Bill Cosby’s once untarnished image as “America’s Favorite Dad” in the 1980s before its almost overnight collapse in the face of a check-kiting scandal. But I think that the FTX story is special precisely due to the utterly mysterious nature of cryptocurrency to outsiders. It was an act of marketing genius, in its way, for Bankman-Fried to take crypto out of the shadows and shine a pop-culture-powered spotlight upon it in order to pull in more customers. Unfortunately for him and his clients, he appears to have fallen asleep at the wheel when running the company itself, and the rest is likely to be history. My point is not to honor Bankman-Fried, however—far from it. It is simply to point out the power, and danger sometimes, of popular culture. Twitter and the reality series “The Apprentice” come to mind here, but it goes much further than that. In a world of declining trust in anything, especially any form of authority, people often place absolute faith in professional entertainers (and high-profile sports are a form of entertainment too).  By teaching your students to approach popular culture with a critical, rather than a fan’s, eye, you can help them to distinguish between fact and fantasy, reality and illusion. And I can think of no more valuable a skill to impart in these troubling times of disinformation campaigns and alternative “truths.”   Photo by Bastian Riccardi (2022) used under the Unsplash License. ... View more