Logical fallacies can be the source of humor or the source of the most successful acts of deceit ever pulled off. To learn to avoid fallacies in their own writing, students need to practice recognizing and understanding the fallacies in what they read and hear. They will be less susceptible to flawed logic if they practice spotting it in everyday rhetoric. Commercials and ads provide plenty of examples for practice. You can ask your students to bring in or jot down examples of fallacies they find in ads and then can discuss in class what fallacies they illustrate. Here are a few examples: Faulty Use of Authority: Mila Kunis endorsing Jim Beam. False Dilemma: “Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline.” Ad Populum: “Lipton Ice Tea. Join the Dance.” Appeal to Tradition: For lemonade (or almost anything else) — "Just like grandma used to make.” It’s not always easy to categorize logical fallacies, but the important thing is for students to recognize what is wrong with the logic even if the line between types of fallacies is sometimes blurry. Remember also that the fact that an advertising strategy is not logical does not mean that it is not effective. You may want to move from such an exercise to consider logical fallacies drawn from the news, perhaps bringing in some examples and asking the students to find others.  False Analogy: The most infamous example this month has been Fox News’ Tucker Carlson’s editing 44,000 hours of January 6th footage and characterizing the remaining brief clip as the actions of innocent sightseers being escorted through the Capitol. Post Hoc or Doubtful Cause: Because some childhood inoculations are given around the same age as parents often become aware of the first symptoms of autism in their children, a group of anti-vaxxers now object to having their children inoculated. It has been proven that the inoculations do not cause autism, but the misguided belief of a few has led to a rise in the number of cases of some diseases once virtually eliminated in the U. S. Ad Hominem: It is common in politics to attack an opponent, and in this age of a decisive split between parties, those attacks are as heated as ever. An ad hominem fallacy occurs when the person making an argument is attacked instead of his or her argument. It is an attempt to distract from the issue at hand. For example, critics have been using Biden’s age to argue that he is not fit to be president of the U.S. Slippery Slope: This sort of poor reasoning is exactly why a bank failure such as the recent one in California sends shock waves through the financial community. Unfortunately, it has happened before that the failure of one or a few banks caused a panic, which caused people to pull their money out of other banks, which caused more banks to fail. It’s not hard to find examples of bad logic, but it takes practice. Students generally enjoy these exercises. The challenge comes in seeing their own flaws in logic as they draft their essays. "I must be a cat"  by Nattiebug is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

For our 2nd writing project this semester, we are working on creating multimedia projects. The intention is to create a deeper understanding of our class’s key source, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” by James Baldwin. We are returning to this source with 3 central goals in mind: To practice part-to-whole analysis, students will find a section from “Artist’s Struggle “ that caught their attention while composing Writing Project 1. They will analyze how and why this part of the text caught their attention, and explain how this section exemplifies  Baldwin’s overall message.  To prepare for Writing Project 3, the researched essay, students will engage with deeper reading of “Artist’s Struggle.” For WP 3, students will use the section from WP 2 to find an additional source by James Baldwin that speaks to connected or similar concerns. “Artist’s Struggle” presents many of the germinal themes that Baldwin revisited throughout his life, including the idea of artists bearing witness to and recording cataclysmic events in order to move audiences to action. In investigating Baldwin’s work in more depth, the hope is that students will explore and synthesize questions and concerns from across the semester. To understand Baldwin’s work more fully, students will engage with the artistic process of writing for discovery. For facilitating this part of the assignment, I will offer examples of projects that students have created in the last several years, including videos, drawings, and collages. In reconsidering the third goal, I wondered how to introduce poetry as an additional possibility for a multimedia project. Then I remembered the concept of cross out, or erasure, poems. To create an erasure poem, the Poetry Foundation suggests the following process: “Cross out words or entire phrases to make a new poem ‘within’ or ‘underneath’ the real one.”  My thought was that, using their selected section from “Artist’s Struggle,” students use Baldwin’s original words to create their own cross out poem. I tried out this process myself  to see how it might work and what it might look like.   First, in order to have a clear reference point, I copied a sample section into a Google Doc: If I spend weeks and months avoiding my typewriter—and I do, sharpening pencils, trying to avoid going where I know I’ve got to go—then one has got to use this to learn humility. After all, there is a kind of saving egotism too, a cruel and dangerous but also saving egotism, about the artist’s condition, which is this: I know that if I survive it, when the tears have stopped flowing or when the blood has dried, when the storm has settled, I do have a typewriter which is my torment but is also my work. If I can survive it, I can always go back there, and if I’ve not turned into a total liar, then I can use it and prepare myself in this way for the next inevitable and possibly fatal disaster. But if I find that hard to do—and I have a weapon which most people don’t have—then one must understand how hard it is for almost anybody else to do it at all. (Baldwin 68) Next, I recopied the section and added cross outs using strikethrough formatting. This was not an easy process, and I spent some time figuring out what words to keep to make meaning (and a poem!) from the original section.  If I spend weeks and months avoiding my typewriter—and I do, sharpening pencils, trying to avoid going where I know I’ve got to go—then one has got to use this to learn humility. After all, there is a kind of saving egotism too, a cruel and dangerous but also saving egotism, about the artist’s condition, which is this: I know that if I survive it, when the tears have stopped flowing or when the blood has dried, when the storm has settled, I do have a typewriter which is my torment but is also my work. If I can survive it, I can always go back there, and if I’ve not turned into a total liar, then I can use it and prepare myself in this way for the next inevitable and possibly fatal disaster. But if i find that hard to do—and I have a weapon which most people don’t have—then one must understand how hard it is for almost anybody else to do it at all.  In the process of choosing the cross outs, I found myself slowing down and reading more deeply to discover how Baldwin used language to make meaning. I noticed, as if for the first time, how Baldwin used verbs, conjunctions, and punctuation to create meaning. Even though I regularly teach these stylistic features, I realized that I was creating something new from something seemingly very familiar. I looked more closely at sentences and key words to figure out how the component parts could work together as a reimagined whole. What I discovered was that erasing words and punctuation allowed me to better understand the heart of Baldwin’s message—a condensed version, in a sense. In other words, the erasure of words helped me to concretize meaning in a text where meaning can seem abstract and elusive.  I wished I had thought of this for WP 1, I noted to myself. Perhaps it would have helped with the initial struggles with the text. On the other hand, those initial struggles seem like an important part of the process. In and out of the classroom any of us might struggle to make sense of a complicated world. The hope is that having struggled with a difficult text there will be a transfer of skills that is applicable to other situations in which students find it difficult to make meaning from a first encounter.  The final step in my process was to put my strikethrough formatted text into a Word document and to use the drawing function to cross out the words in digital purple marker. Here is a screenshot of the poem:   Cross Out Poem using a section of “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” by James Baldwin Poem and Photo by Susan Bernstein March 15, 2023. It is perhaps an interesting way to teach paraphrase, as well as a different approach to the writing process and close reading and analysis. Indeed, as with any form of interpretation based on existing evidence, I imagine that the same passage would yield many different cross out poems. But for the moment, the hope is that students will experience for themselves what it means, as artists writing for discovery, to struggle with their integrity. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Xinqiang Li, a writing instructor at Michigan State University. Class as People It’s the students who have inspired me to bring out the best in my teaching. Their eager questions, timely submissions, and even the smiley faces at the end of their emails remove my nervousness and tiredness at the beginning of the semester. They remind me to teach the class as people. Gradually, I’ve learned to imagine the class as a tea house conversation. I step off the platform, walk among the students, and change the sentence “Writing is an epistemic and recursive process” into “How many drafts do you usually write?” Then, I see eyes light up in the class. Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

A few weeks ago I climbed the steps at 100 East End Avenue in New York, which the independent Chapin school calls home. I was there to celebrate teachers, the mission driving The Academy for Teachers, a nonprofit dedicated to honoring and supporting teachers “as valued professionals in need of the latest knowledge and inspiration.” Conceived of and directed by teacher and writer Sam Swope (see his The Araboolies of Liberty Street and I am a Pencil, for example), the Academy urges all of us to give teachers the R E S P E C T that Aretha sings about, along with “the support they need to keep them where they belong—in the classroom inspiring our children for years to come.” In pursuit of this goal, Sam and his team at the Academy offer “master classes” for teachers from public, private, and charter schools to attend three ninety-minute sessions led by artists and thinkers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Gloria Steinem, Jane Goodall, Julia Alvarez, Robert Battle, and others. The intense workshops and conversations led by these experts continue to enrich and inspire the teachers who get to spend time with them, so much so that these teachers are four times more likely than others to stay in the classroom, often against the great odds that all of us know about. The faculty for these master classes come from across the disciplines and artistic fields. On this particular evening, we are gathering to hear The Kronos Quartet perform “A Teacher’s Suite,” commissioned by the Academy to honor teachers and featuring the voices of many of the Academy fellows who have participated in master classes. Kronos had led transformative master classes for the Academy, working with teachers of music to bring new ways of thinking and experiencing music into their classrooms, and this concert followed up on those classes and showcased Kronos’s own interest in and dedication to teaching and to learning.     A teacher teaches a classroom of students   I was sitting with a large group of teachers that evening as we experienced the magic that Kronos so often produces: I could actually feel the room expand with hope and pride as the music cascading around us, could feel what it means for teachers to feel honored and respected. Such a small thing, giving respect. And yet it can change lives and, perhaps, the world. In addition to master classes and special performances, the Academy publishes small chapbooks, written by master class teachers—about a teacher who was important to them. I have a collection of these gems, and looking through them now I’m drawn to one by Jacqueline Woodson, author of Brown Girl Dreaming. She remembers “Ms. Pat,” who “taught me most about what it meant to move through the world as an empath, as a philanthropist, as a thinker, as a doer, as a truly good human being.” Ms. Pat, she goes on, “rarely stepped into our classrooms. Instead, she invited us into her office—and she guided us. She truly guided us.” A teacher like that, Woodson concludes, “stays with you for a lifetime.”   I hope that each of us has a “Ms. Pat” held close in our memories, and I hope that our students will all encounter such teachers, those who will be with them for a lifetime. In the meantime, if you are reading this and have a few spare moments, check out the Academy for Teachers, and consider contributing to their mission. Director Sam Swope dreams of similar academies springing up in cities across the country, all dedicated to supporting and honoring teachers. That’s a dream I can believe in.    Image by Kenny Eliason.    ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn, a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy, and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition   So... The buzz lately is Open AI language generators and Chat GPT, in particular. It’s got teachers talking, scrambling, and rethinking our roles and pedagogies in the classroom and what it means to write. No doubt, as educators, we have many concerns about the negative implications of these tools. We hear tension in our communities pointing to the major disruptive impact of these language generators, or as Steven Marche writes in the Atlantic article, The College Essay is Dead (December 2022). The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up.  We will experience disruption and this tool does present us with real concerns. It is undoubtedly a major paradigm shift that asks us to rethink much of what we know about the teaching of writing. We wonder how it will challenge issues of plagiarism and intellectual property. We recognize the potential threat to students’ abilities to write and think critically on their own. We worry about a world where creativity is merely an algorithm, and the humanity of our discipline is lost.  The fact of the matter is that... we are here... there IS no turning back. We can choose to enter this conversation from a place of fear where students lose the ability to write and think critically or we can search for opportunities, new definitions, and pedagogical approaches. Theorists and practitioners, such as Professor Mike Sharple urge educators to “rethink teaching and assessment” in light of the technology, which he said, “could become a gift for student cheats, or a powerful teaching assistant, or a tool for creativity” (Marche).   Looking Back  This is not the first time in my career that I was forced to reflect on my practices because of the introduction of new technologies and tools. When we moved from typewriters to writing with computers, we had to rethink how we compose and revise. This shift opened opportunities for writers to see revision as more than correction and connected it to thinking and “Seeing again” (Re-vision). It allowed us to revise sentences during the act of composition, reorganize, and substantiate in ways that were difficult with the typewriter as a tool. It helped us to understand the recursive nature of revision beyond a lock-step process. We wondered how tools like spelling, grammar checkers, and citation generators would affect students’ abilities to spell, research and know how to write grammatically correct sentences on their own.   We were concerned when the internet hit the scene that students would no longer spend time in the library and instead find sources in ways that were much more convenient. We worried that students would no longer gain the research practices necessary to foster strong critical thinking and succeed. We had to shift our teaching to focus less on the location of sources and towards the analysis and evaluation of sources since students faced many available options. We taught them new practices such as how to use online databases, key words, and develop a critical eye towards locating themselves within a range of ideas and perspectives.   I was part of the early wave of teachers embracing multimodal composition in our writing classes. In those days, our work was met with criticism, skepticism, and fear.  Multimodal assignments were seen only as “creative” supplements to the writing of essays rather than a valid form of communication to prepare our student writers for success in college and beyond. Multimodality pushed us to think about how we defined composition and what would happen if we moved students away from alphabetic writing as their primary method of communication. We introduced multimodal texts for analysis and eventually followed with the composition of multimodal texts as a viable and compelling way to understand and express meaning. Our focus moved off the production of texts towards teaching writing as a rhetorical act through which students analyze their purposes, audiences, subjects, and contexts to come up with the best modes of delivery for their messages. We came to value rhetorical agility and new understandings of genre conventions in light of new audiences, purposes, and digital affordances. We had to redefine our definitions of originality and creativity and open our minds to the idea of remixing and recognizing the ways texts, images, sound, and motion work together to communicate meaning. We questioned our ideas on intellectual property and fair use as composition became more collaborative and participatory. We moved towards an integrated curriculum through which we engaged writers in multimodal analysis and composition throughout their writing processes – from invention to production.     Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash   Looking Forward None of us can really say where this is all going and once we get our minds around these tools, things will change again. Some, such as Ian Bogost, in his article, Chat GPT is Dumber than You Think, argue that the tool does not have the ability to, “truly understand the complexity of human language and conversation” suggesting that we will seek out a human component in these texts.  I am not sure how this will play out as we learn more about the limitations and affordances of these tools. However, I do know that I will resist practices that put us in a place of fear and have our primary goal to police student writing. First, that is not a winning game and second, it is not why we teach. Instead, we can bring these ideas into the conversation in ways that will help us learn and grow.   Here are some practical ideas we can consider as we move ahead:  Let students know that we are aware of these technologies and work together with them to understand their potential and limitations. Show the tools to students. Have them play with them, discuss them, challenge them.   Study these tools as cultural artifacts in the digital landscape, including the human factors and ethical frameworks.  Use them for brainstorming and invention. AI’s can be a place for students to try out their ideas, explore sources and generate directions for research and writing. The bots can encourage us to ask thoughtful questions and follow up questions.  Understand and analyze style, tone, and voice as we can guide the tool to emulate these characteristics.  Incorporate what we already know about process approaches and scaffolding and include the tool as part of a series of incremental steps towards more finished projects.    Turn our attention towards teaching revision through thoughtful hybrid texts that recognize both student ideas and the ideas of others.    Keep our attention on teaching writing as a rhetorical act and design assignments that ask students to gain rhetorical agility.  Celebrate multimodal composition and its many possibilities for meaningful work and expand our creative and critical writing practices.   We always say that we don’t “teach tools” because tools change. Instead, we can focus on the processes of composition and develop a sense of digital intuition through which students explore new tools and learn as they go. We serve our students well to allow them to experiment with digital tools and contribute their experiences to classroom conversations and collaborative work. Ultimately, we will be OK if we keep our eyes on the prize – helping students to read, write, and think critically and recognizing the impact of their unique ideas and contributions.     Marche, Stephen. “The College Essay Is Dead.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 16 Dec. 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatgpt-ai-writing-college-student-essays/672371/. Bogost, Ian. “CHATGPT Is Dumber than You Think.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 16 Dec. 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatgpt-openai-artificial-intelligence-writing-ethics/672386/. ... View more

  In several of the earlier editions of Elements of Argument, we made use of the Stephen Toulmin term warrant. It proved to be a difficult term, even for some of us who were trying to teach it. It was easy enough for students to link the term claim to the term thesis statement and to link support with the term evidence.  The concept is no easier now that we have adopted the term assumption to replace warrant, but at least the word is familiar. Whatever we call it, this link between claim and support is critical to understanding others’ arguments and our own. Every day, millions of headlines are published in response to the events happening around us. These headlines are littered with the writer's assumptions about the outcome of an event. Having students explore assumptions in the headlines can help them to understand how a writer’s beliefs shape their argument. However, students should be aware that as readers, they will also establish their own assumptions about the content of the article based on its headline. Here’s an activity that you can use to have students explore their biases when reading headlines. Collect about 4-5 headlines and share them on the board. Here are a few examples of interesting headlines this week: Retirees lost 23% of their 401(k) savings in 2022, Fidelity says (from CNBC) Ohio train derailment happened moments after crew warned of axle overheating, NTSB says (from USA Today) Chile readies major earthquakes insurance with World Bank (from Reuters) London activists paint Ukraine’s flag in front of Russian Embassy (from The Washington Post) Then as a class, have students list what they assume the articles would address. Next, divide the class into 4-5 groups and assign each group an article. After reading, each group should explore whether their assumptions about the article were correct or incorrect and how their assumptions shaped their reading experience. This activity will help students to understand how their biases contribute to how they approach and navigate articles, which is important for them to keep in consideration when conducting research. Using assumptions to guide their research can cause students to only use articles that support their argument, creating a skewed discussion of a topic. You can use this activity to stress the importance of understanding all sides of an argument to effectively support and validate a thesis. Additionally, this activity can be used to connect with and understand your students. Our classrooms are more diverse now than ever before. Each student has their own intersectionality, experiences, and beliefs that can influence their assumptions. Understanding how students navigate headlines and the media can help you provide research resources for students, create guidance on how to frame their claims and support to bolster their arguments, and discern what motivated students to choose a specific topic to write about. Navigating the assumptions made in the headlines and our assumptions is the first step in finding the heart of a topic. Although arguments in the media are portrayed with a harsh right or wrong binary, as professors we must continue to remind students that argumentation is not about proving yourself right or someone wrong. Argumentation is simply a tool used to impact the people and world around us with the best uses of argumentation being when it is used to advocate for democracy, human rights, and our planet. "Question mark made of puzzle pieces"  by Old Photo Profile is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Christine Cucciarre, Professor of English and Director of Composition at the University of Delaware.   Weight I read the want ads during the pandemic. At the end of each Zoom class, I clicked “Leave Meeting,” and cried. Maybe I could drive a truck. Sling mulch at Home Depot. Stock shelves at Target. Just to go to work. Leave work. Be home. No torment of failing my students, failing myself. Fall semester I returned to the classroom. Walk to work. Teach. Return home. Repeat. Still, no lingering with students, office conferences, chatting with colleagues in the copy room.  The sudden weight of the pandemic was so easy to put on, but it’s so hard to take off.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

For the past few weeks, American mass media outlets have been transfixed by the recent detection of a series of balloons floating over North American airspace. Even the BBC (U.S. edition) replaced the ongoing earthquake disaster in Turkey and Syria as its top headline with updates on the balloons, their destruction, the continuing attempts to determine just what they were, and the subsequent defense of having shot them down in the first place. Since none of these objects were at any time identified to be existential threats, the expensive scrambling of American fighter jets to blast them out of the sky raises an interesting question: why all the fuss? After all, the sky is filled with all sorts of flying objects, and it is hardly news that some of them are spying on us. Heck, so are Google, Facebook, Siri, Alexa, and our smartphones. What made these balloons so special? On the surface, the whole matter might not appear to be particularly relevant to a popular cultural semiotics analysis. However, the way that it has played out on both social media and the news, not to mention the entertaining theatricality of all those videos of exploding balloons, does have a cultural resonance. An analysis of that resonance can lead us to some conclusions that are worth noting. As always, with a semiotic analysis, we can begin with the construction of a system of associated and differential phenomena in order to define an interpretable context. It starts with the intense distrust of President Joe Biden on the part of the American conservatives, especially in the wake of his handling of America’s pullout from Afghanistan early in his presidency. This alone has put a great deal of pressure on the President to act decisively in the face of any perceived threat to national security, especially as America gears up for the 2024 presidential election. Given this, why hasn’t there been even more intense pressure on the president to act with military decisiveness in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which surely presents a threat to our, and the world’s, security? Here, we find a striking difference in the way conservatives regard Russia with respect to China, their support for a former KGB chief, and their opposition to American intervention in Ukraine’s fight for survival. Suffice to say that the “Chinese spy balloon” has instigated far more national security fervor among conservatives than anything that Putin has done (thus taking its place alongside what former president Trump insisted on calling the “China virus”), leading to their demand for governmental action. All in all, we can see that the PRC, which Richard Nixon began to play off against the USSR in the days of “ping-pong diplomacy" (turning it into the "good" communist country in conservative eyes), is being restored to "enemy" status in right-wing circles. In such an environment, President Biden, whose re-election campaign announcement is expected at any moment, cannot afford to appear to be “soft” on China. Therefore, balloons (three of them turning out to be completely harmless), get expensively shot down in an environment that is, metaphorically and literally, filled with a lot of hot air.   Photo by Tobias Tullius (2020), used under the Unsplash License. ... View more

  A few months ago, I wrote in this space about the rise of AI chatbots like ChatGPT. Since then—like you, I imagine—I have been inundated with articles and YouTube videos and tweets about the still fairly new Open AI chatbot. We are seeing an understandable amount of handwringing among the academic community as administrators and teachers everywhere worry about academic integrity, about “the end of writing,” and even about their jobs. As with every sudden technological innovation, this one is unsettling at best and perhaps terrifying at worst. I have read a lot of the jeremiads and the end-of-the-world-as-we-have-known-it scenarios, and while I am sympathetic, I am at least for the time being inclined less to a “the sky is falling” stance and more to a cautious, careful look at how we and our students can work productively, and ethically, with this new tool. If the slide rule and the calculator didn’t bring the world to a halt, if television did not destroy education, then it seems unlikely that ChatGPT will do so. A recent New York Times piece takes this position. Author Kevin Roose recognizes legitimate fears about plagiarism and other ethical issues but goes on argue that “schools should thoughtfully embrace ChatGPT as a teaching aid—one that could unlock student creativity, offer personalized tutoring, and better prepare students to work alongside A.I. systems as adults.” He makes this argument for three main reasons: 1) that ignoring or trying to keep such AI tools away from students simply will not work: they are here and here to stay; 2) that ChatGPT can be an “effective teaching tool,” giving the example of a teacher whose students use the chatbot to create outlines for essays they are working on—and then go on to write stronger and more engaging essays as a result, or using the tool as an out of class tutor or a debate sparring partner or “starting point for in-class exercises"; and 3) that ChatGPT helps teach students about the world they live in, one full to bursting with AI technologies they will need to “know their way around . . . their strengths and weaknesses, their hallmarks and blind spots—in order to work alongside them.” I found Roose’s argument thoughtful and even-handed and his examples compelling. Still for me, in these fairly early days, I find that ChatGPT and tools like it seem most perfectly suited for play, for the ludic possibilities of rhetoric—as the example of students using ChatGPT to compose satiric love notes and poems demonstrates. But play, remember, is not “mere” play but a crucial part of learning and cognitive development. “Playing around” with language and other symbols is fundamental to growth. So my inclination is to encourage students to play with this new tool, pushing it to its limits, using it to entertain and amuse, all the while using such activities to learn about its strengths and weaknesses, the “blind spots” Roose mentions, and always testing it against their own creativity, ingenuity, and knowledge. We teachers of writing will have a lot to learn from such play!   Image by Jonathan Kemper reproduced under the Unsplash license.   ... View more

  We can spend days analyzing President Joe Biden’s January 7, 2023, State of the Union address to the joint houses of Congress. Given the response the speech has received, students of speech and rhetoric will likely be studying it for years to come. Although this State of the Union address has been rated as the most confrontational address ever, this address also illustrates the importance of audience awareness and the pursuit of common ground.  The key example of audience awareness that no one can stop talking about is how President Biden got the two parties to come to a consensus, right there on the floor of the chamber, on Social Security and Medicare. He was cautious in how he broached the subject. He referred to how some of his Republican colleagues have proposed sunsetting Social Security. Knowing that Republicans would oppose this statement, President Biden came prepared to support his statement by promising to send Rick Scott a copy of his written proposal which outlined the facts.   It was a guessing game throughout the speech at what points Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy would signal to his Republican colleagues that they should stand by standing himself. They were actually in the embarrassing position of NOT standing in support of such generally popular ideas as better pay for teachers and aid to Ukraine. When it came to Social Security and Medicare, the majority of Republicans were eager to distance themselves from Rick Scott in his desire to cut these popular entitlement programs. They leaped to their feet to applaud America’s seniors, and once they were there, Biden pointed out that it seemed everyone agreed that we cannot do away with Social Security and Medicare. Common ground is often the starting point for moving two opposing sides toward agreement. By getting Democrats and Republicans to agree to support what is best for the elderly he seemed to decrease by a tiny degree the schism in the room. Presidents have long brought into the chamber for the State of the Union special guests who like, in this case, Tyree Nichols’s mother and stepfather, have experienced terrible and widely publicized tragedy. Biden was respectful of the couple’s loss and actually used the difference between their experience and that of his family to illustrate the racism that still exists in America. Biden recalled that he never had to warn his sons that if they were pulled over by the police, they should turn on the inside car light, put both hands on the wheel, and make no sudden moves. The common ground, of course, is that no parent should have to. When addressing an audience with polarizing views, speakers need to be aware of how easily their message can be skewed, be strategic about how they get their message across, and bolster their supporting data against loopholes. As President Biden demonstrated in his State of the Union address, sometimes finding common ground is the simplest way to ensure that the purpose of the message is heard.    "Joe Biden"  by GPA Photo Archive is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

The last time I remember technology and composition in such apparent conflict was in the early 1990s, when my colleagues and I wondered if the grammar and spell check tools provided by Word and WordPerfect gave students with access to these programs an unfair advantage over their less tech-savvy peers. Of course, using software to correct subject-verb agreement errors seems positively quaint in comparison with what students can accomplish using Open AI’s ChatGPT, and the many AI-driven programs that are sure to follow in its wake. Not surprisingly, the response to artificial intelligence as a generator of text—among both teachers and media commentators—has been overwhelming. In December, novelist Stephen Marche declared “The College Essay Is Dead,” while high school teacher Daniel Herman concluded that ChapGPT signaled “The End of High-School English.” Some Twitter users were downright apocalyptic, and even Open AI’s own CEO, Sam Altman, acknowledged, “The bad case—and I think this is important to say—is, like, lights out for all of us.” Initially, I didn’t think these doomsayers were far from wrong. One evening, a colleague and I sat down with our computers and tried to stump ChatGPT. Could AI perform a rhetorical analysis on an article she assigns each semester? It could. The grade? “This is an early assignment in the semester, so I’d say at least a ‘B.’” But how would AI do when faced with personal writing? After all, a computer program doesn’t have any life experiences to draw on, so I asked ChatGPT to write a thousand-word essay on the biggest challenge it had ever faced and what it had learned from that challenge. A couple of minutes later, I learned that AI’s biggest challenge had been the death of its mother from cancer when AI was a young teenager. The lessons learned were hardly earth-shattering—the preciousness of life, the need to stand on one’s own two (virtual) feet—but they were the sort of responses one might expect from the prompt I had posed. Right away, my friend and I wondered: If a computer program can respond effectively to assignments like those we gave it, should those assignments be changed? Maybe our first attempts were flawed. However, as we worked variations on standard first-year essay prompts, ChatGPT kept responding in what we admitted was an “acceptable” fashion. Granted, AI was lousy when it came to documentation, and it tended to come up with the most obvious responses to our questions, but the reasoning was sound more often than not, and sentence-level errors were generally absent.  Clearly, we didn’t want to dive headlong into what a special session at CCCC calls “crisis-speak.” Philosophy professor Lawrence Shapiro argues that “the cheaters are only hurting themselves—unless we respond to them by removing writing assignments from the syllabus.” Focusing solely on plagiarism runs the risk of depriving students of the writing practice many of them so desperately need. Moreover, as Chris Gilliard and Peter Rorabaugh write in Slate: Although plagiarism is an easy target and certainly on the minds of teachers and professors when thinking about this technology, there are deeper questions we need to engage, questions that are erased when the focus is on branding students as cheaters and urging on an A.I. bakeoff between students and teachers. Questions like: What are the implications of using a technology trained on some of the worst texts on the internet? And: What does it mean when we cede creation and creativity to a machine? Nevertheless, pretending that AI doesn’t exist and carrying on as before is not a realistic option. Therefore, in the months to come, I’ll be looking at some of the many ways instructors are responding to one of the biggest pedagogical curveballs most writing teachers have ever faced. ... View more

 First-day selfie   Note: These journal entries are adapted from my teaching journal. The original entries are handwritten on the blank pages of my lesson plan book.   Day 1: January 26, 2023 writing on the train after class.  Today was my first day of teaching in person since March 10, 2020, and I am thinking of IT glitches and how they were solved. At the time, those glitches seemed significant because our face-to-face class was paperless. Until the glitches were fixed, I wondered how to find alternative access to the twenty-first century tech I used throughout the long months of remote learning, and had intended to use in person, too.  Yes, I thought, it would be possible to teach without a monitor and a smartboard. We could all just use our personal electronic devices to log into the course management system and walk through the syllabus that way, just like we did on Zoom. As I said, the glitch was soon fixed, and we returned to our post-remote world. “This is not how I intended to begin,” I told the students. The room was small and the desks were crowded closely together. I covered the key points of the syllabus, and showed the welcome video and the video to introduce our reading from James Baldwin. On the way home, on the train, I am taking notes that skim the surface. Although we made nameplates with crayons, name tags, and paper, and although we introduced ourselves to each other, the class felt too much like teaching on Zoom. This feeling is hard to admit, but I need to consider not so much why it felt that way, but what I can do to take advantage of in-person affordances. In-person affordances included the arrangement of the physical objects in the room (desks crowded together, monitor, smartboard) and the room temperature (too warm). Those were the most obvious features. The emotions gathered together in that room were less obvious. How did the students feel about being in this room and what did they think about taking this writing class? We were using the tools of remote learning in an in-person classroom. We were face-to-face and literally elbow-to-elbow in a room filled with people who were strangers to each other, and who had, perhaps, become accustomed to engaging more with devices than with people. At least this is my perception after the first day. I feel exhilarated as well, nevermind the glitches. Or, perhaps the glitches are exactly the point. What would I have done if I could not access the monitor and the smartboard? What did I do before monitors, smartboards, and functional wifi?   Day 2: January 31, 2023 writing in class while students work on their journals.  On the way to school on the train, I had an idea for how to explain an early-term assignment. I found two sticky notes and a pen and scratched down my thoughts. The train was nearing a transfer point and I would have to move quickly. When I arrived on campus, I wrote the explanation on the board while simultaneously revising. I revised for a third time when I composed an announcement for the students on the course management system. I remembered that I used to revise lesson plans like this all the time–kinesthetically, on the go, from brain to handwriting, to catching trains and buses to campus, to writing on the board, to transferring ideas to make them visible online. I remembered that I learned best kinesthetically, and that staying still could be very difficult. I remembered the tactile impressions of fingers against pen, and pen against paper. So I decided to reverse the lesson plan. Rather than beginning with the newly revised assignment, we would begin and end with handwriting. I would use Ask Me Anything (a beginning-of-semester activity I learned about and implemented long before the pandemic) to unpack the syllabus and the course, and exit tickets to help plan the lesson for the next class. I blogged about these activities years ago. Ask Me Anything invited students to ask anonymous questions for me to answer in front of the class. Often students asked different versions of the same question, and I could respond in more depth as needed. Exit tickets, adapted from Stephen Brookfield, offered students an opportunity to write about what was most helpful in class, and what was most confusing. The exit tickets also were anonymous, and I promised that I would not read them until I was on the train. The questions for Ask Me Anything, I explained, help me understand more about where students need to grow as writers. If more than one student asks the same question, then I know I need to clarify my intentions and our coursework. In an environment where students are rightly concerned about speaking in front of class, both activities create opportunities for conversation and feedback about the course, and also to participate in shaping subsequent lessons. My responses can be long, and, in that case, a best practice is to check in with students to see if my answer fits what they are asking. On day two, I received an Ask-Me-Anything question that appeared to require a longer response, and also seemed more personal. The question on the slip of paper asked: What are your pet peeves?  This room, I thought. That it's so small and that we’re all crammed together. That we don’t have HVAC ventilation, and that the room is overheated with a window that barely opens. That adults were unprepared for remote learning during quarantine, and that students, then and now, have to deal with the consequences. As adults, we need to do better. Then, after a quick realization, I paused for a moment. “Oh wait,” I said. “Do you mean my pet peeves as an English teacher? It’s five-paragraph essays. It’s hard to fully grow your ideas in five paragraphs, and important ideas might get lost in the process. We'll practice writing to expand on ideas and to create a longer essay. But that’s my English teacher pet peeve, five paragraph essays.” Growing as a writer, for students and teachers alike, can be immensely challenging, and transitions are never easy. As a neurodivergent teacher away from in-person teaching for nearly three years, I considered the costs and benefits of returning. Anxiety became a language without words, and the feelings were difficult to communicate. At the same time, experiencing the difficulties of communicating also draws me back to the classroom. In unexpected moments, the classroom can become a place to bear witness to  people attempting to communicate in circumstances that would seem to mitigate against communication.  Writing remains one means of bearing witness to journeys toward teaching and learning, with  many detours encountered on those journeys. Back in the classroom, the journey continues, and the journey is just beginning. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Stuart Barbier, a Professor of English at Delta College. Partly Veiled Validation I returned to mask-to-mask teaching after three semesters asynchronously online. About half of our college's students elected to return, too. Yet, the hallways were oddly quiet, and I only saw a few colleagues. I'd always speak, even if just a quick hello. One colleague barely acknowledged my greeting the first time, and then was silent all the others, not even looking my way when I added his name. Might as well have been online with my camera off. In contrast, my students acknowledged my presence with their eyes, words, and only partly veiled validation.   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 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