Every year around this point in the semester -- past midterms, almost at Thanksgiving Break, and starting to think about final exams -- I find myself needing some additional inspiration to push through the last weeks of fall courses. I can feel my motivation lagging and the early sunsets only add to my lethargy. I’m taking some time for reflection this week in hopes of reinvigorating my mental focus so I can finish the semester with the same (or close to ) enthusiasm I had the first week of September.   The first step in my reinvigoration process has been to take some time to think ahead to next semester. Half of my course load is different in the spring so I looked back through some of the notes I kept from last spring to remind myself of particular changes I want to make to those courses. Giving my brain a future project to think about, even briefly, gave me a momentary break from the weight of the current semester. I like to make at least one significant curriculum change each time I offer a course. Reviewing my notes from last time around reminded me of ideas I had for spring 2022 and gave me an opportunity to feel excited about their implementation.    Next I spent just a handful of minutes today browsing the current registration numbers for my spring courses. Registration just opened this past Monday and already my US Women’s History class is full. To know that there are so many students interested in the subject matter made me more excited to think about topics I will be teaching in the spring and how to better connect them to my students’ lives.   Finally, as a last bit of motivation, this morning I pulled one of my all-time favorite books down from the shelf. Many years ago as a graduate teaching assistant at Boston College I was assigned to a Western Civilization II course. As a US history major I remember dreading the shift in focus to European history for so many precious hours of the week. The professor assigned Pat Barker’s brilliant Regeneration (1991) for the students to discuss as part of their World War I materials. While I cannot remember anything about leading those discussion sections, I have reread Regeneration every single year since that fall semester in 1999. The book itself is now in its thirtieth year of publication. Each time I read Barker’s fictional account of a British asylum for soldiers during the war I am reminded of how the book initially led me to read more about World War I when the course finished, and then many years later inspired me to start researching asylums in the United States around the same period of time. As I reread the book now I’m hopeful that some new inspiration and motivation will grow from the familiar story.   How do you handle late-semester fatigue? Suggestions welcome.   ... View more

I’m getting my COVID booster today and am feeling very hopeful. If enough people in my neck of the woods follow through with vaccinations and boosters maybe, just maybe, I will be able to return to campus in the spring. Student reluctance to register for on-campus offerings has meant a third semester of all online teaching. I’m starting to optimistically think about what I might take back to the brick and mortar classroom space with me from this three semester-long remote experience.    A colleague noted this week that she plans to continue using her online discussion board even when she is teaching in-person. Students who are reluctant to speak up in a traditional classroom space often submit eloquent, thoughtful discussion posts in online classes. My colleague is wise to take advantage of this reality and I plan to as well. I’ve also thought about using a chat-style system during my in-person lecture so that students who might be shy about raising their hand will still get their questions answered in class. Perhaps an open “chat” during my live lectures will allow me to engage more students in classroom meetings than I have in the past. While my attention span is too short to allow a scrolling chat to interrupt me during lecture, I can foresee looking at the chat in the last couple minutes of class to catch any questions that need to  be addressed.    I’m planning to continue to use the journal-based research assignment that I first wrote about in a blog this past spring (see “Summer Project: Assignment Reboot” ) in which I break down a traditional research project into sections and grade each separately. I designed this project because I felt my students were fatigued from online learning and not fully engaged in their semester-long projects. Forcing them to submit the project in sections has enabled me to keep tabs on their progress while providing feedback along the way, and has significantly reduced the problem of procrastination on the students’ end. I also find that the grading process for me is quicker (shorter chunks of work submitted at a time) and that I’m writing more comments.   And finally, I’m planning to continue to take advantage of the abundance of human resources that are available virtually as a result of the pandemic. I encourage fellow faculty to follow the social media feeds of historical and cultural organizations that relate to the topics you are teaching in class. On November 1st, for example, my students will be attending a virtual artist talk by Nikole Hannah Jones titled “Examining Slavery’s Modern Legacy,” hosted by Massachusetts College of Art & Design ( register here ). Later in November they will be assigned to view (live or via the post-event recording) a talk by Gayle Jessup White hosted by the National Archives. “Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendant’s Search for Her Family’s Lasting Legacy” will be moderated virtually by historian Annette Gordon Reed ( register here ). I have no doubt you’ll be amazed by the access your students can have to fabulous speakers and resources with just a little time web surfing.   If there is something that you’ve brought back into the traditional classroom with you from your experience with pandemic-era online learning, please share!  ... View more

On Oct 21st, 2003, scientists first discovered the dwarf planet Eris. When first found, there was some discussion that it was larger than Pluto which then led to questions about Pluto's categorization as a planet. The debate within the scientific community ultimately led the International Astronomical Union to "downgrade" Pluto to a dwarf planet in 2006. The dwarf planet Eris seems to be aptly named as it was inspired by the Greek goddess of discord.                 ... View more

When I was 22 I made it through only half of the movie “Pulp Fiction” in a theater before leaving. I couldn’t see past the violence on the screen to the creative story being crafted underneath. I was simply too uncomfortable to see anything artistic through the blood and gore. Nearly three decades later my son, an aspiring filmmaker, convinced me to give the movie another try -- reminding me of a lesson that I have forced on him many, many times: discomfort can be a tool for learning.   I’ve been thinking a lot about my (admittedly simplistic!) example of a personal life lesson lately as public debate abounds about the teaching of critical race theory and the level of discomfort by which many white people approach discussions of race. I’m heartened by the fact that since the death of George Floyd more white students at my college are taking Black History and courses that examine race and ethnicity through the lenses of sociology and literature. The students’ willingness to confront discomfort makes me hopeful in spite of news stories that highlight the hatred and ignorance that still festers in so many predominantly white communities and institutions in the United States.    This week’s coverage of the resignation of NFL coach John Gruden’s over racist, homophobic, and misogynistic emails is a reminder of how far our society still needs to go to move the needle on hate and discrimination. Gruden’s flimsy explanation that he “never meant for [the emails] to sound that bad” reminds us that many white Americans in positions of power -- Gruden had a contract that paid him $100 million over ten years -- are incredibly ignorant of history and the context through which racism, sexism, and homophobia have negatively impacted countless people. As history teachers, we need to continue to work to ensure that the next generation of leaders in business and industries, like the NFL and so many others, do not enable the acceptance of hate speech.   In spite of all the negativity present in our current world, as an educator I have to remain hopeful for the future. I welcome fellow history teachers to share such hope with their students and academic communities. This month I’m encouraging my students to identify stories of hope and inspiration from black history by entering this year’s “Black History, Black Stories” video/writing competition sponsored by Macmillan Learning. Visit the Macmillan Learning web site for details and consider assigning the video/essay prompt as an extra credit assignment. Learning more about who/what inspires our students can be a great help for curriculum design and can give us deeper insight into the lives of the young people in our classrooms, which can only lead to greater compassion and understanding.  ... View more

I’m excited this fall to be co-designing a team-taught, cross-discipline experimental course. Wow! That is a mouthful! Since transfer agreements are such an integral part of our curriculum at a community college, the opportunity to create a new course comes infrequently and with numerous challenges. This week I’ll share my experience with the early stages of this process from the history side of the course in hopes that Macmillan Community members will chime in with ideas and suggestions.   The idea for our new, as yet unnamed, course came about before the recent pandemic began. Several years ago, a colleague in the Biology Department expressed interest in my US history students’ study of the 1918 Influenza outbreak. Wouldn’t it be great, we concluded, to have a course that linked biological crises with their historical origins and context? Both of us were busy with our 5-5 teaching load, so we filed the idea away until spring 2020 when the COVID-19 Pandemic hit the United States. Amidst the chaos of moving all of our courses online, we knew we needed to revisit our idea. Students were asking questions that required complex and thoughtful answers: had this kind of crisis happened before? When? Why? How did previous generations respond?    As excited as we both were about the idea of creating such a course, reality took the reins. Where would this course be housed at our community college and how would it transfer? As much as we wanted to dive right in and think about the curriculum, we had to stop and first consider logistics. I started the conversation with my department chair who suggested at least a dozen more questions we had not considered, including the hurdles that would be necessary to clear our course on an experimental basis (two semesters) with the college’s Curriculum Review Committee. Undeterred, we continued to ask colleagues for advice and to gather materials we believe will be useful material in the course.   Our vice president for Academic Affairs suggested that we start the process by working with the department whose students would benefit most directly from the development of such a course. At our college, nursing students are required to take just one course in the Humanities or Social Sciences. Generally the students take whatever course best fits their schedule because none of the classes are designed to specifically enhance the nursing curriculum. Here, it seems, we have found our stride. As we move forward with the course design process it is with the intent of providing nursing and other health sciences students with a course that better connects their fields to history while maintaining a significant degree of scientific learning as well. We are hopeful that by studying history and biology together, health care students will recognize the interconnectedness of those seemingly distinct fields. We hope, too, that we can help our college to increase offerings in courses on public health, which seem particularly valuable in current times.   Now that we are in the planning process, I would love to hear from anyone who has co-designed/taught a course that covered two distinct disciplines. What unexpected challenges did you face? Please share!  ... View more

Author Eric Nelson speaks on blurring the lines of the in-person and digital student experience. Listen as he shares his thoughts about using low-stakes adaptive quizzing & discussion sections both now and during COVID along with other less successful methods to get here. ... View more

This past weekend marked the twentieth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attack. As I reflect on my personal memories of that tragic day, I find myself, again, thinking about the US history survey and how recent history fits (or doesn't fit) into my semester-long sections of "US II." In a previous blog, Up-to-date? Where to End the US Survey (2017) , I discussed the challenge of getting through as much content as possible and my avoidance of teaching topics that I had lived through. One astute reader reminded me back then that just because I witnessed a historical event doesn’t mean that students are familiar with it. So, here I am four years later, and the question still perplexes me. Do I need to get to 9/11 in a course that starts in 1877 and is already bursting at the seams with content? Is it time for me to officially abandon my quest for "coverage"?   As a mom to college-age children it is impossible to escape notice of how dramatically things have changed since 2001. My children have grown up under the cloud of the War on Terror in the same way my youth was influenced by the Cold War. And yet, so much of what I know about the Cold War was learned in adulthood, not as a college student living through the collapse of the Soviet Union. My college history professors ended US II with Watergate and the fall of Saigon, and I’m still ok with their choices. Had they tried in the early 1990s to teach the historical meanings of the Iran Hostage Crisis or Reaganomics, students would have been left with an incomplete understanding of complex topics that had not yet been fully examined by historians.    The longer I teach the more I find myself wedded to the notion that the passage of time enables a deeper, more thoughtful understanding of events. Not without bias, but certainly with additional data and facts to temper extreme partisan perspectives. That being said, while I don’t see myself incorporating study of 9/11 into my US History II sections any time soon, I do believe that providing students with the tools to begin their own study of a recent event or contemporary topic can be helpful. Over the course of a semester they come to rely on their professors as experts. Offering them a starting point for exploration of topics we cannot “fit” into the time frame of our 15-week courses, therefore, makes sense.    The knowledge my students gain about how to study history, I’ve concluded, is more valuable than coverage. Finding new ways to train our students to think as historians -- evaluate sources, look for bias, search for contradictions in the written record -- will prepare the college students of today to both analyze events as they occur around them now  while also enabling them to think critically in the future about what they have experienced. As someone who teaches mostly STEM and health care majors, the process of learning history feels more important than ever.   In 2021, with US History II needing to cover more and more material, how are you training our next generation of historically-aware citizens?    ... View more

Whenever I allow students in my US Women’s History classes to choose their own research topics they automatically default to biographies. In an effort to move away from the kind of history that focuses solely on the accomplishments of individuals, this semester’s research project requires each student to study a social movement in which women were significant participants, if not the leaders. Since my course covers the period 1600-1900, I’ve created a list of suggested topics that includes abolition, temperance, and voting/political rights, as well as mental health, public health, and education. My hope is that students see groups of women as significant actors in the development of our modern-day ideas and institutions, rather than singling out specific women for their individual achievements and ignoring the communities around them. I was inspired to discourage students from writing biographies this semester in part by my spring-semester students’ desires to focus on women with whom they were already familiar. Rosa Parks, for example, immediately came to mind for students when they were assigned a research project for US Women Since 1900. Since I had not made a blanket “no biographies” rule I tried my best to steer students towards women such as Ida Wells and Ella Baker, who were significant as civil rights activists but not staples of middle-school history curriculum. Anyone who remained committed to Rosa Parks as a topic had to study her work aside from the Montgomery Bus Boycott. While at first students were unhappy about my “rules,” ultimately they seemed pleased by semester’s end to have expanded their understanding of Parks’s work or to have learned about women that were previously unknown to them. I’m hopeful that by studying women’s participation in 19th-century social movements students will engage in deeper thought about both the motivations of these women and the challenges they faced forging a space for themselves, and others, in the public sphere. How did their families/communities respond to their desire to be publicly active? Did the women view their work as political, or were they inspired by moral or religious beliefs? Who did they lean on in their public and private lives for support? Students will need to acknowledge the privilege that enabled upper-class white women to work for social causes while servants and enslaved women managed the heavy responsibilities of their masters’/employers’ households. Ultimately, I want the students to see that women’s social activism during this period of our history required more than the desire to make change. While some women wrote abolitionist pamphlets or toured decrepit institutions for the “insane,” the day to day toil of other women in private homes made the work of social pioneers possible. Communities of women made change possible then, as now.  What are you doing to expand your students’ understanding of how the individual fits into the larger picture of our national history? Ideas and suggestions are welcome.    ... View more

In 2007 when I was first hired by the community college where I’m about to start my fifteenth year, the centerpiece of my teaching load was a course called “America’s Experience in Vietnam.” The class was very popular among a specific sub-group of students: recent veterans of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of them had permanent war-related injuries, while others were open with their classmates about their struggles with PTSD. Still others were physically and emotionally healthy but working incredibly hard to rejoin civilian life after an extended period of time in the armed forces. They added an element of realism to the course discussions that had been absent when I taught a similar course at a private four-year college.   As the years went on, and the turmoil in the Middle East continued to draw on the human and economic resources of our country, the “Vietnam course” as I liked to call it became more and more difficult to teach. Historians had a clearer picture than ever before of the errors in policy made in Southeast Asia and there was plenty of Vietnam-related data for analysis and discussion. My students, however, were beginning to see parallels between the war they were studying and the one in which they had been combatants. It was obvious to me that some were quite troubled by the proverbial notion of “history repeating itself.”   Class discussions became tangled in a question that I couldn’t answer with any authority: would a historian one day be making the argument that US military action in Afghanistan and/or Iraq had been misguided? I admittedly started to have a difficult time keeping the students on track because their concerns about the similarities between US policy in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, though decades apart, were so troubling. It seemed that every conversation about Vietnam ended with thoughts on the Middle East. Eventually I began to believe that a class focused solely on the war in Vietnam no longer made sense for a generation of students who were themselves living through a protracted military engagement overseas and needed broader historical context. I began to encourage student veterans to take general US history courses so that they could better understand how US foreign policy has changed over time in response to diplomatic and economic crises throughout the world.    I’m thinking a lot this week about those students I taught in 2007, 2008, and 2009 who were new to college but veterans of combat. My college is offering additional support to current student veterans feeling stress and anxiety over the situation in Afghanistan, but I know that those young men and women I taught more than ten years ago -- wherever they may be today -- are likely thinking back to our class discussions. It’s unsettling.    What do we say to students when we literally see history repeating itself in front of our eyes? I’m mulling this question as we prepare to start a new school year with the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to wreak havoc on our daily lives. In these immensely challenging times I want to find ways to be truthful in my classroom while also offering hope for the future. Seeking suggestions.    ... View more

Happy International Pirate Month! Here are a few female figures from the extensive history of piracy to celebrate a pirate-centric August.  First, though, it’s important to note that experiences of women on pirate ships are less documented than their male counterparts. It’s often hard to distinguish myth from history, and the ends of all these women’s lives below are not known. Still, their piracy careers are fascinating and worthy of study.    Anne Bonny and Mary Read These two famous English pirates both were active during the early 1700s, both were illegitimate children, and both dressed as men at different parts of their lives.  Eventually, Anne Bonny left her sailor husband James Bonney to join the crew of John “Calico Jack” Rackman, where she dressed as a man when interacting with other ships. In one of these interactions, the ship took Mary Read, dressed as a man, prisoner. The two women became friends, fighting together on the ship.  They eventually both stood trial in Jamaica and were found guilty, sentenced to be hanged. But, they were not killed at that time, as they were both found to be pregnant. While the primary source on these two pirates, Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates says a lot, it doesn’t state what happened to these two women in the end. It also doesn’t say what is certainly true, and what might be myth.   Sayyida al-Hurra When the Spanish armies conquered the Muslim Granada in 1492, Sayyida became a refugee and vowed to avenge herself. After she went to Chaouen, in present day Morocco, she married Abu al-Hasan al-Mandri. After he died in 1515, she became the sole governor of Tétouan and thus the last woman to hold the title of “al-Hurra.” This also makes her the last Islamic queen. Twenty-three years after becoming a refugee, Sayyida assembled a fleet and started her piracy career by attacking Portuguese shipping routes in the Mediterranean. The profits from these exploits were used to rebuild her city.  Still, Sayyida’s full story is not well documented, especially after she married the King of Morocco in 1541. We don’t know how she was deposed, but her career as a pirate and ruler was certainly prolific.    Zheng Yi Sao (Ching Shih) Ching Shih, or “Cheng’s widow” started her career in piracy after her husband’s death, taking over his fleet of 1,800 ships and 80,000 men. The two had married in 1801, and Ching died in 1807. Ching Shih then started a relationship with Ching’s adoptive son, whom she eventually married.  Ching Shih then became leader of the infamous Red Flag Fleet, which she commanded until she retired in 1810. She died in 1844, but like all the female pirates on this list, not much is known about her later years. She also inspired the character Mistress Ching in The Pirates of the Caribbean .    How do you approach the role of stories in history? Discuss in the comments!  For more on pirates, check out the Bedford Document Collection Pirates and Empire in the Seventeenth Century Atlantic-World by David Head.  ... View more

This week’s blog is my 101st for the Macmillan Community! While I wish I had a provocative way to remark upon the experience of blogging about teaching history, instead, as I prepare to start a new academic year, I face my annual anxiety about what is to come in the year ahead. So, this week I offer more jumbled thoughts.   First, I’m thinking about how much I miss being on campus and lamenting that I will continue to long for a return to academic normalcy for at least one more semester. Enrollment at my community college is such that demand for online courses is outpacing on-campus offerings. The unknowns of the Delta variant, amongst other factors, means that all of my courses are running this fall as remote, asynchronous once again. I had such high hopes for being back in the traditional classroom that, admittedly, it’s going to take a little extra effort on my part to generate excitement for remaining full online. Are you on campus or online? What challenges are you facing as you prepare for either format or a combination of both?    Second, I’m thinking about the college search process and how overwhelming it can be for students. I’ve spent a good part of this summer prodding my youngest son to look at colleges. Our conversations in the car after campus tours have reminded me that students on the cusp of transitioning from secondary to higher education need our compassion just as much if not more than our content expertise. It has occurred to me several times during these visits that at 17 years old I had absolutely zero plans to be a historian. To paraphrase my son after one presentation: “looking at colleges is really scary.” No doubt! As a parent and professor I’m often just as confused about which college would be best when I leave the information sessions/tours as I was when we arrived on campus. It's no surprise to me that many of my students come to community college after spending time a four-year school that was not the right "fit." There has to be a better way. Ideas? Advice?   Finally, as a historian, I continue to reflect on how best to help my students place themselves within the context of this unprecedented time in American history. Just as we thought society was moving towards a new “normal” we find ourselves again facing mask mandates and engaging in debates about the value of vaccination. No doubt this is a confusing time for students and teachers alike. As always, I encourage fellow teachers to reference times in our history when we’ve faced similar challenges. I recently started listening to the inaugural season of the Intervals podcast released this year by the Organization of American Historians and available free of charge through Spotify . Subjects include yellow fever, smallpox, the influenza outbreak of 1918, and the use of disinfectants during the Gilded Age. It’s easy to get drawn in by the fascinating subjects of this fabulous series. Any one of the episodes could offer an early-semester writing prompt in a history or English class.   As we approach this new academic year, what are you thinking about? What challenges do you anticipate as we move into this new phase of pandemic-era higher education? Please share.     ... View more

This year’s Olympics in Japan is ‘different’ than all of the previous ones--I don’t just mean that it’s happening during the COVID pandemic, it’s also the one that has the largest number of athletes who are openly a part of the LGBTQ+ community. This year, there are currently 168 athletes who belong to the LGBTQ+ community, maybe even more as there are some athletes who aren’t open about their sexuality. What’s even more impressive is that if all of the LGBTQ+ athletes were representing a country, they would be ranked 14th in the world in the number of medals won . Here are some of the athletes making headlines: Tom Daley : After having won a bronze medal in diving when he was just 18 in the 2012 Olympics, he won a gold medal this week in the men's synchronized diving competition along with his diving partner, Matty Lee.  Megan Rapinoe : Megan’s skills as a soccer player, her unflinching support for LGBTQ+ rights and amazing hair color has placed her on the map as one of the most prominent LGBTQ+ athletes in the Olympics and in the soccer world. She has already won a gold medal back in 2012 and a world cup winner as well. Chelsea Wolfe : Chelsea was the first trans athlete to qualify for the Olympics from the USA team. She will be serving as an alternate in the BMX freestyle event. The reason why this year’s Olympics is particularly special for trans people is that this is the first time there are trans athletes competing. Trans athletes were able to participate in the Olympics back in 2004, but it wasn’t until this year that trans athletes actually participated . This is amazing news; while the number may seem small, it was by far much much larger than it was before and it's important that athletes from all over the world, are able to express who they are and what they do wholeheartedly without fear of judgement or retribution. I hope that this will be a gateway in helping other LGBTQ+ athletes come out and be open about who they are in the future. ... View more

What pulled you into teaching history, and eventually, becoming a history textbook author? I grew up with maternal grandparents who spoke German as a first language; my grandmother was born in the US but into a large German-speaking farming family and my grandfather emigrated from Ukraine (at the time we called it the USSR or Russia). This made me curious about European history and languages so I first studied German, then French, and finally ended up in French history because of my interest in the French Revolution. I loved studying history and also teaching it, both in large undergraduate classes and small seminars. It seemed to me then and still seems to me now that studying history gives you a new perspective on yourself, your family, your community and your nation and a sense of belonging to a wider world. Textbooks are essential because they provide an introduction to all the fascinating questions that could be studied in greater depth and they also, when they work well, give a sense of how things fit together, whether it’s different kinds of experience (war, economic change, cultural variations) or developments over time (how much we have inherited from the past). Can you tell us a little bit about the courses you teach/have taught and where you've taught? I began my career at the University of California, Berkeley teaching Western Civ, general European history and French history in particular. I have taught very large lecture classes (many hundreds of students) and small seminars, both undergraduate and graduate, and everything in between. Berkeley was somewhat unusual (aside from the fact that it was Berkeley, the home of radicalism) in that the history department required every major to write a thesis, not just the honors students. This got students involved in original research and writing and was often very rewarding both to students and their professors. After Berkeley I went to the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school, but I still taught the same variety of courses. Then I went to UCLA where I continued to teach a variety of courses. I still teach an online summer version of Western Civ. I loved all the places where I taught and found the students always very engaged (not every single one, of course!), though I also learned that students respond to their professors – if they sense enthusiasm and passion for the subject, they tend to feel the same way themselves. With The Making of the West going into best-selling 7th edition, and a new Achieve platform, what are you most excited about showing your fellow history professors this fall? The online component of teaching is only going to grow, and the most important thing is that that component reflect the same research and analysis that go into textbook writing and the research and writing of history more generally. What I like about the Macmillan platform for the 7 th edition is that it had great input from my co-authors and myself. It reflects our interests and priorities, not some generic template. At the same time, Achieve offers so many choices. No one has to do the same thing as everyone else; the customization possibilities are endless, as I discovered for myself teaching this course with Launchpad over the last few years. What are the biggest themes that you try to convey? What are the organizing principles of The Making of the West? Interconnection above all else: we have tried to bring all the different kinds of history (from military to women’s and gender history) together into a seamless (in so far as that is possible) narrative without privileging any one aspect or region. Interconnection in the sense, too, that Europe is part of a wider world and we would like to think that we were very much in the forefront of emphasizing that aspect of Western Civ. What has been the best "teachable moment" to emerge from teaching in the era of the pandemic? I am not sure that enough has been made of how the online format can actually increase professor-student interactions. If you teach a bricks and mortar version of Western Civ as I have, it is very hard to get to know individual students if you have a class of 150-500 students (except those in your own section if you have one). And it’s very hard to get students to come to office hours because they have busy schedules and are often convinced that no one will be very interested in their problems when there are so many other students. With the move online during the pandemic, students have been more willing to email their professors because it’s the only way to contact them. Yes, in synchronous classes, you can stay and ask a question after the lecture but in asynchronous ones, you cannot. But you can email the professor or attend his or her zoom office hours. Without this, I’m afraid that the pandemic would have been even more disastrous for learning. ... View more

The Tokyo games will begin this Friday, July 23, and there has been recent news around Rule 50 of the Olympic games which bans “demonstration or political, religious, or racial propaganda in Olympic venues.” The Olympics, though, have a long history of protests, and I think it’s helpful to view current events in the context of this history.  Here are three stories of protest at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. If you watch or follow the upcoming Tokyo Olympics and the associated protest that might occur, you can think of them within this larger context of historical protest at these world games.  Tommie Smith’s and John Carlos ’ protest is probably the most famous of these games. The two men won the gold and bronze medals in the 200 meter race. When receiving their medals, Smith and Carlos wore black socks without shoes to symbolize African-American poverty and a black glove to symbolize African-American strength and unity, and they each raised a fist with lowered heads during the national anthem.  Smith and Carlos were then suspended from the US team and forced to leave the Olympic Village, but they were not forced to return their medals.  Wyomia Tyus is mostly known as a former world-record holder in the 100 meter race, and the first person to win gold in this event twice. During her 1968 gold-medal performance, she also protested against racism and human rights abuses through her clothing.  She did so by wearing dark blue running shorts , in contrast to the white ones the other Americans in this event wore. She also criticized the actions taken against Smith and Carlos for their own protest. Her shorts are now in the National Museum of African American History and Culture , and she recently published a memoir detailing these games.  In gymnastics, Věra Čáslavská also protested at these historic games. When receiving her four gold and two silver medals, she turned her head from the Soviet flag. Two months earlier, the Soviet Union had invaded Čáslavská’s home of Czechoslovakia. She then fled to the forest and trained by swinging from trees and doing floor routines in a meadow.  After the games, Čáslavská was barred from the sport in Czechoslovakia, so she decided to coach in Mexico. ... View more

In May I described my plans for a deconstructed research project to be assigned during my six-week summer intensive course in place of a traditional writing assignment. (See “Summer Project: Assignment Reboot” for details.) My goal was to have the students complete the key elements of a research project in structured sections, due over four weeks, rather than handing in a finished product at the conclusion of the course. Having just finished reading spring-semester research projects, I hoped that with this new approach the summer projects would be academically stronger if they were broken up into sections even though the summer students would have less time to complete the project than the spring semester students. Thanks to everyone who wrote to me after the blog was published to share their experiences with deconstructed projects!   So what did I find? Here are some observations from my first experience assigning this project with a class of 24 online students.   First, seasoned students who had completed research projects in other courses were initially confused about “the point.” I had a handful ask if they could “just write the whole paper” instead of breaking down the projects into my four step process. Although some students clearly already knew how to complete a research project, I explained that all students could benefit from slowing down the process. Part One of the project asked students to explain their topic and identify three secondary sources in MLA citation form. Right away some students hit a roadblock because they did not know where/how to locate secondary sources and/or they were unfamiliar with MLA. Since they had only seven days to complete the assignment, however, there was no time to procrastinate. Anyone who needed assistance with the sources had to immediately schedule time with our reference librarian, and the majority of students did just that.   Having students focus Part Three of the assignment on primary sources provided an opportunity to once again offer help. Part Two asked students to summarize the basics: who/what/where/when/how. Part Three required them to find primary sources to illustrate the details. In semester-long research projects I have consistently seen students ignore the differences between primary and secondary sources as they rush to complete a project in the crunch of a deadline. In the deconstructed project the students had seven days to identify three primary sources. For most students, successful completion of this part of the project meant brushing up on what a primary source is -- I provided links to several online resources as well as a sample of my own work for students to mirror. Again, I reminded students of the short window of time and encouraged them to ask for help. I was pleasantly surprised to see so many students booking virtual appointments with our college librarians and the college Writing Center.   Finally, Part Four required students to submit two paragraphs on the historical significance of their topic along with a final Works Cited page in MLA format. I provided several prompts to help the students to think more broadly about their topics and to draw connections to contemporary issues when possible. Once more the students had seven days to complete this part of the project. No time to procrastinate.   Ultimately, my trial run with a (time-sensitive) deconstructed research project was a success. The vast majority of  students completed all four parts of the assignment on time and I was pleased with the effort put forth. It’s difficult to judge whether the results will be the same during a semester-long course because in my experience students who take summer-intensive courses are extra motivated by the need to earn those last few credits that will allow them to graduate and/or transfer. I’ll try the project in a semester-long format this fall and am considering whether or not to maintain the same four-week plan. I’m curious to see if the four-week approach reduces the amount of procrastination that tends to seep into semester-long research projects.   Thoughts? Suggestions? ... View more