Weekly Varia no. 24, 04/29/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

The penultimate week of classes at Truman State passed with a significant amount of chaos stemming from the system outage that I wrote about last week. IT actually restored services pretty quickly, all things considered, but the outage came at a particularly bad point in the semester calendar and thus landed like a bomb among already deeply stressed students and ambiguous messaging from administration about expectations for extensions and reduced workload made things significantly worse.

I scaled back expectations for a couple of my classes to account for the lack of access to resources and functionally waived late penalties between now and the end of the semester. I understand that not everyone has these options, but I have been leaning into flexibility and optionality in my courses by default over the past few years, which helped make these changes without compromising any of my learning outcomes. Moreover, while I have been second-guessing my specifications grading system in that it requires a significant amount of work for me to help students meet the higher standards in their writing, it has come in handy here because some number of students have already completed their major assignments for the course.

Perhaps most surreal for me is that at a time when so many people seemed to be panicking, I felt the most relaxed. When students asked how they should submit work, I told them to wait until Blackboard was back. Several times I joked I might just pretend that my email is still out even once it comes back. My consistent message to my students echoed what I said when COVID hit: we’re all in this together and I’ll do everything in my power to help you succeed in my course.

The week reminded me of a story my mother told me about an experience as a student teacher. The primary teacher was struggling to manage a particularly rambunctious class that pulled out the straws they were using to shoot spitwads when they were introduced to my mother. The teacher was furious. My mom laughed, and went on to have a great relationship with the class. Expectations and standards are not bad and there is plenty of reason to stress, but sometimes the most important thing you can do is to laugh at the absurdity.

This week’s varia:

  • A statuette of the Buddha carved from Anatolian stone been found at a Sanctuary of Isis in Berenike, Egypt. We have other textual evidence for these trade connections, but seeing its material culture is always exciting.
  • Neville Morley writes about his research trajectory through the lens of the Oxford vs Cambridge rivalry at a time when every university had a unique tradition for how to do ancient history, and how a globalized academic world has flattened and erased a lot of these differences.
  • At his blog, Bret Devereaux has a good primer on academic ranks and some of the sleights of hand that universities use to obscure who does what work. In my experience there is even more fuzziness to these terms and I know of a few more people who moved from teaching stream to tenure stream than Bret does, but the broad strokes of what he writes in terms of categories and consequences is spot on.
  • Texas is pushing the ten commandments into school classrooms as early as next fall. This is the latest effort to push a watered-down version of generic Christianity into the world that should worry not just non-Christians, but also the devout because such symbols can be weaponized against people of different denominations just as easily as they can be used to proselytize to the non-believers. As Kevin Kruse, the author of One Nation Under God pointed out on Twitter, similar attempts in the 1950s received the most pushback from Christians who had no interest in the state getting decide for their children what type of Christian they should be. One of the groups in Texas already raising concerns is the Texas Baptists Christian Life Commission.
  • Graduate student workers at the University of Minnesota voted to unionize, with more than 2500 out of 4,165 workers voting and only 72 rejecting the measure. Graduate employee unions can be fraught given the revolving door of members and frequent uncertainty about who is eligible—when I was at Mizzou I couldn’t participate in the drive because it happened the year when I was on fellowship and thus paid through financial aid and didn’t receive a w2, which was part of the argument to administration, even though I was just as negatively affected by the administration’s decision to cancel our expected health insurance with less than 24-hour’s notice—but this is a field that desperately needs overhaul around both working conditions and pay. Meanwhile, Michigan GEO Union is striking for better conditions and being met with a university negotiating in bad faith.
  • In the Washington Post, David Perry reviews Short Changed: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students. Consider this added to my to-read list.
  • Carolyn Bryant Donham, the woman whose accusations led to the brutal lynching of Emmett Till in 1955, has died. The last time I taught US History she had just returned to the news with a Grand Jury investigation and the discovery of an unserved arrest warrant. Moments like are a powerful reminder that 1955 isn’t all that long ago, historically speaking.
  • Today in “there are too many guns,” a man in Texas executed five people in a neighbor’s house after they asked him to stop shooting his AR-15 in the middle of the night because their baby was trying to sleep.
  • The Washington Post has a story about a county board of commissioners in Michigan that saw its new Board of Commissioners dismantle its structures from the inside, including targeting the county’s vision statement “you belong,” which they claim “has been used to promote the divisive Marxist ideology of the race, equity movement.” Centered in their crosshairs is the new health officer Adeline Hambley who they needed to manufacture a reason to fire.
  • Florida’s Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, altered the findings on a COVID-19 study to show that the vaccines posed a health risk to young men.
  • The current Roberts Supreme Court is in a race to strip legal protections from millions of Americans. The other horse in this race are the revelations about how deeply it is compromised, from the Clarence Thomas reports to Gorsuch’s sale of a ranch, to Roberts’ wife receiving a handsome salary to serve as a recruiter for law firms with business before the court, to Alito’s rants, to a story this week about omissions in the Senate report that cleared Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct. But Roberts is refusing either to testify before Congress or to adopt a formal code of conduct. To his credit, every justice is doing their part to avoid more formal oversight—which is as good a reason as any to need it in my book. But, sure, it’s politically-motivated attacks that are discrediting the Court.
  • Montana follows in the path of Tennessee and voted to expel their only transgender lawmaker Zooey Zephyr for breaching decorum (read: representing positions they disagree with). In Nebraska, a democratic lawmaker is being investigated on an ethics complaint regarding an act that would prohibit puberty blockers because she has a trans son. Great. Now do wealthy lawmakers and tax cuts, Republican lawmakers and gun control, and evangelical lawmakers and putting prayer in schools.
  • The FBI has arrested thirty people who applied for work at Rentahitman.com, including a member of Tennessee Air National Guard. The story turns more than a little disturbing at the price ($5,000 dollars) he accepted the job for and the lengths he seemed willing to go. But I also can’t help but see this as a worrying sign about economic instability.
  • There are allegations against the West Virginia State Police Academy, including video tapes in the women’s locker room and a hostile, sexist environment that also led to improper relationships and assaults.
  • In San Francisco, a former fire commissioner was beaten with a metal rod by a homeless person, leading to charges against the person. And then video footage started to come out that seems to show the man using bear spray on homeless people while they sleep.
  • This week in the ongoing tragi-comedy that is monarchy, The Proclaimers have been removed from King Charles III’s coronation playlist because the Scottish brothers have expressed Republican political views.

Album of the week: Johnny Clegg and Savuka, Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World (1989)

Currently Reading: Robert Graves, I, Claudius

Weekly Varia no. 16, 03/04/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Every semester in an academic calendar has its own rhythms. Fall starts with energy and excitement created by a lengthier summer hiatus before usually turning into a race to Thanksgiving and a coda that is the final few weeks. Summer is both more frenetic thanks for the shorter terms and more laid back because everyone is working on a smaller number of courses at a time. Spring, by contrast, starts with everyone still not quite recovered from the fall, but is also divided more neatly into two separate arcs, one leading up to the spring break, and one from there to the end of the semester.

I like the shorter arcs of the spring semester in theory. But I have also been reminded again this week, the penultimate before break, that so much of exhaustion, stress, and burnout are bigger systemic problems, which has prompted me to dramatically overhaul the schedule for one of my classes in particular in order to align my expectations, what my students can handle, and the course outcomes. Fortunately, I overbuilt the latter, so I can do almost anything in the back half of the course and still meet every objective.

At the same time, though, I don’t relish the thought of adding this to my to-do list. While I don’t have an obscene number of students this semester (despite two of my classes being mildly over-enrolled), I am already teaching three new courses, with the one that I am now retrofitting mid-flight being the one I had expected to be able to leave on autopilot while I tended to the others. Naturally.

At the same time, I discovered just how many groups I’m involved in decided that we need to squeeze whatever we’re doing in before break, leading to quite a crunch on my time.

Reader, I am tired.

I’ll make it through this week and through the rest of the semester after that, but the feeling of exhaustion that swept over me when I resolved to make these changes reminded me of this piece about John Fetterman, depression, and the requirement for politicians to always be “on.” Despite the reputation that professors are callous, impatient, and disinterested in engaging with students, or perhaps because of it, I saw a parallel in always being on. I might be a dozen anxieties in a trench coat making things up as I go along (an exaggeration on all fronts, but with a hint of truth), but I am supposed to be approachable and welcoming to students, timely in my feedback on student work, prepared with my class material, and present in my classes (though I had a…memorable…professor in undergrad who was frequently absent with no notification), on top of being an expert in the content and a responsible colleague to my coworkers.

This week’s varia:

  • Hannah Čulík-Baird returns to blogging with a post that consists of two fragments, one on fragments as nodes of interconnection both horizontally and vertically and about academic voice. Full disclosure: I get a shout-out in the post as an inspiration for the return based on intermittent, ongoing conversations Hannah and I have had about academic writing and academic voice across multiple social media platforms.
  • Charles Roberts has a blog post pointing out that the issues of student engagement are the consequence of larger structural factors that professors are now being asked to solve without the training or support to do so. He has a note about how dispiriting it is to hear an accreditor devalue the teaching that professors do, which, yes. as I keep saying about ChatGPT, this sort of language is toxic and sets establishes dangerous misunderstandings that I think set students up to fail in the long run.
  • The International Baccalaureate program in the UK is going to allow students to use AI programs if they cite e.g. ChatGPT as a source. This is an unbelievably dumb policy that completely misunderstands what ChatGPT is. The director claims that they created the policy because he thinks it is more valuable for students to learn to critique essays that to learn to do it themselves, which I find is an absurd premise given that doing one at least to a certain level is required to do the other. I’m dreading how decisions like this are going to create headaches for me down the road.
  • Jonathan Wilson writes about the challenges of creating a one-size-fits-all (students and teachers) model for flexible deadlines. I also share his concern about the frequency of students using avoidance as the primary coping strategy for students in distress. In addition to avoidance leading to more avoidance, I often find that it causes work to pile up to the point that it is unmanageable and students will further avoid me because they’re convinced that they have to turn all back work in at once in order to participate in the class and earn my respect—no matter how many times I tell them otherwise and try to help create manageable timelines for getting their missing work in.
  • Given a new round of commentary about campus cancel culture, I saw circulating a Teen Vogue op-ed from 2021 that I missed at the time arguing that colleges and universities are conservative institutions—for many reasons, not the least of which is that the existing fiscal structure of the universities often demands a conservative approach to budgeting and, the larger the endowment, the more the entity functions like a hedge-fund with a vestigial educational institution attached. As a complete tangent, my favorite part of this article is not the content, but the form. This opening paragraph is exactly what I want to see in an introduction. It has a hook, context, and concludes with a clear, coherent thesis that organizes the rest of the piece. A+.
  • From the Vermont Digger: the girl’s basketball team from Mid Vermont Christian School forfeited their game in the state D4 basketball tournament rather than play against Long Trail because the latter team had a trans player. The school also applied to the state to be able to receive public tuition money while being exempted from anti-discrimination regulations. This is an abominable position, but one that is all too common these days. To receive public money, you should have to be in compliance with state rules on issues of discrimination.
  • The Montana state legislature is debating a bill that would ban anyone who received a COVID vaccine from giving blood. Opponents of this bill say that it will lead to an 80% drop in blood donations, thus creating a new public health crisis.
  • A Republican lawmaker in Florida introduced a bill requiring that any blogger or other writer who does stories about the Governor or other executive officials register with the state or face a fine. Just the latest proposal to curtail civil liberties in the name of strangling political opposition coming out of that state.
  • A white-supremacist Lutheran who believes that Hitler went to heaven and views the world in Manichean terms where either you believe in White supremacy and Fascism or you believe in Marxism is trying to gain control of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. This synod is already an extremely conservative denomination, but he wants to turn it into an alt-right organization. I hate it here.
  • Bari Weiss “reported” last month about a whistleblower at a clinic in St. Louis that offers care to transgender teens, ginning up an enormous amount of outrage and potential political action against the clinic. Parents of the patients, the patients themselves, and the clinic are speaking out against the allegations, as reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. After the previous four links, adding this one runs the risk of seeming like I’m beating a dead horse, but…
  • Two trains collided in northern Thessaly (Greece), killing more than 40 people. This is an awful tragedy and critics are pointing out that like the aging infrastructure that caused the crash in East Palestine, Ohio, the train network in Greece is in need of overhaul, even if some of the blame here falls on human error.
  • Pizza acrobatics are a sport. There are competitions, and the Washington Post profiled the 13-time world champion, Tony Gemignani. I’d personally rather eat the pizza.

Album of the week: The Barefoot Movement, “Pressing Onward” (2021)

Currently Reading: Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction; Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children; Nikolaus Leo Overtoom, Reign of Arrows

https://vtdigger.org/2023/02/27/mid-vermont-christian-school-girls-basketball-forfeits-playoff-game-rather-than-compete-against-team-with-transgender-player/

Weekly Varia no. 12, 02/04/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I turned 37 earlier this week. 37 is a curious age. I’m older than Alexander the Great was when he died, but not yet at the acme of my life (~40); no longer young, but also not old. I’m just an indeterminate middling age. Old enough for my beard to be starting to turn white, but young enough that a student mistook me for being a decade younger than I am. In his defense, I am the youngest person in my department. Nor was 37 an age that I imagined when I was younger. There were things I more or less expected by the ages of 25, 30, 32, 35, 50, but I skipped right past 37. Not that I correctly foretold much past the graduation of college, anyway. I could complain about plenty at this age and I both have made plenty of mistakes along the way and have plenty of developing left to do, but I also largely like the person I have become this decade. Now if only I can persuade him to get more sleep.

This week’s varia:

  • ChatGPT Roundup:
    • Rachel Elliot Rigolino says that AI tools mean that writing instruction should focus on students as editors. I agree in principle with the argument, though I could say the same thing about teaching them to edit their own writing. Likewise, you can only be a good editor if you have a good working knowledge of the skill.
    • Ben Crowell, a physics professor, writes about AI writing very similarly to what I’ve been saying: that substantive responses to student writing will push past the superficial fluency of the AI.
    • Google seems to be testing a new homepage that uses a chat AI interface. If it is anything like ChatGPT, this change is going to annoy me to no end.
    • Washington Post has a story about the historical chat AI. The article is a little “both sides,” giving the creator of the app the last word, but it does profile historians’ critiques.
    • A good piece in Slate about the college is going to respond to ChatGPT, even as the company that produces it is not thinking about college at all. I particularly like this line: “This assertion, that A.I. might “free up human workers to focus on more thoughtful—and ideally profitable—work,” is wrongheaded at the outset. When it comes to writing (and everything that can be done with it), it’s all grunt work. Having an idea, composing it into language, and checking to see whether that language matches our original idea is a metacognitive process that changes us. It puts us in dialogue with ourselves and often with others as well. To outsource idea generation to an A.I. machine is to miss the constant revision that reflection causes in our thinking.”
    • Teen Boys Beat Shit Out Of ChatGPT Servers After It Only Gets Them ‘C’ On Assignment
  • Ron DeSantis’ political appointees to the board of The New College in Florida fired the president Patricia Okker, replacing her with a DeSantis ally. Among other changes that they are aiming for, they want to place all hiring decisions in the hands of the President, alongside firing all faculty and subjecting them to selective rehiring. Setting aside the nebulous concept of academic freedom that applies on a sliding scale to professors, this is a ruthless assault on the fabric of higher education as an institution designed to impose a narrow definition of acceptable education, and a vision that DeSantis’ allies aim to expand to all public schools in Florida. John Warner has a good piece about the consequences of these changes, with an emphasis on how this is a political attack that will be a material detriment for students in small, meaningful ways like having someone to serve as a reference, despite DeSantis’ rhetoric.
  • Axios has a roundup of some evidence that the Humanities might be making a comeback, in terms of majors and how young people are trying to make sense of the world. A notable point is that some students are starting to see that a STEM degree does not guarantee a better job.
  • Teen Vogue continues its run of substantive articles with a good discussion of Reconstruction and how it is, or isn’t, taught in schools.
  • There are reports from Ohio of a home school ring that is using explicitly Nazi educational materials in their “schooling.” The group’s leader told a podcast that she was having trouble finding “Nazi approved school material for my home-schooled children.”
  • New Mexico’s legislature introduced a bill that would require schools to overhaul their ventilation systems. I know that I would feel much more comfortable teaching in a classroom with no windows open if I knew that the classroom had a state of the art filtration.
  • At Vice, Roshan Abraham reports on allegations that Avian flu was used as cover by major egg producers to raise prices dramatically beyond what was necessary. Eggs are one of a number of items I have noticed in the grocery store that have been going up in prince well beyond the rate of inflation, which makes this argument of particular note.
  • Colossal Biosciences, a start-up company trying to revive extinct species, has completed its Series B funding that injected another $150 million dollars. This story reminds me of the time that I explained to my closest friends (whose wedding I was officiating) on the RSVP that my doctor had me on an “extinct birds” diet, so all of my meals had to be acquired from a specific purveyor who had cloned extinct birds specifically so that people on this diet could eat them. It was not a short explanation. (I did, in fact, choose one of their options at the end, I’m not entirely without manners.)
  • The United States has concluded a deal with the Philippines for the use of four new bases, expanding at least the potential for a US military presence in the South China Sea.
  • The Pentagon announced that there is a Chinese surveillance balloon over Montana. I have no particular insight into what this means in terms of the slow-boiling conflict between the United States and China, but I wanted to include it in this list because it reminds me of the fascinating story from World War 2 about Fu Go, a Japanese program that dropped bombs on the continental United States.
  • One of my persistent complaints about public discourse in the United States is that it is entirely lacking in nuance or an awareness of context. This is how you get the story about the diner in Connecticut that the proprietor, a Mexican woman, named “Woke,” because it serves breakfast and coffee, you see, that has become a target of outrage and support because people assumed she was making a political statement. At least this misunderstanding runs both directions and Woke is receiving good business from people pushing back against that outrage.
  • The Netflix reality show Squidgame, a less fatal version of the hit show, stands accused of creating conditions that were much more challenging than contestants signed up for. On the one hand, most of these people were not paid for appearing on the show unless they won, which I do think is a problem, but, on the other hand, there is a deep irony that people eagerly signed up without considering this at least a possible outcome.
  • Recep Tayyip Erdogan is opening a museum…to himself.

Album of the Week: Amanda Shires, Take It Like A Man (seriously, listen to Amanda Shires)

Currently Reading: Fonda Lee, Jade War, Matthew Canepa, The Iranian Expanse

The Game: Weekly Varia 11/26/22

Posted on by Josh Nudell

The Game kicks off in Columbus in about an hour. For those who don’t follow college football, The Game is the annual showdown between the University of Michigan Wolverines and the Ohio State Buckeyes. Michigan leads the all-time series 59-51-6, but the rivalry has been lopsided in the other direction for the better part of two decades. Going into The Game last year, Ohio State had only lost twice since 2001 when Jim Tressel took over as coach. Ohio State was rarely ranked outside of the top ten in the sport when the teams met during that period. Michigan put up a fight in a lot of years, but, outside of an excellent Michigan team in 2003 and an anomalous Ohio State year in 2011 between the end of Tressel and the start of Urban Meyer’s tenure, Michigan could not seem to win and often lost in heartbreaking fashion. Last year I left the TV off and played Civilization VI until a friend texted me in the fourth quarter telling me that I probably needed to tune in.

Sports fandom, and sports hatred in particular, are strange, tribal phenomena. I have hated many teams in my life, sometimes as specific iterations of a team and sometimes simply for the laundry. Sometimes I hate how a team or player plays their sport. Other times it is because my team can’t seem to ever win. However, I increasingly find myself without the emotional energy for hatred. I still don’t like teams and root for the teams that I’m a fan of, but full-on hatred both takes more energy and is best curated in groups. When it comes to a game like this one, where my fandom collides with the deep, simmering dislike of the other team, though, all bets are off.

I went back and forth a half dozen times this week on whether to tape The Game or watch it live this year. Ohio State is ranked #2 in college football, while Michigan is #3. Both teams are undefeated and the winner will likely end up with a bid to the college football playoff while the loser will “only” play in the Rose Bowl. The lure of live sports is proving too strong to resist, so I’ll be tuning in while also preparing myself for what I think will be a likely Michigan defeat. Go Blue.

This week’s varia:

  • A new study claims to have authenticated a coin found in 1713 long considered a possible forgery because it names an otherwise unknown Emperor Sponsian (the research is available on PlosOne). The researchers suggest it dates to c.260 CE when Dacia might have been cut off from the rest of the Roman Empire and thus minted coins under the name of a local military commander. There are, of course, skeptics. Numismatists, specialists in ancient coins, are suggesting that this study fails to account for numerous tenets of the discipline in their haste to scientifically authenticate the coin. To my mind, this study is a useful reminder about the fragmentary nature of evidence from the ancient world.
  • Graham Hancock’s show Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix is a “documentary” that offers “evidence” of a an advanced ice-age civilization was wiped out by a flood sometime in the dim past. This is pseudoarchaeology with racist bones (it denies the achievements of indigenous communities), so, of course, it is one of the most popular shows on Netflix. The Guardian calls it “the most dangerous show on Netflix,” while Bill Caraher has a more nuanced piece about the impossibility of debunk ing this sort of conspiracy theory and some suggesting for how to productively counteract their influence.
  • Corey Booker is introducing the Industrial Agriculture Accountability Act (Vox), which proposes to reform how the meat industry handles disaster. The bill includes requiring the industry to pay annual fees that would work as insurance in cases of disaster, mandating disaster preparedness plans, and putting companies on the hook for costs like cleaning up the after disasters and paying workers severance afterward. It also would ban the most inhumane culling methods and close some loopholes in American slaughter rules. I have disagreed with a number of Booker’s positions over the past few years, but his consistency in attempting to change one of the American industries most in need of reform is admirable.
  • Investigators are leveling accusations that some Russian military commanders encouraged their soldiers to commit sexual violence in Ukraine (Reuters). This investigation is part of the broader inquiry into Russian war crimes and, while it is too early to say how widespread the practice was, the implication that this violence was in some instances coordinated makes it all the more harrowing.
  • In the Washington Post’s “Made by History” column, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd explores how Ron DeSantis is the latest in a lineage of conservative political actors to make schools their chosen battleground to instill their vision of “America.” The hook here is that Florida recently became the fifth state to make students recognize a federal holiday that I missed when President Trump established it in 2017: Victims of Communism Memorial Day. Lassabe Shepherd is the author of a forthcoming book, Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars.
  • John Warner, the author of Why They Can’t Write, remains my favorite commentator about the state of higher education. In his column at Inside Higher Education this week, he writes about why nostalgia is such a dangerous sentiment for colleges.
  • Rebecca Jennings at Vox argues that we should stop taking billionaires at their word when they say that they are “doing good” in the world. This argument is hardly new (cf. Winners Take All) and matches what I already believe, but American society remains easily seduced by a class of people who confidently assert vague platitudes while proudly refusing to engage with history or the humanities. But they’re rich, so they must know what they’re talking about, right?
  • In the realm of the silly, the New York Times Pitchbot is consistently the best satirist on Twitter: “This morning while we were listening to The Daily, my four year-old turned to me gravely and asked “Daddy, why are there no pictures of Naomi Biden’s wedding in the Times?” When I told him “because Vogue got an exclusive”, he started crying.”

Album of the week: Gin Blossoms, New Miserable Experience (Deluxe Edition).

Currently reading: Susanna Carlsson, Hellenistic Democracies; Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built.

Fall 2021: The Uncanny Valley of Normalcy

Posted on by Josh Nudell

As I read a flood of headlines about schools going online in response to the latest COVID-19 spikes, I am finding it hard to imagine what it was like back in August when we returned for a fall semester masked, but back at full capacity and in person and all of the talk on campus was when, not if, the mask mandate would get dropped.

Now it is late December and I am sitting in my office trying to plan for a new semester that starts in less than three weeks without any sense of what it will look like and without having had a chance yet to process the semester that just ended.

Perhaps a nap would be a more productive use of my time.

More than any semester I can remember, I spent a lot of time and emotional energy trying to coach, support, and otherwise help struggling students through a very difficult term. Some of this can be traced to my new position at a new school that allowed me to invest in this sort work and a campus climate that made it more necessary. Yet, anecdotally, I also saw sentiments that this semester was harder than the ones that were more explicitly pandemic semesters. There are a variety of possible explanations—those other semesters came with more explicit planning and everyone’s mental and emotional reserves are empty after two years of a pandemic—but one that I particularly like came from Kevin Gannon on Twitter who speculated that this semester was the Uncanny Valley of Normalcy. That is, we were close to normal in a way that only highlighted that something was off.

After a lot of debate, I set up my courses so that students could use Zoom to attend remotely if they asked me for the link. I suggested they use chat to contribute to the class conversation, but also warned them that I might not be able to bring them fully into the course discussion. I am not happy with this solution, but after trying to teach language classes in a hybrid format last year I decided that this was just a battle I didn’t have the energy to fight. I still want to imagine something better but keep drawing a blank.

Other challenges I faced this semester come back to it being my first year in a new department. For instance, I came in with certain assumptions about the demographics of my upper-level course and then had to adjust on the fly to meet my students where they were. Going into next semester, I can have these adjustments built into the course from the start. Similarly, I came into the semester thinking that the my World Civ course (world history for non-majors) would be an iteration of a world history course I had taught before, but then found myself adjusting mid-stream when I saw the virtues of some of what the World History course did, before adjusting again when it became clear to me how many of my students were wearing down at a frightening rate. I suspect having a more regular assignment schedule will help this class immensely, and this is something that will be easier to accomplish now that I have a better sense of the students, campus community, and resources at my disposal.

This semester has also been causing me to reflect on three aspects of my teaching.

First, I like most of my class sessions, and, by extension, the course as a whole to have a big idea and an arc that allows each idea to reinforce what the students are learning. When I taught my monsters class, for instance, we go from primordial monsters, the interaction between monsters and humans, and finally asking whether human beings are the “real monsters.” In other classes, I often use a sort of ring composition that has the course return to the ideas we established at the outset of the semester at the very end. This method, along with a strong emphasis on reflection in the courses, allows the students to see what they have learned that semester and I have no intention of fully abandoning that model, but I am wondering if I wouldn’t be better to build in more compartmentalization.

Take this analogy. I often often have students go through drafting processes and peer review by way of scaffolding writing assignments. This semester when I tried a peer-review exercise in one of my classes, only half of the class had a draft for their peers to review. Now, I am going to change how I do these peer reviews in the future by requiring students to submit the drafts as a “graded” (complete/incomplete) assignment, but I also saw this as symptomatic of how many students were simply overwhelmed this semester. I had multiple students miss long stretches of class time where they seemed even more lost when they return, so I wonder if there might be virtue in finding ways to build in water-tight compartments so that if one ruptures the whole boat doesn’t sink, so to speak. Not that compartmentalization helps with any given writing assignment, though.

Sorry, mixed metaphor is where my head is at right now.

Second, I am once again questioning the value of tests. Not assessment, mind you, but tests. When I finished working as a TA for big US history surveys, I vowed I would never again offer a blue-book test. Basically, I think they are of negligible pedagogical value for what I hope to teach my students and I find in-class exams mind-numbing to grade. I have exclusively used open-book take-home tests in my classes where part of the assignment is learning how to synthesize and cite information from the various sources that we have used.

Some of these tests have worked better than others, and I am starting to think that a take-home test needs to do more than replicate the in-class test at home. That is, if you are doing a take-home test, it shouldn’t be a series of short answer terms followed by several essays. Some students do exceptionally well at these assignments, but others replicate many of the same issues I have with the in-class exams while the large number of individual components to the test often leads to divided focus. I have had more success with exams that ask fewer questions, expect more from each answer, and allow revision.

However, if I am going to take this approach, what is the virtue in doing one midterm and one final with two questions each rather than, say asking those same questions over three or four papers that go through a peer-review process? In this model, much learning ostensibly tested by the short answer portion of those exams would be done through weekly quizzes over factual materials and readings. Not every course needs to be writing-intensive, but this can be accounted for in the length of the assignments, while doing more frequent but shorter assignments that go through this process would likely result in deeper, more sustained engagement with the course material than the alternative.

Finally, the end of this semester has me again reflecting on compassionate pedagogy. I want to be the sort of professor who my students trust to support them. Right now this means finding ways to make my course policies flexible and respecting the demands put on their time. I don’t have access to my course evals for the semester yet, but I am particularly looking forward to seeing what they thought of my late policy that treated all major assignments as checkpoints and allowed them to get an automatic extension by filling out a Google form before that checkpoint. In particular, I wonder what messaging a policy like this gives. A lot of students wrote that they were taking my extension because they had other work due the same day. That in and of itself isn’t a problem—I understand students have other classes and this extension is on offer—but when I scaled back a number of assignments late in the semester because I saw my students becoming utterly overwhelmed, the break I gave them was immediately swallowed by work for other classes. Put the two together, and I can’t help but wonder if building flexibility and compassion into my course as a baseline gets taken for granted and sends the message that what I’m teaching them is not important.

I don’t intend to go away from a compassionate pedagogy because I don’t see rigor and rigidity as synonymous, but it does underscore for me that individual instructors cannot solve problems like the mental health crises on college campuses. We need structural solutions.

You say oh-micron, I say ah-micron, let’s call the whole thing off.

Posted on by Josh Nudell

This post has a soundtrack.

It happens at least once a semester. A student will be reading something aloud or making a point in a class discussion when they need to say a Greek name. They suddenly stop. Sometimes they stumble through, sometimes they will get a pained look on their face as they struggle with where to begin.

I gently offer a pronunciation if they look at me for relief, though I encourage them to repeat it rather than simply saying, “yeah, that.” 

Sometimes a student will simply power through.

Nobody likes to seem stupid. My mother like to tell a story about how I spoke early but then stopped — possibly because I thought that people were laughing at me — and then didn’t speak again until quite late developmentally. When I finally returned to the world of the vocal, I spoke in complete sentences. 

Some of those details might be off, but I have great sympathy for that version of my infant self.

I still struggle with these feelings. I don’t like not knowing things. I am chagrined when I learn that I am mispronouncing a word, which is a particular issue when there are any number of vocabulary terms I learned by reading them in books.

It is for this reason that I tell almost every one of my classes that I pronounce Greek like a hillbilly who rolled up from the forest. The last part is true, but I actually don’t know how I speak Greek, just that whatever it is isn’t “right.” I still don’t like speaking Greek in public because I am self-conscious about screwing it up. The same applies double to meter. I just do my best, and that is what I ask of my students.

Frankly, this is a microcosm of a larger issue. Students are not able to learn when they believe they are supposed to already have the answers. I blame standardized tests, personally, but it is probably more complicated.

The national crash-course on the Greek alphabet during the COVID pandemic naturally caused a panic over the pronunciation of “omicron.” It would be the height of embarrassment to say ah-micron when the right pronunciation is oh-micron.

Put bluntly: who gives a damn?

Seriously.

When a friend asked me, I had to say omicron aloud several times to determine what I say, at which point I realized that I usually say “ah,” but also sometimes “oh.” But even that level of investment misses the point. This is a virus that has killed millions of people world-wide and left untold numbers of others with lingering conditions. Billions of people are unvaccinated and early returns suggest that infants might be particularly vulnerable to the omicron variant.

Getting hung up on pronunciation, whether to use it as an elitist bludgeon because it makes you feel smart or out of fear that what you say will be wrong, just means getting distracted by superficial crap.

The Missing Course

Posted on by Josh Nudell

David Gooblar’s The Missing Course offers a simple, but radical thesis: that improving college teaching requires shifting the mindset about what the product is the professor offers. It is easy to think that your product is your expertise in your content area, honed through years of study. Institutional structures in PhD programs and promotion standards reinforce this belief from one end, while, on the other, there is a temptation to think that the transaction the students are paying for is to have knowledge transmitted to them by a world renowned expert (you).

However, speaking as someone who took classes from some exceptional lecturers and loves the feeling of one of his own lectures landing with an audience: even the most inspiring lecturer will not connect with every student. Gooblar’s proposal follows in the vein of recent scholarship on teaching and learning that encourages teachers to eschew lectures in favor of shades of active learning, but with a critical addition: that the product is not the content, but the student.

This proposal seems obvious, but it also requires foundational changes in class design and assessment and simply bypassed the handwringing about why students aren’t capable of picking up the subtle themes and brilliant observations about life and everything. As Gooblar opens with in chapter one, is that you can’t make someone learn, so the challenge is finding ways to encourage learning beyond the punitive threat of a poor grade. The lecture works well, if still imperfectly, for students who are already interested in learning, but it works best as a gateway drug––a taste that prompts students to go out and get more. That is, the lecture works well for students who approach it as part of an active learning process. But too many others approach the lecture as something to passively receive, learn by rote, and regurgitate as best they are able on the test.

Each of The Missing Courses’ eight chapters approach a different aspect of this teaching, from the basic course design to assignments, to classroom activities, with practical, actionable suggestions to try. There are too many points to summarize here, but I found myself happy to find practices I use in my own classes like low-stakes weekly quizzes and extensive opportunities to revise assignments among his suggestions and still found myself jotting down new ideas.

As a history professor who believes in the importance of teaching writing across the curriculum, I was particularly excited to have suggestions from a professor of writing and rhetoric about how to encourage best practices in citations. For instance, he provides the most lucid explanation I have seen of why students struggle to cite secondary scholarship and will often only do so when citing direct quotes:

“To write a summary, the student must read the whole text (perhaps multiple times), think deeply about the most important aspects, and synthesize observations into a concise rendering of the text’s substance”

In other words: using secondary scholarship is hard and intimidating (what if you get it wrong!), where citing a quote is easy. I couldn’t tell you where I learned how to cite scholarship. I don’t remember being taught how at any point, it was just something I picked up by osmosis, so I very much appreciated seeing Gooblar’s suggestions on activities that can help teach these skills.

All of Gooblar’s suggestions come back to the student as the course material. Toward that end, he emphasizes the importance of respecting students as individuals even, or perhaps especially, when they are failing the course, and of facilitating the classroom as a community where not only are students and their ideas respected, but students may also help each other grow.

At this point you might be thinking, what about the content? If the students are taking a course on World History, shouldn’t they, you know, learn about World History? Of course the answer is yes, but, speaking from experience, thinking in terms of coverage is a trap. I tell my students in these classes that every class period (and usually every slide) could be a semester-long class course of its own, meaning that we only ever scratch the surface. Which is going to be more beneficial to the student in the long run: making sure that we spend ten minutes in a lecture talking about the Tibetan Empire of the second half of the first millennium CE, which is admittedly fascinating, or redirecting that time to primary source analysis, discussion, debate, practice summarizing and engaging with sources, or any of a myriad of other active learning techniques. Some of these are harder when teaching introductory courses where it seems like the students don’t have enough background to engage at the level you want and lectures are sometimes a necessary component of the class, but incorporating active learning into the course offers significant rewards.

Toward the end of the book, Gooblar turns his attention to how to teach in the modern, tumultuous world. I jotted a brief response thread on Twitter, but wanted to spotlight it again here. College professors are often accused of trying to indoctrinate their students into radical Marxism or the like. While American college professors do tend to be more liberal than conservative, the largest number actually self-classify as moderate. Further, the recent primary results have demonstrated that the Democratic party remains a big-tent coalition, while the Republican party, which has accelerated attacks on funding for higher education in recent years, has veered further right. The political doesn’t end at the classroom door and to pretend otherwise is naive.

As a history teacher I run into these problems with regularity and, to be honest believe that I can and should better handle them. Ancient Greek democracy was made possible by both exclusion (narrow participation that did not include women) and exploitation (Athens had many times the number of enslaved people as it did citizens). The spread of religions was at different points a blood-soaked process, Christianity included, and European colonization amounted to exploitation and indoctrination at best and either incidental or intentional genocide and ethnic cleansing at worst. And for all that I find history endlessly fascinating.

Gooblar suggests a similar approach to the one I’ve adopted, which is to “take seriously the equality of our students and the inequality of the world,” while placing an emphasis on process. There are some premises that I will not tolerate in my classroom, including endorsement of slavery, racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry, but I also believe that there is room for students to argue for the virtue of, for instance, Athenian democracy and capitalism so long as their arguments are based on good use of available sources and I build time into the class period to have students practice these skills.

One of the virtues of a college classroom should giving students space to debate issues in a responsible and respectful manner: disagreements are okay, bullying is not.

The limiting factor in college teaching is not knowledge, but attention. Becoming a good teacher requires practice and cultivation, just like developing any other skill. Fortunately for anyone interested in improving their skill, we are currently living in a golden age of publications on teaching and learning. I haven’t finished everything on the list of resources I solicited a few years back, but The Missing Course is already my go-to recommendation for a place to start.

Teaching College

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Through the heat-scorched landscape of late July, it is almost possible to feel the first winds of autumn, which means that it is time to be thinking about the courses for the fall semester. In preparation for teaching I have once again gone back to the well of teaching books and done another thread for the #PhDSkills tag on Twitter, this time reading Norman Eng’s lauded book, Teaching College.

This post follows the model I used for my previous threads, on John Warner’s Why They Can’t Write and Helen Sword’s The Writer’s Diet, as well as the posts I wrote after reading Jay Howard’s Discussion in the College Classroom, James Lang’s Small Teaching, and Mark Carnes’ Minds on Fire. A longer list of resources can be found here, in a post with collected suggestions for guides on how to teach in the humanities that I solicited a year or so ago. I have added to the original posts as I find new resources.

ΔΔΔ

Norman Eng’s Teaching College often comes up on lists of books for college instructors to read. It promises to be a practical guide to teaching and learning, with lessons from the worlds of marketing and K–12 teaching, fields Eng worked in before getting his ED.D.

You can find my sprawling reading notes in this Twitter thread.

Eng tries to do everything in Teaching College, and the result is a lot of useful tips. Even with the book by his own admission being less useful for humanities classes, I do not disagree with most of what Eng writes. For instance, he stresses reflective practice, both on the part of the teacher and for the students, and the importance of creating a safe learning environment. I think both of these are central to good pedagogy, as is making sure that you are finding ways to keep the class engaged through active learning exercises and discussions. This can be easier said than done, but Eng advocates a “less is more” approach in getting students to learn rather than to simply commit facts to short-term memory––which Kevin Gannon, among others, have suggested is the best way to improve even the bloated survey courses.

( I think we teach history backward, but I also teach in the system we have.)

For as useful as Teaching College was at points, though, I was often frustrated with it. This frustration came in several different forms, but they started early on with an unrelated book. One of the media groups in Columbia, MO has been running the same set of radio ads for the past few years promoting the book The Wizard of Ads with a series of tips on marketing strategies. The Wizard of Ads promises to teach the reader simple rules to ensure marketing success. Teaching College came across like an educational version of that book. This is not to say that either book is necessarily wrong, just that there is something about the tone promising quick fixes that rubbed me the wrong way.

But my issues went beyond the superficial.

First, Eng’s approach to class structure struck me as overly formulaic, even when he offered variations. In his defense, he added the caveat that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to teaching, but in the body of the text he blows right past that advice. I will be taking his advice that I need to make sure that I am being aware of how much interaction I plan because when I get overwhelmed I tend to just talk, but I am unlikely to entirely jettison things that are working in my classes.

Second, while Eng offers some additional reading (or Ted talks to watch) and some citations, it often came across like a Ted talk where one person with a particular expertise tells the audience how to improve––ironically unlike his advice for how to teach. He is persuasive, I thought, in showing how college professors could learn from marketers and K–12 teachers, though we have all had our share of poor teachers there, too, but the fact that it is generally heavy on personal stories and light on relating scholarship about best practices in teaching and learning made Teaching College seem insubstantial.

Third, Eng tries to cover too much, offering panaceas for everything from classroom management to syllabus design to readings. On the one hand, this means that he is arguing for a comprehensive overhaul with prescribed changes, but, on the other, there is also limited space dedicated to explaining the purpose of any of the changes. Compare this to James Lang’s Small Teaching, which similarly covers a lot, but with the explicit purpose of making small tweaks to improve a class rather than a full overhaul.

Fourth and finally, perhaps my biggest frustration is that other than a critique of using a single midterm to assess student performance, there was almost no discussion of assessment. My issue here is that reflection on how we are assessing students is about as important as reflecting on why students are not doing the reading. You can’t have one without the other, and I find that particularly in history and civ surveys the course aims and course assessment are wildly mismatched. Eng boils this problem down to thinking about your client profile (the students, with their big-picture goals) and aligning your course goals accordingly, but identifying these and adjusting the class procedure only does so much good if the assessment remains out of alignment with what you want the students to take from the course.

In sum, I wonder if I would have found more utility in Teaching College if I hadn’t read Small Teaching and Discussion in the College Classroom first. This is a useful little book that gave me a few ideas, but much of what it offers can be found in more detail in other resources.

Thesis or unThesis

Posted on by Josh Nudell

The days are getting longer and pollen is in the air, which means the end of the spring semester approaches. As usual, I find myself reflecting on my courses and thinking about ways that I can improve my practice.

Some of these reflections are mundane––post readings earlier, move content around, allot more time for a particular reading; others are more foundational and abstract.

I have written before about how I design my to require students to write and to think. In some courses I think this backfires, such as when students may believe I am violating an unspoken contract about the expectations of a gen-ed course, but I generally get good results and see marked improvement in my students over the course of the semester.

Going into these writing assignments, I tell my students that every piece of writing has an argument, whether implicit or explicit, and that their writing needs one, too.

In practice, this means that everything they write needs to have a thesis. The problem is that the moment I invoke the T-word, they fall back on the rote lessons about thesis-writing: that it needs to be a single sentence and end in a tri-colon set of points that will make up the three body paragraphs of their five paragraph essay.

Students can do these exercises blindfolded and in their sleep. While working in the US History surveys as a graduate student, I used to run my class through exercises on this after receiving rounds of papers that lacked an argument. The theses developed in these exercises were more functional than earth-shattering, but the problems started to crop up the moment students were asked to start using evidence to build a paper, as though the two practices were totally disconnected and the thesis only existed to receive its mandatory check-mark.

Recently I have tried to address this disconnect by having my students write a lot of theses, just without telling them that is what they are doing. In surveys of any sort, I assign weekly quizzes online that ask questions from lecture and readings and allow retakes. Most of the questions are multiple choice, fill in the blank, true/false, etc, and are designed for accountability and recall.

Every quiz also has at least one essay-style question, asking students to respond to a prompt in two or three sentences using evidence from the readings to support that answer.

In other words, write a thesis with a little bit of the evidence you would use to support that argument, but don’t finish writing the essay.

In lower-level classes, I keep this format through the semester, while in upper-level surveys, I start with one question (20% of the grade) and gradually expand until they make up the majority of the quiz (60–70%).

From my side of the desk, this format gives me ample opportunity to get a feel for what the class is picking up from lecture and the readings and, without committing to hours of grading, head off issues like casual sexism that they pick up from their sources.

(A class of 35 with two essay-style questions takes well under an hour to grade since it is a total of about six sentences per student.)

Equally important, though, it offers rewards for student writing. From these assignments alone, students in an intro survey will write at least 12 theses with evidence, on top of their other written assignments. In upper-level classes those numbers climb toward 30 or 40, with greater expectations for the use of sources.

Usually these written responses are good––thoughtful, careful, and creative–– all without ever mentioning the T-word.

This semester, though, I struggled with how to convey my expectations in longer assignments. The reason: in an effort to bypass problematic “rules” my students had learned regarded theses, I wrote my assignments without invoking the T-word.

The result was confusion and frustration all around. The students seemed to look at an assignment unmoored from their previous writing experiences and I had to belatedly explain that when I said their papers had to have an argument it indeed meant that they had to have a thesis, followed, inevitably, with a discussion of what a thesis is beyond the scope of the rigid formula.

Realistically these exchanges only took a few minutes before we were all on the same page again, but neither were they my finest moment in the classroom. And so I sit here at the end of April thinking about whether there is a way to forge new connections about the T-word, connections that break ingrained habits and help students conceptualize the thesis not as a check-box waiting to be ticked, but as a tool that encapsulates the point that the author wants to convey.

Polishing Your Prose

Posted on by Josh Nudell

“Writing is hard” is a truism, but these three words conceal a more complicated reality. Simple word generation, though looking for the right words is rarely simple, is comparatively simple. Taking words found on the first pass and polishing them until they shine––until they dance and sing when someone takes their time to read them––is hard. In short: writing is easy; editing is hard.

Fortunately, editing is a learned skill, and there is no shortage of guidebooks on the subject, each offering a series of rules, tips, and tricks. Polishing Your Prose, written by the brothers Stephen and Victor Cahn, belongs to this genre.

The first section of Polishing Your Prose, “strategies,” presents ten key concepts for clear and concise writing. They eschew the idea that these are “rules,” but go on to largely repeat commonly-held rules for writing such as eliminating empty constructions, redundancy, and jargon, minimizing adverbs and adjectives, and making sure that pronouns have clear antecedents. Other strategies are equally straightforward but more subtle, such varying sentence structure, using parallel structures for coordinating elements, using transitions to link ideas, and placing the most dramatic material at the end of the sentence thereby allowing sentences and paragraphs to build toward a crescendo.

The Cahns present each strategy simply, as though it is common sense, with the occasional gem of observational wisdom, such as “if you can’t find an appropriate transition, your ideas may not be as coherent as your presume.”

The second section puts these words into action with three paragraphs from an early draft of an essay on teaching math that eventually saw the light of publication. Word by word, sentence by sentence, and paragraph by paragraph, the Cahns work through these passages and talk about their thought process to polish the text. They suggest that the reader edit the paragraphs before reading on, but without an easy way to do this I skipped the step. Nevertheless, there is a lot to be gleaned from reading their thought-process, such as noting that paragraphs need to maintain unified themes and that careful use of a thesaurus is a writer’s friend. Most of all, as the conclusion reminds us, this section demonstrates that editing is not a straightforward process, but one that requires constant tinkering, reworking, and reconsideration choices, because editing, like writing, is a matter of choice.

Polishing Your Prose shares much of its advice with other books in this genre, in large part because there is no grand secret to writing well. What I appreciated about this one is its emphasis on process. The Cahns assume everyone has their own voice, and Polishing Your Prose is designed to draw attention to the choices an author in the hopes that that voice can sing.

Before wrapping this up, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the epilogue. I appreciated the rest of the book and can see using a variation of part two in a classroom, but the epilogue, which consisted of an autobiographical piece from each author, stole the show. The one detailed a class in graduate school where the professor demanded that the students resolve a philosophical problem by thinking for themselves rather than referring to a body of literature that as a first year student he knew nothing about––and in so doing this professor forced the students to learn. The other was a comic tale of youthful male hubris that I ate up. Both essays amounted to the authors flexing, mature authors offering ample evidence why one ought to pay attention to their advice.

ΔΔΔ

#PhDSkills is a collaborative project created by Naomi Rendina and Greg Wiker where graduate students and early-career academics volunteer to read and review on Twitter books on teaching and writing. Polishing Your Prose is my third contribution, the final one scheduled to date. I am happy to talk about the book further in the comments or on Twitter.