One Year of Specs Grading: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Spring semester 2023 is in the books. It actually has been in the books for a few days, though I have spent the time since working on wrapping up its ragged ends.

In truth, this was a second consecutive brutally difficult semester, making the 2022/23 school year one of the most difficult of my career. In addition to a series of crises external to what happened in the classroom, I was also teaching three new classes: upper level surveys on Ancient Rome and Persia, and a first year seminar. The demographics of that first year seminar were particularly challenging such that I had to functionally re-write the syllabus midway through the semester and I had one student so difficult that I came to dread walking into that classroom.

I wrestled the semester into submission eventually. My Persia class might be my favorite class I have ever taught, in large part because of the mix of students, and my revised first year seminar syllabus along with a slightly different approach to discussion allowed my students to pick up on the themes and skills that are most important for the course. In each of these three classes I was also able to build trust with the students that we were able to largely weather the techpocalypse ransomware attack that took down the network two weeks before the end of the semester. The outpouring of comments from students in the last few weeks was enormously moving, but I also want to recognize how hard I had to work to get there.

However, by way of semester retrospective, I want to focus on one academic year using Specifications Grading. I adopted this system because it promised to make my life easier, and my spring changes like an UnGrading system to assess participation and taking attendance every day worked, but, one year in, I am left wondering whether a specs model is the right fit for most of my classes.

The Good

My favorite part of specs grading is not assigning grades to assignments. The obsession with grades is deeply rooted in students, but grades themselves are often a poor match for learning. Specifications, by contrast, clearly establishes my expectations and, at least in theory, gives the students guidance on how they can earn credit for an assignment. This is still a form of grading, but the expectations provide a framework within which the students can learn and my feedback can focus on whether the student has met the expectation for that assignment. Moreover, the grades are earned across categories, meaning that the students have to engage with each part of the course and the clear expectations for each grade tier can allow students to prioritize their efforts if, for instance, they have met the requirements for their target grade in my class and need to focus instead on passing a different one.

Moreover, by modifying the expectations up or down for either the overall grades or for individual assignments I can adjust what my expectations are for the students. Thus, when our tech issues struck, I could easily fulfill every learning objectives and still lower the expectations for several graded categories in my classes, much to the relief of my students.

I particularly found specifications grading effective for relatively small, repeated assignments like journals where partial credit is particularly arbitrary and missing the rubric on one or two assignments both teaches an important lesson about following the assignment guide and has a relatively minimal overall effect on the final grade. Whether or not I continue with Specifications Grading as an overarching grading scheme, I will definitely carry these aspects forward into what comes next.

The Bad

More of my students this semester than in the fall term seemed to embrace the spirit of the specs grading and understood how the grade tiers worked, but this still left me with some students who struggled to see the connection between the work that they were completing the grade tiers in the syllabus. A couple of these were unique cases with a confluence of circumstances, but others were more persistent and connected to another issue that frustrated me last semester.

One of the keys to Specifications Grading is transparency. Every assignment guide came with a detailed rubric that spelled out exactly how to earn credit for that assignment. These rubrics were prescriptive in that they articulated the formal characteristics that I was grading on, but they were deliberately open-ended so that the students could work within the guardrails to express themselves. For instance, the journal assignment specified a length, a mandate to include a date, title, and word count, and a set of prompts like “what was the most interesting thing you learned from class this week” or “how would something you learned this week change a paper you wrote earlier in the semester.” For responses to a class movie, the rubric might be that you need to answer each question with at least 2 complete sentences appropriate for the movie.

However, I often got the sense that the students weren’t checking their work against the rubric before submitting it. In the small repeated assignments one or two times being told that an assignment wasn’t accepted put the students back on the right track, but then in some of these cases the students would trip up in exactly the same way on the next assignment.

Even more worrying was that this also happened on bigger assignments like papers where students turned in sometimes two or more drafts that seemed to rely on little more than hope that it fulfilled the rubric, even after having the students use this exact rubric for the purposes of peer review. I allow students to revise their papers both as a matter of praxis for teaching writing and because not doing so would be too draconian a policy for a specs system (see below), but nevertheless getting rounds of papers that simply ignored the guidelines, and, in at least one case, introduced new ways that the paper missed the rubric on revision, made me ask in frustration why I provide the rubrics in the first place.

But for all of these frustrations, these are not the reasons I’m considering whether to keep a specifications model or adopt some sort of hybrid system.

The Ugly

Two semesters into using Specifications Grading, my biggest question is whether it is a good match for writing-enhanced classes.

I really like the rubric I designed for grading essays in this system. Unlike most specs rubrics that use a proficient/not-proficient binary, my rubric has two “pass” tiers, one for basic proficiency and another for advanced. The advanced tier I calibrated at roughly a low-A. Earning a C in this course required revising one of three papers to the advanced tier and just the first tier for the other two, a B required revising two, and the A required all three.

Despite the promises of specs grading, I have not found that this system saves me any time at all, especially when grading papers on the learning management system, which I do as a matter of equity (e.g. costs of printing), scheduling (e.g. not having things due at class time), and convenience (e.g. I can toggle between versions). Simply put, I found that a lot of students would not be able to write well enough to fulfill the advanced tier of the rubric on one paper, let alone three. Even when they looked at the scored rubric, which was not always the case, I felt like I had to give lots of direct and actionable feedback in the paper itself, in the rubric comments, and in the summary comments on the paper. Otherwise, I feared, the students might not be able to make the connections between whatever they wrote and the rubric scores.

Let me be clear here: the system works. As I told my students, my goal at this point in their college career is to help build good writing skills and habits so so that every student knows that they can revise a (relatively short) paper to a high quality before they get to the two research-centric classes that they take in their junior and senior year. I am also comfortable with the rubric calibration because each semester I had a few students who fulfilled the rubric with no or minimal revisions to their paper, and nearly every student improved dramatically from the start of the semester to the end.

But there were also some days when I felt like I was dragging two classes worth of students (46, at final count) toward writing proficiency, on top of being responsible for the course content, two sections of tag-along non-WE sections of these courses (6 students), and the first year seminar. It was a lot. Having two sections of this process of course magnified all of the issues, but it also left me wondering whether continuing down this path toward completely spec-ified writing-enhanced courses is sustainable. I don’t relish the prospect of going back to traditional points-based grading either, which makes me wonder if I can imagine some sort of hybrid grading scheme that does what I want it to do.

The Past is an Alien World

Posted on by Josh Nudell

With the spring semester starting to wind down, I have found my attention starting to wander toward the classes I’ll be teaching this fall. Two of the classes have a somewhat prescribed range of topics simply by the virtue of being variations on first-year courses for students, but the third is my version of an upper-division Greek History survey—the first course that I ever taught as the instructor of record and the course other than general education US history surveys that I have taught more than any other. All of which is to say that I have well-established materials for this course.

And yet, I also tinker with the course every time I teach it.

“Tinkering” in this context can mean a lot of things, from assignments, to readings, to the order of topics, to drawing current events into the course. Already for the fall semester I am going to be using several new books as core readings and more clearly signpost the phases of the course to complete the metamorphosis the course has undergone since the first iteration as an inexperienced teacher. But I have also been debating whether a more fundamental tweak might prove fruitful.

It is a shibboleth of teaching history, and something codified in many of our learning objectives, that the job of the teacher includes helping the students make meaningful connections to the contemporary world. That is, the past has value inasmuch as it has contemporary relevance.

How this target is reached can happen in a lot of different ways. In some classes they happen almost subconsciously because the importance of, say, the US Civil War, for someone living in the United States are impossible to miss. For other topics, though, such connections are less intuitive, and the further back in time one goes, the more alien things might seem. This is not to say that the task is impossible or even worthless, and discussion about the origin of systems or concepts (e.g. democracy) that people in the modern world take for granted can create these productive connections. In the case of my Ancient Persia class, for instance, we have spent a lot of time talking about how Greco-Roman sources distort our understanding of Persia using tropes that have continued to inform how Europeans talk about people in West Asia.

In a very non-scientific study, I have observed that one of the most common techniques is to suggest that the ancients are just like us. Indeed, I have been guilty of this in the past, though I prefer to do this by pointing out that our own world is much weirder and more alien than we typically assume.

I thought about this juxtaposition again last week when I read Carlos Noreña’s essay on Paul Veyne. Noreña writes:

One comes away from his many publications with a deeper appreciation for the sheer distance of Mediterranean antiquity from the present: past worlds, past lives, past experiences and past epistemologies that now, in the wake of his scholarship, look profoundly alien.What is more, it suggests that our intimacy with that world might be a false one. It forces us, as a result, to look at past and present anew. 

Perhaps my favorite thing about ancient Greece is that it is fabulously complex in a way that defies simple description. While this is true of all times and places, I find that something about the political fragmentation of Greece and how that overlaps with the development of a more-or-less common literary canon that is also in conversation with West Asia is particularly fascinating. In fact, I recently came across an eighteenth century complaint that the history of Greece defied an easy narrative, like the one that the growth of imperium provided for Rome.

I was already thinking about whether it might be productive to embrace the alienness of ancient Greece in class when the hollow husk of Twitter started buzzing with “defenders” of Classical learning demanding that people emulate Odysseus and accusing Homeric scholars of harboring a leftist agenda because they dared use the text of the Odyssey to point out why Odysseus might not be a great model. The irony, of course, being that the uncritical veneration of the Homeric stories comes from a thoroughly modern understanding of heroism and superficial understanding of the ancient world where you find both critiques of the central heroic characters already in the epics and a rich discourse critiquing everything from individual heroes to the very nature of epic poetry.

Simplifying these complexities at least to some extent can lower barriers to entry, but I also think that it can do the material a disservice. These classics contain a depth to these that warrants reading and rereading precisely because they developed in the complex cultural milieu that was ancient Greece. I find a lot of these complexities deeply human, but I also wonder if preserving some of the alienness might force us to engage with the complexity and thus prevent antiquity from being simplified and reduced to culture war tropes.

This post is a revised and expanded version of a Twitter thread posted on April 23, 2023.

Weekly Varia no. 22, 04/15/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Spring arrived in force in Northeast Missouri this week. The world is starting to turn green, but the leaves around town have largely been preceded by an explosion of flowering things. I can’t complain about the views and the rising temperatures have drawn students out into the quad outside my office, making campus generally feel more alive than it does throughout the winter.

However, spring also comes at a cost. I have never been one to suffer from allergies in the past, but one of these flowering things causes my sinuses to go haywire each spring in Kirksville, which has made teaching classes a bit of an adventure this week. This phase only lasts a couple of weeks, fortunately, and the nice weather almost cancels out the temporary pain. Besides, I’ll be complaining about the heat again soon enough.

This week’s varia:

Album of the Week: Counting Crows, August and Everything After (2007)

Currently Reading: Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement, Caroline Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity

Some Writing Advice for Students

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Some of my undergraduate students were compiling advice from professors on the topic of writing history paper. I had a lot to say, even while trying to keep the advice from become too long winded. Below are the answers I wrote to the questions the students provided.

What is the most important thing that you want to know about writing a history paper?

Most people struggle with writing in some way or another.

I don’t mean that everyone struggles in the same way or that you can’t enjoy the process, but rather that the act of generating thoughts, compiling evidence, and editing the product so that it is compelling to an audience does not come naturally to most people, and even good writers often do not write good first drafts.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that it is an exercise that gets easier with practice. 

That said, there isn’t one right way to write. Some people are discovery writers, finding their thoughts as they write. Other people carefully outline all of their ideas and know exactly what they want to say before putting pen to paper. Speaking of the medium, find what works for you. Some writers work best at a computer, while others write entire drafts by hand and use the step of typing those passages as a first chance to revise the essay. Kevin J. Anderson writes entire books by dictating into a recorder while hiking with his dog. Some writers find that they write well late at night. Others write best in the morning. Ernest Hemingway started writing before dawn. Ursula Le Guin described her schedule as writing in the morning, but noted that after 8:00 p.m. she “tend[s] to be very stupid and we don’t talk about this.” Roxane Gay writes to the ambient sounds of Law and Order, while other people listen to music or nothing at all.

The challenge is to find a process that works for you and then to make time for it. The dirty secret to writing is that you just have to write. So block aside time where you can tune out distractions for a concrete period of time and just do it. Then come back and make sure you edit what you wrote.

Where is your preferred place to begin research on a topic?

Once you have your general topic, start by reading your sources. Textbooks, historical surveys, and even Wikipedia can give you a general overview of a topic and list some useful sources, but the most important thing you can do is to read your sources to see what they actually say. Then start asking questions about that source. What is it not saying? Is there something it talks about obliquely? How does it connect to other sources on this same topic? Is there another type of evidence that would offer conflicting or complementary information? 

Reading modern scholarship is all well and good (and important!), but nothing beats the evidence itself, especially for ancient history, and what you find in the sources will help you find relevant modern scholarship.

How do I choose a research topic?

The best research topic is a puzzle, with your thesis being the key to solving the puzzle and the essay putting that key into action. Now, that puzzle need not revolutionize the field for every class that you take, but framing it in these terms can help guide the research and clarify the thesis. 

How do you ensure that you are addressing the correct question?

At the risk of being tongue-in-cheek with regard to this question, I think this is not the right question to ask here. While some professors offer prompts with specific points that must be addressed to earn a particular grade, that is often not the case with research papers. A better question, therefore, is whether the question you’re addressing is the appropriate scope for the length of paper you’re writing. Some questions are answerable in 5 pages, some in 25, and some require entire books. One frequent issue I see in short papers is that students will craft an enormous thesis, often with one broad topic and three explanatory points. The slightly hyperbolic example that I wrote for a writing handout is: 

“The Roman Empire collapsed because of barbarian migrations, the challenge of independent generals, and administrative decay.”

Each of these things can be true, and each of these could be a compelling thesis in their own right, together they set this imagined author up to give a broad summary of barbarian migrations, independent generals, and administrative decay, while precluding either specific analysis of any of these developments or a strong argument. By contrast, a still large, but perhaps specific enough thesis might argue that: “Climate change and disease caused administrative and economic decay in the fourth century that allowed migrating German tribes to establish new kingdoms in territories previously occupied by the Roman Empire.”

What is the most common mistake you see students make when writing a paper?

Waiting until the last minute and thus not giving yourself enough time. Some of this is not within your control, since the academic semester means short turnaround times and juggling various assignments with overlapping deadlines. But you’re also doing yourself a disservice by waiting until the night before an assignment is due to start writing it. 

Even if you don’t have time to write the paper far in advance, start the process as soon as possible. Maybe that means poking through a source between classes or over breakfast, or mulling over which of two prompts you want to write on as soon as the assignment comes out. Or maybe your significant other would like to hear all about that paper you’re writing. Not only will these steps make it easier for you to write the paper when you sit down the night before, but they may just give you enough time to revise your introduction when you discover that the initial thesis just doesn’t quite work anymore.

When do you recommend a student reach out for processor advice?

When you have a specific question, but far enough in advance that they can actually help.

Questions can come at any stage of the research and writing process, but the more that you can give them to work with, the more they’ll be able to help you. “I’ve been looking for X source, do you know how I can access it?” is going to be much more productive than “I don’t know where to start.” Make clear the steps that you have taken in your research, which both shows your professor that you have been working and will make them better able to diagnose the issue and put you on a productive path.

But, a word of warning: bring those questions far enough in advance of the deadline that they are actually able to help. Even when questions that come in at the last minute get answered immediately, you might not have time to actually implement the advice.

Weekly Varia no. 21, 04/08/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I am not a particularly religious individual, but I have a soft spot for the traditions and rituals that accompany holidays. Passover, which started this past week is one that I find fascinating, but I have to confess that it is not my favorite holiday.

Passover ostensibly celebrates the liberation of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt as told in Exodus and literally drips with symbolism (pun intended, if you’re familiar with the seder plate). But these traditions are perpetually changing such that a festival that blends elements of a Greek symposium with Jewish ritual and an invented history with a flexible ritual manual (the Haggadah) that can either can freeze the tradition at a point of imagined purity or be updated to address the concerns of contemporary participants, if often in ways that are dissonant with the modern political climate—especially with the traditionally invocation of “next year in Jerusalem.”

Last night while attending a seder I found myself thinking about what a “historically accurate Haggadah” might look like. No references to Pharaoh’s pyramids, if for no other reason than that the chronology is wrong—Khufu’s pyramid was built more than thousand years before the Exodus was supposed to happen. Perhaps, I thought, the Haggadah stories become framed as the product of an oral storyteller balanced against the commentary of a contemporary archaeologist and context can be added to the traditions of reclining for the meal by pointing to the myriad of influences that make up modern Judaism. Precision gets added to the invocations of freedom to condemn those of every background who threaten it. Of course, I quickly snapped back to the present because the purpose of a seder is to invoke and create community rather than to quibble about the nature of labor in ancient Egypt.

But my actual beef with Passover isn’t the service, it’s the food. As much as homemade matzah is a pretty good flatbread, I have been known to joke that I should be able to use a dollop of my starter so long as the baking is complete in the requisite time because you wouldn’t want to leave a carefully curated starter behind in Egypt. (This is not usually how leavening worked in the ancient world. Like I said, a joke.) Nevertheless, I used the seder as an excuse to try a new dessert recipe, producing a delicious and decadent dairy-free flourless chocolate cake, topped with a chocolate ganache.

Since this weekend is also Easter, I get an extra day off, which I’m going to use to sleep, read, and catch up on grading. Whether your holiday of choice this weekend is Ramadan, Passover, Easter, the arrival of spring, or just the regular end of the week, may you find it restful and rewarding.

This week’s varia:

  • Bret Devereaux placed an op-ed in the New York Times, arguing for the importance of the Liberal Arts for a functioning, free, democratic society. His argument here, in effect, is that public and political discourse are strangling these programs, despite both practical and philosophical importance of what students learn in these programs. Bret is an adjunct professor and an excellent historian who has quite a large following on his blog ACOUP, which is an enviable model for public engagement.
  • The lead story of Pasts Imperfects this week looks at recovering the lives of ancient artisans, exploring what the physical objects can tell us about the people who made them.
  • I read three pieces this week on “active learning” that spoke to each other:
    • A couple weeks ago at Inside Higher Ed, Sarabeth Grant talked about how “active classrooms” can be one too many things for overwhelmed students to handle. She points out that many students are unprepared for active classrooms, and relates an anecdote about a particularly negative experience. I find that the preparation varies by discipline and institution, but very much find that all active, all the time has to be handled with extreme care.
    • Jonathan Wilson comments on the “recipe” as a metaphor for teaching, pointing out that simply reproducing the latest buzz of pedagogy discourse is not going to work for every teacher or every classroom. In the middle of the piece he reiterates that lectures and other forms of “transmission” teaching is necessary to facilitate active learning. He describes learning to teach as “learning to cook” as opposed to following the recipe.
    • David Labaree published an essay from his new book in which he makes a case that college teaching is both better than you might think and that it is better than the institutional structure of higher education requires it to be. This is a bit of a contrarian argument, comparing professors to a competitive street gang competing for popularity among the students, but I think he’s got a legitimate point. Professors might have different criteria for success and have different levels of creativity or attention to the craft, but most professors take this part of the job seriously.
  • Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira makes a case for what he calls “epistemic Luddism” against the encroachment of AI on education. Basically, he says the same thing that I have been on about with AI, which is that its proponents largely misunderstand the purpose of essay assignments.
  • LSU played a great game to beat Iowa in the Women’s Final Four earlier this week, though the game was marred by bad officiating. Iowa’s star, Caitlin Clark plays a game like Steph Curry that is a lot of fun to watch, but she is also a trash talker. Angel Reese of LSU, a black player, used a similar gesture to Clark at the end of the game, which caused (mostly white) people online to become outraged and Dr. Jill Biden gave a comment that she’d like to invite Iowa to the White House, as well as LSU. The commentary is mostly not worth reading, but I wanted to highlight that Clark, for her part, seems to have her head on straight and rejected both the criticism of Reese and the invitation to the White House. I also liked Paul Thomas’ reflection on his experience with race on the basketball court.
  • Paul Thomas observes that the laments of conservative academics are performative, just as much as most academics perform progressive social politics in an institution that rewards conservatism.
  • Israeli police raided al-Aqsa Mosque, beating worshippers and arresting more than 350 people. This during Ramadan, which happens to coincide with Passover (and Easter) this year. Israeli police seem to need no excuse for this behavior, but I can’t help but wonder if the convergence of holidays is connected given the desires of religious zealots of both Christian and Jewish traditions who are more aggressively than ever working to define Israel as an exclusively Jewish state.
  • Last week there was quite a buzz about a story from California based on a lawsuit filed against the Shasta County Fair and law enforcement. In short, fair officials decided to teach a young girl a lesson after she bonded with a goat that she owned and was raising for an auction. The girl didn’t want to have the goat slaughtered and refused to turn it over, which prompted the fair to file a criminal grand theft complaint and deputies drove 500 miles with a search warrant to seize the goat, leading to it being slaughtered. Everything about the story is excessive, and in Vox Gabriel Rosenberg and Jan Dutkiewicz explore how the story is reflective of a larger ideology around 4-H and the inhumane nature of the meat industry.
  • Tennessee’s legislature and its Republican supermajority voted to expel two young black men for their participation in a peaceful protest against gun violence, while narrowly voting to keep the white woman who also participated. This is the sort of action used during the early period of Reconstruction as Black legislators started to be voted into state congresses. This gross, reactionary vote puts the GOP priorities on display, even if it will likely result in a fundraising windfall for both men since nothing prohibits their district boards from simply appointing them as interim legislators or for them to run (and very likely win) the special election. By contrast, one of those Republican legislators rhetorically asked protestors what gun they’d like to be shot with (if not the AR-15).
  • Bolts Magazine shed light on an election loophole in Georgia where an official (in this case judges) who announces their resignation within six months of a scheduled election allows the governor to appoint a replacement and delay the election of a replacement to the next full election cycle, thereby circumventing the democratic process and dissuading candidates from running lest the rug get swept out from under them.
  • Pro Publica has an investigation into the relationship between the billionaire Harlan Crow and Justice Clarence Thomas, including the wide range of gifts that Crow has bestowed on Thomas over the years that the latter has never disclosed. Naturally. Crow has an extensive collection of Nazi memorabilia in his home and a statue garden with (apparently genuine) statues of 20th century dictators, but he apparently is more comfortable discussing his other collections.
  • The British Museum changes tune on repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles and is now offering Greece an “exclusive NFT.” The rare good April Fools piece.

Album of the Week: The Barefoot Movement, Figures of the Year (2013)

Currently Reading: Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children; Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement; Caroline Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity

A plump cat in a sunbeam

Inventing Utopia

Posted on by Josh Nudell

This week in my speculative fiction first-year seminar we have been working through a mini-unit on Utopias and Utopian thinking.

On Monday, I gave in lecture a “brief history of Utopian thinking” (I tried to name as many daily topics as possible like they were episode titles from Community). We started with a breakdown of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and the society therein, but then explored both earlier examples like the Golden Age of Man in Hesiod’s Works and Days and Plato’s Republic, and historical attempts to create these communities like the Shakers and the Oneida Community. That day concluded with a discussion of what utopias do, both in terms of social critique of the present and imagining a better future. We haven’t yet talked about Atlantis and Atlantean-type stories as Utopias because I (mistakenly) put it at the end of this unit, but the next time I teach this class, I’m going to move that day to put it more directly in dialogue with this one.

Then, on Wednesday, we read Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” This short story asks you to imagine a happy, pleasant city that can only exist because of the abject suffering of a single child. Everyone in the community is aware of this trade-off and the ones who walk away cannot live with that knowledge. The story prompted a lively discussion, drawing comparisons to the Trolley Problem and generally about the morality of Utopias that always require some sort of trade. Several students challenged whether the people walking away are any more moral than the ones who stay given that even though they are opting out of the benefit of the Utopia they are nevertheless still living with the knowledge of the child’s suffering. One student asked how the message changes if you can’t walk away, to which several responded that it suddenly becomes a dystopia. This was my favorite question, though, because Omelas can be read as allegory for modern society where the happiness of people in one part of the world comes at the expense of the suffering of people elsewhere, in which case individuals only have so much capacity to opt-out.

(We are going to return to this point in the class at the very end of the semester with N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight.” Now that I think about it, I might move the Utopia discussion to the end of the semester next time around.)

The assignment for this unit is a poster where the students work in groups to create their own utopia, as agreed upon by the group members.

This is a deceptively difficult assignment. It requires thinking through the consequences of the society that they set up and consider what makes it a Utopia. One of the things I stressed in our discussions is that a Utopia for one is not a Utopia for all (except in the fleeting moment of Hesiod’s Golden Age), so one of the tasks is to define who are the “in” group and who are the “out” group, with those definitions being entirely up to the group. The larger the society, the harder it is to think through the consequences of the rules, laws, and social norms. This is why it amuses me that one group is re-creating a Matrix to allow each person their own bespoke Utopia that exists only in their minds.

To be completely transparent, this assignment is my equivalent of the Kobayashi Maru, just with a different set of lessons that can be taken from it.

If I were completing this same assignment, I would start by considering the sources of human conflict, big and small. If we were able to eliminate scarcity, jealousy, and pain, that would eliminate most conflict. Something like the world imagined in Wall-E as a dystopian future after humans destroyed the world.

The issue is that the elimination of all of these needs strips away something essential to being human, I think. Put another way, I think it is not possible to both have humans and to have a true Utopia, thus short-circuiting the whole exercise. As Hesiod says in Works and Days, we live in an Iron Age where we are doomed to experience sickness and pain as our meat sacks move through the world. It is simply the price of being human. Thus, the best that we can hope for is to mitigate the suffering that comes from scarcity, jealousy, and pain rather than eliminate it altogether. And, to paraphrase a delirious priest in Brothers Karamazov, we already live in paradise, so we have all the tools of that mitigation if we’re willing to commit to the practice.

However, this impossibility is also why I really like this assignment, perhaps with some fiddling around the edges. Utopias are good to think with, and working through the potential issues as a group forces the students to focus on the process rather than skipping ahead to the product.

Weekly Varia no. 14, 02/18/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Practically speaking, week five of the semester passed in the same blur as week four. There were substantive differences, but to the same end point, which has left me without the time or energy for posts between the weekly varia entries. It also left me grasping at straws for something to introduce this post. Out of desperation comes inspiration.

At the one-third mark of the semester, I am loving my course on ancient Persia. I structured the course around two interlocking themes, orientalism in our interpretations of Persia and continuity and change in the imperial structures of West Asia, including the development of religion and ideology. This course has also given me an excuse to dive into the rich recent bibliography on Persian history.

My most recent read was Matthew Canepa’s The Iranian Expanse: Transforming Royal Identity through Architecture, Landscape, and the Built Environment, 550 BCE–642 CE (California 2018). Canepa traces the evolution of royal ideology and conception of where they sat in the world through their palaces, sacred spaces, funerary practices, and gardens, with a particular emphasis on points of disjuncture. That is, Canepa was more interested in change than in continuity, and in how subsequent dynasties competed with the ones that came before in establishing their own legitimacy. I particularly like that Canepa did not skip the Seleucids, but instead acknowledged their indelible place in the royal lineage of the region. I assigned several chapters to my students, many of whom are more familiar with modern history and thus found the discussion of ritual, cosmology, and monumentality disconcertingly anthropological. I will concede that this focus on royal architecture offers a top-down vision of the world, but placing them within a landscape over such a long continuous span I thought gave life to otherwise static monuments. The Iranian Expanse is a densely-packed, but immensely rewarding read.

This week’s varia:

  • Brett Devereaux has a long piece on ChatGPT and history classrooms, echoing a lot of the refrains given by a lot of us AI-skeptics about the purpose of essays and what the AI does poorly, which is a lot. I particularly like how Brett articulates the essay as a form and as a pedagogical tool. He offers a nice metaphor about an Amazon box for how the AI can mimic the essay container (sort of), but it can’t comprehend that what brings joy about the delivery is what is in the box, not the box itself.
  • Inside Higher Ed has a piece giving some higher ed context for Vermont State University’s decision to have a completely digital library and surveying the backlash to the decision.
  • Education researchers conducted a meta-analysis of flipped classrooms and found that the results were far less positive than its proponents often claim. Their findings dovetail with my anecdotal experience that many “flipped” models include more “passive” learning than most traditional lectures, but push that process outside of class where students will watch it at double speed or skip it altogether, leaving them unprepared for the “active” component in the classroom. They also note that “flipped” can mean any number of different things. This is also my problem with education discourse on Twitter: nothing is going to work in every class or for every teacher. Active learning leads to better results than passive learning, but there are a myriad of ways to reach active learning.
  • BBC Travel has a piece about a lost city under the sands…of California. Investigators have been uncovering the set of Cecille B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments, which he buried because the film set was supposed to leave no trace.
  • Corey Doctorow has a good piece on Google’s doomed and short-sighted attempt to chase the AI-search fad.
  • There are videos of Türkiye’s president Erdogan boasting about waiving zoning regulations that allowed construction companies to quickly build buildings in regions affected by last week’s earthquake that killed more than 44,000 people, one week out. One estimate puts the number of buildings not up to code at 50%. Rescue crews are still finding people alive more than a week after the disaster, but relief agencies are facing budget shortfalls for a number of reasons.
  • Legislators in Idaho advanced a bill that would more or less annex eastern Oregon into “Greater Idaho.” Eleven counties in Oregon have signed a petition in support of the bill, but such a change would still require both Oregon’s legislation and Congress to sign off on the plan.
  • Shortly before last weekend’s Super Bowl, researchers at BU released findings that their study of 376 former NFL players detected CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) in 345 (92%), which points again to the game’s brutality.
  • One of the balloons shot down by the US Air Force last week might have been launched by a hobby group in Illinois. This makes me think of how much we don’t know about these balloons, which is then both the cause of and then a reaction to the hysteria.
  • The Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News has revealed documentary evidence for the obvious, that Fox News continued to push election fraud stories because to do otherwise risked their bottom line if viewers switched to the even more shameless Newsmax.
  • The Onion does a New York Times (parody).
  • A gunman killed three Michigan State students just off campus before killing himself on Monday. There are too many guns.
  • Packers Sanitation Service has been fined after an inquiry revealed that more than 100 13–17-year olds were working overnights. Last week I had a story about an Iowa bill that would legalize this sort of work. I’m generally in support of people being able to take up economic opportunity of any sort, but nobody should be put in a situation where they are forced by circumstance to work in dangerous and exploitative jobs and these are the latest examples of a concerted effort to undo progressive reforms that curbed the worst excesses of capitalism in this country. Child labor is particularly concerning in that it also undermines the promise of an education that, at least in theory, would offer a pathway out of those circumstances.
  • A Mars Wrigley factory in Pennsylvania has been fined $14,500 by OSHA after two men fell into a vat used for mixing the ingredients for Dove bars. One wonders how active Willy Wonka has been in efforts to defund the agencies that regulate workplace safety.
  • The man who stole 200,000 Cadbury Creme Eggs in Britain is facing several years in jail. The headlines are more entertaining than the crime, though. He stole a truck, broke into the industrial facility, and drove off with the trailer before surrendering when he realized that he was being followed.

Album of the Week: Pixie and the Partygrass Boys, Snake Creek (2021)

Currently Reading: Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King; Mick Herron, Spook Street

Merlin, modeling “Friday night”
Libby, modeling “weekend life”

First Day Fragments: Spring 2023

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I usually do “first day fragments” to mark the start of the fall semester, but here on the first day of the spring term I find that I also have a few topics rattling around that are also worth exploring. Only time will tell whether this is a one-off or a new spring-semester routine.

Course design is an exercise in omission. And the more of a survey the course is designed to be, the more this truism cuts close to the truth. This has been on my mind over the last week while preparing for the upcoming semester. Even before the pandemic I had begun adopting a “less is more” mantra in the classroom, and doubling down on core questions and fundamental skills. But I also like big and open-ended questions, both to structure the course and to set as assignment prompts.

This semester I will be teaching upper-division survey courses on Ancient Rome (Romulus to Romulus Augustulus, in theory), Ancient Persia (Achaemenid to Sassanid), and then a first-year seminar on speculative fiction. Enormous topics, all.

Adding material to these courses is the easy part. It would be easy, for instance, to have the students read Beowulf and Le Morte d’Arthur, skip forward to Lord of the Rings, and then do something contemporary. Or just watch the movies. Or I could have decided that we’re going to do an entire course on the thousands of pages in Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty novels. But neither of these options fit with my objectives for the course.

The challenge is finding the right balance. The entire extent of Tolkien that we are going to read will be “On Hobbits” and two short pieces of commentary about Rings of Power. We’ll read Ken Liu’s brilliant short story “Paper Menagerie,” but nothing from his longer works. Ditto for N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” which I’m using both as a counterpoint to Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” and and as a way to close the semester on a note of optimism after an emotionally challenging set of readings.

ΔΔΔ

All three of my courses this semester are new preps. This is a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, new preps make for a lot of work. They require compiling materials as you go through the semester, writing presentation slides, and deciding on how you want to present the material, even when approaching topics that you know well. Some of the activities are going to flop, or maybe the scope of the course needs to be changed. The course wobbles a little, because it has not yet settled into its foundations. A graduate school professor told me once that he believes a course only reaches its mature form in its third iteration.

On the other hand, I sometimes find that certain in-class activities and readings work best the first time I assign them. This is in part because I am forced to spend more time with the readings and preparing the activities, which means that everything is fresher, but I also find something magic in the thrill of invention. The second and third time through I can adjust to how the students experienced the assignment, but this comes at a cost when the assignment becomes somewhat calcified or the pathways that the course discussion become a little more worn in.

ΔΔΔ

People have been talking on Twitter about when professors have an obligation to post the syllabus. My only thought is that the syllabus will go up when it is ready and the course website is minimally ready for use, usually a day or two before the semester starts. I’m happy to answer questions even when the syllabus is in the design phase, but there are a myriad of reasons why it is good to take right up until the last minute making changes even if the basic structure has been set for weeks.

ΔΔΔ

Most of my courses are what my university calls “Writing Enhanced,” which means that they fulfill the standards of that program—emphasis on product, cognition, and process. Nearly twenty years ago when I was an undergraduate student, a writing-enhanced course required a certain number of pages, some of which had to be revised, but my guidance here is more flexible. I have another course design post (yes, I know that this is turning into a teaching-heavy blog) in mind for the near future that engages with the models we use when designing new courses, but, every semester, I have a momentary pang of concern that I’m not having my students write enough. For instance, I have never assigned a long 15–20+ page final paper. Instead, my students write multiple shorter papers (5–7 page) that they revise to a high standard, with the thinking that learning to polish a concise argument in a short paper is a prerequisite for writing a good longer paper when taking research classes. Besides, even without a long research paper to conclude the semester, my students write a lot. By my rough tally, I find that many of my students write nearly twice as much as I did for any class I took as an undergraduate student. Which then sends a flare of concern in the other direction: how much writing is too much?

ΔΔΔ

I wrote about Chat-GPT last semester and stand by everything I wrote there. But the new semester has brought out another round of hand-wringing and panic about how this tool means for higher education. This semester I’ll be leaning into AI writing in some classes with an “AI-essay critique” exercise and otherwise just incorporating it into the conversations we have when we talk about writing. But as the topic du jour, I’m bored by the conversation now. Moral panics turn tedious in a hurry.

What is “the college essay,” or ChatGPT in my classroom

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Confession: I don’t know what is meant by “the college essay.”

This phrase has been the shorthand for a type of student writing deployed over the past few weeks in a discussion about the relationship between college classes and AI programs like ChatGPT-3 that launched in November, which I touched on in a Weekly Varia a few weeks ago. These programs produce a block of unique text that imitates the type of writing requested in response to a prompt. In its outline, input/output mimics what students do in response to prompts from their professors.

The launch of ChatGPT has led to an outpouring of commentary. Stephen Marche declared in The Atlantic that the college essay is dead and that humanists who fail to adjust to this technology will be committing soft suicide, which followed on from a post earlier this year by Mike Sharples declaring that this algorithm had produced a “graduate level” essay. I have also seen anecdotal accounts of professors who have caught students using ChatGPT to produce papers and concern about being able to process this as an honor code violation both because the technology is not addressed explicitly in the school’s regulation and because they lacked concrete evidence that it was used. (OpenAI is aware of these concerns, and one of their projects is to watermark generated text.) Some professors have suggested that this tool will give them no choice but to return to in-class, written tests that are rife with inequities.

But among these rounds of worry, I found myself returning to my initial confusion about the nature of “the college essay.” My confusion, I have decided, is that the phrase is an amorphous, if not totally empty, signifier that generally refers to whatever type of writing that a professor thinks his or her students should be able to produce. If Mike Sharples’ hyperbolic determination that the sample produced in his article is a “graduate level” essay is any guide, these standards can vary quite wildly.

For what it is worth, ChatGPT is pretty sure that the phrase refers to an admissions personal statement.

When I finished my PhD back in 2017, I decided that I would never assign an in-class test unless there was absolutely no other recourse (i.e. if someone above me demanded that I do so). Years of grading timed blue-book exams had convinced me that these exams were a mismatch for what history courses were claiming to teach, while a combination of weekly quizzes that the students could retake as many times as they want (if I’m asking the question, I think it is worth knowing) and take-home exams would align better with what I was looking to assess. This also matched with pedagogical commitment to writing across the curriculum. The quizzes provided accountability for the readings and attention to the course lectures, as well as one or more short answer questions that tasked the students with, basically, writing a thesis, while the exams had the students write two essays, one from each of two sets of questions that they were then allowed to revise. Together, these two types of assignments allowed the students to demonstrate both their mastery over the basic facts and details of the course material and the higher-order skills of synthesizing material into an argument.

My systems have changed in several significant ways since then, but the purpose of my assignments has not.

First, I have been moving away from quizzes. This change has been a concession to technology as much as anything. Since starting this system on Canvas, I moved to a job that uses Blackboard and I have not been able to find an easy system for grading short answer questions. I still find these quizzes a valuable component of my general education courses where they can consist entirely of true/false, multiple choice, fill in the blank, and other types of questions that are automatically graded. In upper-level courses where I found the short-answer questions to be the most valuable part of the assignment, by contrast, I am simply phasing them out.

Second, whether as a supplement to or in lieu of the quizzes, I have started assigning a weekly course journal. In this assignment, the students are tasked with choosing from a standard set of prompts (e.g. “what was the most interesting thing you learned this week,” “what was something that you didn’t understand this week form the course material? Work through the issue and see if you can understand it,” “what was something that you learned this week that changes something you previously wrote for this course?”) and then writing roughly a paragraph. I started assigning these journals in spring 2022 and they quickly became my favorite things to grade because they are a low-stakes writing assignment that give me a clear insight into what the students have learned from my class. Where the students are confused, I can also offer gentle guidance.

Third, I have stopped doing take-home exams. I realized at some point that, while take home exams were better than in-class exams, my students were still producing exam-ish essay answers and I was contributing to this problem in two ways. First, two essays was quite a lot of writing to complete well in the one week that I allotted for the exam. Second, by calling it an exam most students were treating it as only a marginal step away from the in class exam where one is assessed on whether they have the recall and in-the-moment agility to produce reasonable essays in a short period of time.

What if, I thought, I simply removed the exam title and spread the essays out over multiple paper assignments?

The papers I now assign actually use some of the same prompts that I used to assign on exams, which were big questions in the field the sort that you might see on a comprehensive exam, but I now focus on giving the students tools to analyze the readings and organize their thoughts into good essays. Writing, in other words, has become an explicit part of the assignment, and every paper is accompanied by a meta-cognitive reflection about the process.

Given this context, I was more sanguine about ChatGPT than most of the commentary I had seen, but, naturally, I was curious. After all, Sharples had declared that a piece of writing it produced was graduate level and Stephen Marche had assessed it lower, but still assigned it a B+. I would have marked the essay in question lower based on the writing (maybe a generous B-), and failed it for having invented a citation (especially for a graduate class!), but I would be on firmer footing for history papers of the sort that I grade, so I decided to run an experiment.

The first prompt I assigned is one that will, very likely, appear in some form or another in one of my classes next semester: “assess the causes underlying the collapse of the Roman Republic and identify the most important factor.” I am quite confident in assigning the AI a failing grade.

There were multiple issues with ChatGPT’s submission, but I did not expect the most obvious fault with the essay. The following text appeared near the end of the essay.

Vercingetorix’ victory was, I’m sure, quite a surprise for both him and Julius Caesar. If I had to guess, the AI conflated the fall of the Roman Republic with the fall of the Roman Empire, thus taking the talking points for the Empire and applying them to the names from the time of the Republic. After all, ChatGPT produces text by assembling words without understanding the meaning behind them. Then again, this conflation also appears in any number of think-pieces about the United States as Rome, too.

But beyond this particular howler, the produced text has several critical issues.

For one, “Internal conflict, economic troubles, and military defeats” are exceptionally broad categories each of which could make for a direction to take the paper, but together they become so generic as to obscure any attempt at a thesis. “It was complex” is a general truism about the past, not a satisfactory argument.

For another, the essay lacks adequate citations. In the first attempt, the AI produced only two “citations,” both listed at the end of the paper. As I tell my students, listing sources at the end isn’t the same thing as citing where you are getting the information. Upon some revision, the AI did manage to provide some in-text citations, but not nearly enough and not from anything I would have assigned for the class.

A second test, using a prompt I did assign based on Rudyard Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden, produced similarly egregious results. The essay had an uninspired, but a mostly adequate thesis, at least as a starting point, but then proceeded to use three secondary sources, none of which existed in the format that they were cited. Unless the substantial C.V. of the well-published scholar Sarah C. Chambers is missing a publication on a topic outside her central areas of research, she hasn’t argued what the paper claims she did.

A third test, about Hellenistic Judea, cited an irrelevant section of 1 Maccabees and a chapter in the Cambridge History of Judaism, albeit about Qumram and neither from the right volume nor with the right information for the citation. You get the idea.

None of these papers would have received a passing grade from me based on citations alone even before I switched to a specifications grading model. And that is before considering that the AI does even worse with metacognition, for obvious reasons.

In fact, if a student were to provide a quality essay produced by ChatGPT that was accurate, had a good thesis, and was properly cited, and then explained the process by which they produced the essay in their metacognitive component, I would give that student an A in a normal scheme or the highest marks in my specs system. Not only would such a task be quite hard given the current state of AI, but it would also require the student to know my course material well enough to identify any potential inaccuracies and have the attention to detail to make sure that the citations were correct, to say nothing of demonstrating the engagement through their reflection. I don’t mind students using tools except when those tools become crutches that get in the way of learning.

In a similar vein, I have no problem with students using citation generators except that most don’t realize that you shouldn’t put blind faith in the generator. You have to know both the citation style and the type of source you are citing well enough to edit whatever it gives you, which itself demonstrates your knowledge.

More inventive teachers than I have been suggesting creative approaches to integrating ChatGPT into the classroom as a producer of counterpoints or by giving students opportunities to critique its output, not unlike the exercise I did above. I have also seen the suggestion that it could be valuable for synthesizing complex ideas into digestible format, though this use I think loses something by treating a complex text as though it has only one possible meaning. It also produces a reasonable facsimile of discussion questions, though it struggles to answer them in a meaningful way.

I might dabble with some of these ideas, but I also find myself inclined to take my classes back to the basics. Not a return to timed, in-class tests, but doubling down on simple, basic ideas like opening student ideas to big, open-ended questions, carefully reading sources (especially primary sources) and talking about what they have to say, and how to articulate an interpretation of the past based on those sources–all the while being up front with the students about the purpose behind these assignments.

My lack of concern about ChatGPT at this point might reflect how far from the norm my assessment has strayed. I suspect that when people refer to “the college essay,” they’re thinking of the one-off, minimally-sourced essay that rewards superficial proficiency of the sort that I grew frustrated with. The type of assignment that favors expedience over process. In this sense, I find myself aligned with commentators who suggest that this disruption should be treated as an opportunity rather than an existential threat. To echo the title from a recent post at John Warner’s SubStack, “ChatGPT can’t kill anything worth preserving.”

Course Planning: “Historicizing Speculative Fiction”

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I have had an abiding love of speculative fiction for about as long as I can remember. I have a memory of my father reading the stories of Tolkien and Lewis to me and my younger brothers, and, at some point, I started reading ahead on my own to complete my first of many read-throughs of The Lord of the Rings. I started reading The Wheel of Time in elementary school and was deeply disturbed by descriptions of the blight. I picked up A Song of Ice and Fire sometime in middle school, mostly because I was drawn to the cover art. I also read a lot of bad speculative fiction in those days and am retroactively pleased with my youthful dissatisfaction with certain books.

I say all of this by way of prologue.

First year students at Brandeis (my undergraduate institution) took a “University Seminar in Humanistic Inquiries” course. These courses are designed as seminars on a coherent topic that begins establishing transferable skills and lays a foundation for further progression in college. If I’m being honest, I don’t recall my section of this course being particularly successful (I got into my third choice, after my top choice taught by my future adviser filled up before I enrolled), but I like the idea of the course.

Truman State offers “Self and Society” seminars that work toward the same end while also promoting multi- and inter-disciplinary thinking. One of the myriad of things that has been consuming my time this semester is that I was offered an opportunity to design and offer a course. The remit of these courses have to meet a certain level of disciplinary background, they are also a space that can allow for professors to create courses based on their areas of interest, outside the usual disciplinary constraints. The course I pitched, and that I am now designing to be taught next semester is “Historicizing Speculative Fiction.”

I read speculative fiction as a historian, which makes sense given my professional training and areas of expertise. One of my pet peeves about speculative fiction is when the world itself is undeveloped, while, by contrast, I will often overlook narrative or character issues if I have fallen in love with a creative world. When I proposed the course, I explained that while these genres of literature have their roots in myths and legends, these invented worlds are reflections of real world issues. Thus, the course description:

In this section, we will use speculative fiction—particularly science fiction and fantasy stories—to approach the issues of Self and Society. Once framed as niche interests, these stories make up some of the biggest pieces of intellectual property in the world today. Such stories might seem like simple entertainments featuring wizards and elves and dragons, but these worlds and the ideas we bring with us to talk about them reflect very present concerns about society and our place in them. So step through the wardrobe with me and let’s see how we can use these stories to better understand ourselves.

My idea for the course is to build a series of thematic units each built around one novel, or a primary and a back-up that could be substituted in future iterations. These novels are supplemented with short stories, essays about popular culture, and selections from other authors. These units are interchangeable by design, such that each time the course is offered I can swap units in and out. For the first iteration, I have chosen four units: World-building and historicism (P. Djèlí Clark, A Master of Djinn), Power, Language and Authority (Ursula le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan), The Environment (Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower), Self, Society, and the Worlds we Create (Susanna Clarke, Piranesi). You can see the core reading list at the end of this post.

The core reading list is intentionally diverse, with the intent being to break students away from the expected canon for a course like this and to introduce them to the range of creative stories that exist. I won’t say that it was easy to craft this reading list. My personal tastes in fantasy stories run to very long books and extended series, and I can’t reasonably set the four books of The Dandelion Dynasty and expect the students to actually read them all, even though it might be the most perfect series for this course. However, I have also been greatly enjoying the excuse to read short stories in preparation for the course—more than once this semester you might have found me weeping in my office because of something I had just read. But I also have more to do still, since I would like at least one short story to fill out the unit on the environment.

The other work-in-progress for this course is the list of assignments. Some of these are going to be straightforward (e.g. book reviews and a course journal), but I am also concocting some creative assignments designed to get students to make students engage with the course themes in different ways. For instance, one assignment is going to be an “Inventing Utopia” group project where the students will work in groups to design their own utopias and present them as a poster presentation.

One thing I want to be particularly careful about with this course is striking a balance between sharing with the students all of these things that I think are particularly great without overloading the students who are in their first or second semester of college. I am beyond excited to be teaching this course, but if my enthusiasm leads to a course that is packed to the gills with amazing books and stories, then it won’t allow any space for the analysis and reflection where the actual learning happens.

Core Reading List

Introduction

  • Excerpts from Arthur stories and Beowulf
  • Nibedita Sen, “Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island”

Unit 1: World-building and historicism

  • P. Djèlí Clark, A Master of Djinn
  • Selections of J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin
  • Adam Serwer, “Fear of a Black Hobbit” (the Atlantic)
  • Ursula Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”

Unit 2: Power, Language, and Authority

  • Ursula le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
  • Ken Liu, “Paper Menagerie”
  • Octavia Butler, “Speech Sounds”

Unit 3: The Environment

  • Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
  • Appendices to Dune

Unit 4: Self, Society, and the Worlds We Create

  • Susanna Clarke, Piranesi
  • Rebecca Roanhorse, “My Authentic Indian Experiencetm“
  • N.K. Jemisin, “The Ones Who Stay and Fight”

Alternate Units

  • Orientalism: Saladin Ahmed, Throne of the Crescent Moon
  • Colonialism: undecided
  • Epic Journeys: Neil Gaimon, Ocean at the End of the Lane
  • Gender: Ursula le Guin, Left Hand of Darkness