Learning from my mistakes

Word to the wise: If you're sitting in the drawing studio chatting with the drawing professor and you hear a faint caterwauling, do not ask, "Is someone in the next room shaving a cat?" Especially do not do this if you aren't entirely familiar with the layout of the art department, where the drawing studio butts right up next to a row of practice rooms for music students. 

Not a cat screaming but a soprano practicing. I won't make that mistake again!

So far my tenure as Chair of the Art Department has been fairly uneventful. One faculty member left without being replaced, one is on sabbatical, one teaches evening classes, and one teaches online, so this morning the whole top floor of the Arts building was quiet--until the soprano started reaching for the high notes. I've enjoyed getting to know some very talented faculty members, and soon I'll be visiting classrooms to watch them work.

Meanwhile, I've been fielding emails asking questions to which my first response is I don't know but I'll find out for you. Why didn't the prof let this student add the course? Because she can't fit 17 butts into 16 seats. Who is administering this scholarship contest now that the person in charge no longer works here? Let's shift that task to someone else. How do I find out what courses a certain professor plans to offer next year? Well, for starters, you could ask the professor. And so on.

Seeking answers is a great way to learn how the department functions, and of course I'm also learning from my mistakes. I'll continue tracking down answers to the most baffling questions as long as no one asks me to make any art, because anything I draw is the visual equivalent of screaming cats.    

Up the down staircase

The staircase runs both ways, I said to the student looming in my path. He had his eyes glued to his phone so he may not have been aware that he was getting ready to steamroll me right off the steps. I had to go back up those stairs a few minutes later when I realized that I'd left my office keys in the classroom, but if that's the worst thing that happens in the first week of classes, I'll survive.

After all, I survived the semester when the staircase didn't run both ways. In Fall of 2020, we came back from Covid lockdown to find one-way staircases and directional arrows all over the building, necessitating roundabout routes to wherever I needed to be. I survived teaching in masks, teaching hybrid classes with some students face-to-face and some on Zoom, teaching without any fall break or even a long weekend, teaching in a building where everyone seemed to be teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown every single day.

And even longer ago I survived a semester of teaching while undergoing cancer treatment, guiding online discussions while chemo drugs dripped into my veins, teaching sitting down when I couldn't stand up, teaching entirely from home when my immune system went on hiatus, and relying on my students to figure things out when I wasn't available to respond.

And even earlier in my career, I survived teaching during a departmental search in which I was the only inside candidate, hiding in my office on days when outside candidates were being wined and dined and squired around campus, trying not to read anything menacing into my colleagues' casual comments, trying to focus on my teaching after I was told that they were expanding the search to invite yet another candidate to a campus interview. 

I could go on, but I'd rather not. I prefer to forget my most challenging teaching experiences unless I can use them as inspiration on a day like today: If I can survive all those other things, then today's challenges should be a piece of cake.

Great ideas illuminating the path ahead

When the academic Powers that Be proclaim that we need to work on negotiating the compliance landscape, my first question runs toward wardrobe: does this kind of excursion call for pith helmets, snowshoes, or parasols? I guess I'm going to find out because the compliance landscape plays an important part in our institutional goals for the year. I'll keep my eyes on the new president so I know when to reach for appropriate accessories.

Whatever landscape we're entering this year, I'll be well equipped with good ideas. I brought a container full of them today, tiny yellow tomatoes that look like lightbulbs, so sweet and juicy that every time I eat one I'm reminded that planting them was a really great idea. I'll take my tiny lightbulbs to the workshop I'm leading this afternoon and tell my colleagues I'll share my great ideas with you if you share yours with the rest of us.

I hope they'll comply--otherwise, the landscape will feel really lonely.

Edible lightbulbs--great idea!

 

Photo finish

So I went out of town for a few days but left my computer charging cord at home and ran down the battery trying to edit some butterfly photos I took in my daughter's wonderful front garden, but my camera is failing in a variety of ways and my editing software is so old that it couldn't get installed on my new laptop so I had to use clunky software I'm not familiar with and it made the whole joyful process of taking and editing photos miserable. Which is why I've posted nothing here for a week. So sue me. Some battles are worth fighting and some simply are not.

The next challenge, of course, is to pick out a new camera. I can take photos on mine but that's about it: I can't view or edit or even delete them without going through a massive annoying rigamarole. My Nikon has provided loyal service for eight years, but I've carried it into wet, messy environments and dropped it more than once, so it doesn't surprise me that it's malfunctioning. No one is repairing SLR cameras these days and buying a new camera will require getting up to speed on the mirrorless options, many of which look big and bulky and (gulp!) expensive. I mean, really expensive. I suppose the price ranges are proportional to what I paid for my Nikon eight years ago, but the number of digits in the price makes me nervous about making an expensive mistake.

I could stick with my cell-phone camera, but frankly, cell-phone photography does not provide the pleasure I've always received from the feel of an SLR camera in my hands. Years ago when I was a struggling journalist and a painfully shy person, I found that I could walk into any environment and speak to anyone as long as I had my camera around my neck.  It was a sort of badge of belonging, an antidote for the imposter syndrome that crippled me in so many situations. 

These days, photography requires me to get off my butt and away from my computer, to look closely at the world around me and seek out different perspectives. Facebook memories crop up to remind me that I've taken photos of the same scenes and situations over and over, but while the photos may be similar, the experience remains fresh each time. I've taken hundreds of butterfly photos over the years, but the one I take today will provide just as much pleasure as all the preceding photos.

So I'm looking for a new camera, reading online reviews and talking to photography friends, seeking advice in hopes of avoiding an expensive mistake, and I'm trying to silence the tiny Puritans in my brain who think it's frivolous to spend so much money on myself. "It's cheaper than therapy," I'll tell them, and if they won't shut up, maybe I can distract them with some butterfly pix. 

 

Calling Dr. Syllabus-Saver!

Right now academics everywhere are typing and clicking, copying and pasting, updating due dates and reading assignments to make sure their syllabi are flawless before classes begin, but deep in our hearts we long for the appearance of Dr. Syllabus-Saver, a caped crusader who swoops in to swat our hands when we're on the verge of accidentally assigning all our classes to submit drafts on the same date. Faster than a speeding cursor, he's able to make leaps of logic across courses and sections to see hidden conflicts, to synthesize details across space and time and stand boldly in the path of disastrous gaps that creep into policies.

I'm dreaming, of course. I've had decades of experience in enshrining foolish decisions on course syllabi, and no one is hovering overhead to prevent me from doing it again. I've finished two of my fall syllabi, but I've learned the hard way that I'd better not print them out until next week. One year a flood closed campus, delaying the start of classes for a week and washing out every date on every syllabus. If I print out these syllabi today, I'll just be tempting fate to strike us with a wildfire or tsunami or even a global pandemic.

So instead I'll keep pointing and clicking, copying and pasting, updating and revising until all three syllabi are done. Of course I did the two easier ones first. I've taught both of these classes many times before, but I've still needed to switch out a few readings and tweak some assignments and, of course, change all the due dates. I keep recalling the former colleague who used to hand her past syllabi to the department secretary and demand that she change all the dates manually with a typewriter, but nobody's getting away with that kind of noblesse oblige these days. We're all doing obeisance to our keyboards and course management systems, which means that the blame for any mistakes falls firmly on our own shoulders.

The next syllabus will take some work. I've taught the class twice before but I'm still not happy with the rhythm of the course or the assignment structure. Two of the papers are too similar, and I'd like to change the final project to eliminate some of the lazy shortcuts that students can't seem to resist. They do a ton of reading about what connects people to specific places, and they write some short papers about their own connections to specific places, but the final project asks them to argue that a certain group should take a specific action in regard to a specific place. Despite seeing plenty of examples of place-based advocacy, too many students want to argue that "Everyone should visit x place because it's really cool." Not a particularly interesting argument, especially after the umpteenth repetition. 

So today's task is to revise the assignment structure to shut off access to that particular shortcut without opening doors to other shortcuts I can't yet imagine. If only I could call on some academic superhero with the power to foresee every possible point of weakness in a prompt and obliterate it before it's enshrined in print! Where's Dr. Syllabus-Saver when I need him? 

Surviving the veggie-pocalypse

As summer problems go, too many vegetables is not a bad one to have. Right now my kitchen looks like the aftermath of an explosion at a farmer's market, but an excess of eggplant is far more manageable than an excess of, say, wildfire. 

So I'm not complaining! But I'm grateful to my friends who accept my offerings of zucchini and tomatoes, and I'm especially grateful to my vegetarian friend who came out for lunch and helped me gobble up zucchini quiche, babaganoush, and cucumber salad. 

But I refuse to be grateful to the raccoons, even if their depredations did reduce the volume of veggies needing my attention.

I remember the time years ago when our corn crop was reaching its peak and we designated a certain day for the harvest--but when I went down to the garden early that morning, I found corn stalks knocked over and ears of corn stripped and eaten. Raccoons! After all the time we'd spent planting and weeding, the raccoons left us about three ears of sweet corn.

That disaster inspired the resident green thumb to start installing a solar-powered electric fence around the corn patch. For a few years we were able to frequently relish the crunch of freshly picked sweet corn and even preserve many ears in the freezer, but then the flood that washed away our garden shed took all the electric fencing supplies down the river, and then for a few years we were dividing our time between home and Jackson so we didn't bother with a big garden.

But this was the summer to bring back sweet corn. My sweet hubby installed the new solar electric fence, taking care to put the strands of wire close enough together to deter small animals and high enough to prevent deer from jumping over the top. All summer he's carefully tended the corn patch until, finally, he brought in the first batch of fresh sweet corn to share with our son on his birthday.

That was August 3rd. For a week we've eaten sweet corn nearly every day, and if you've never eaten sweet corn on the day it's been picked, you don't know what you're missing. What a great week! But it's all over now: on August 9, my husband went to the garden early in the morning and found corn stalks knocked over and nearly every ripe ear stripped and eaten.

How did the raccoons get in there? Did the electric fence fail in the middle of the night? Or did they climb on each other's backs to reach high enough to flip the switch and turn off the power? We'll never know.

This evening we'll eat the few scrawny, immature ears the raccoons rejected, the last gasp of this year's corn patch. We'll have plenty more veggies--the peppers are just now starting to ripen and we still have kale and cabbage and cucumbers and all kinds of squash. Brussels sprouts! Watermelon! Cantaloupe! And a row of sunflowers towering over everything!

But I look at the piles of produce in my kitchen and wonder where we'll put the next batch that gets harvested. We'll eat some and put some in the freezer and keep pushing veggies on everyone we see and maybe at some point we'll be able to see the countertops again and open the fridge without releasing a cascade of eggplant. Until that time, we're learning to live in the veggie-pocalypse.

   

Sunflowers are just starting to bloom.

Corn stalks torn down and stripped.

More zuccinin--always more zucchini.

Corn tassels reach higher than the top fence wire, but not by much

Taking a gamble on student writing

Decision time! Two weeks until classes start and I still haven't figured out how to adapt my writing assignments to the presence of artificial intelligence. I've done some reading and writing and thinking about the topic and I've jerked awake from some annoying nightmares, but now that it's time to actually write the assignments, I'm stumped. How do I get students to do their own writing?

Require more in-class writing, by hand. Until someone invents an AI-equipped pencil, I can be sure that students are doing their own work. 

But then I'll have to read their handwriting. Time to stock up on magnifying glasses and eyedrops.

And in-class writing is bound to be less polished and coherent than out-of-class writing. Allow them to revise for additional points after it's graded? More work for me, but probably better papers.

I want them to draw evidence from texts in their writing, but many students use electronic texts, which means I'll have to allow them to refer to their phones or computers while writing in class, which means I'll have to monitor all those screens to make sure they're being used only for accessing texts. 

Ack! This is too difficult.

Stick with out-of-class writing but run everything through an AI detection program. Essays will presumably be more readable and polished and students will practice the kind of drafting-and-revision process that we all know and love.

But AI detection programs aren't foolproof and disputes are bound to arise. Last semester when a student's paper was flagged as 100 percent AI-generated, I had a hard time moving the discussion past the yes-you-did-no-I-didn't stage. Disputes and appeals suck up time and energy, souring my days and intruding on my nightmares.

Incorporate AI into the writing process. I've heard all kinds of ideas: Use AI as an idea-generator or outline-creator. Have students write a compelling thesis statement in class and then use AI to generate paragraphs. Get students to critique AI-generated text and fill in gaps from their reading or their own experience. 

But I'm just old-school enough to find these ideas distasteful. I want to see human minds at work, not algorithms spinning words--but I fear that I won't be able to tell the difference.

Trust my students to do what's right. This would be my preferred option, but in the current climate, it's just not realistic to expect all students to resist the lure of a tool that promises quick, easy results and good grades. Besides, their idea of what's right may differ dramatically from mine. 

Right now, though, the right thing to do is to make a decision about my fall writing assignments. The options keep spinning around in my head like a roulette wheel that promises either lasting success or instant disaster. The only way to make the wheel stop is to write those assignments, but I wish each decision didn't feel like such a huge gamble. 

The free-book frenzy

Free books! For an academic, is there anything better?

Anyone looking at my shelves would assume that I already have more than enough books, and my giveaway pile keeps growing--and yet I still get excited when someone offers me a free book.

Back when textbook publishers used to send packages of sample texts, opening the boxes felt like Christmas. Usually most of the books went into the giveaway pile, but there might be one jewel that I would be happy to read even if I didn't want to spend my own money on it. A collection of critical essays on Charles Chesnutt? Yes, please!  

Some free books aren't really free, of course, but serve as compensation for service. Today I've been promised a book in exchange for reviewing a prospectus for a publisher, and while I enjoyed reading and commenting on the prospectus, my favorite part of the transaction occurred when I went online and chose one from a selection of books. I hope I enjoy the book as much as I enjoyed selecting it.

Funny story: at a recent academic conference, the book table included display copies of various books written by conference attendees, and at the business meeting the organizers drew names to give away those books. The twelve people whose names were picked from the hat had to cross campus to another building to choose their free books--first come, first served. The minute the meeting concluded, the winners made a frenzied dash across campus as if heading for the last helicopter out of Saigon. I'm slow so I knew I wouldn't get my first choice, but I got a free book on an interesting topic and took pleasure from the knowledge that I could send it to a friend who would find it compelling. 

But that wasn't my favorite part of that transaction. My book Teaching Comedy was one of the giveaways, and as I hobbled out the door I heard a swift young grad student calling out, "I've got to get there first so I can get Bev's book!"

He got it. I appreciated his enthusiasm for the book, but most of all I delighted to see that free books can still inspire such joy.

When AI answers the wrong questions

Writing instruction is irrelevant, they said, or something very close to that. Artificial Intelligence is able to excel at so many writing tasks that in the long term, they said, we won't need to waste time teaching students how to write effectively because they won't need those skills in the so-called Real World. 

Imagine a world, they said, in which you never again have to explain to a student how to use an apostrophe--because the AI can take care of that. Students who rely on AI will turn in papers without annoying spelling errors, without misplaced or missing commas, and without subject/verb agreement flaws.

And without humanity, I wanted to interject, but there's no point in yelling at the radio. Without creativity, without playfulness, without depth of ideas, without so many things that make writing worth reading.

To my mind, the AI cheerleaders seem intent on providing answers to the wrong questions. If the question is "What's the most efficient way to get students to produce error-free essays," then AI is a pretty good answer. But what about other kinds of questions?

Go ahead and ask ChatGPT about the purpose of suffering. It is capable of instantly producing an error-free, well organized essay outlining various philosophies of suffering, with a caveat at the end:  

It's important to note that these explanations are not exhaustive, and different individuals and cultures may hold unique beliefs about the origin and purpose of suffering. While understanding the reasons behind suffering can offer insight, addressing and alleviating suffering remain important goals for individuals and societies.

All true! And if I ever need a brief summary of different approaches to understanding suffering, I'll know where to look. But what I don't see in this passage is any evidence of original thought: given all these approaches, which do you find most relevant to your life or to a particular text we're discussing? If, as Richard E. Miller insists, writing is "a technology for thinking," then I want writers to do some thinking in their writing, not just parrot back what others have thought.

But apparently I'm missing the point. According to the experts on the radio, I need to think about writing tasks from the perspective of students, who may suffer extreme anxiety at the thought of putting words to paper. AI will help them overcome that anxiety by enabling them to produce error-free prose fulfilling the requirements of the assignment.

Again, all true! If the main purpose of education is to ease students' anxieties about writing, then AI is a pretty good tool. I don't want to minimize the impact of writing anxiety--heck, I still get tense and jittery when I have a deadline and I've been writing professionally for over 50 years. But in my experience, we don't overcome writing anxiety by avoiding writing but by writing. Just as a performer can learn to transform stage fright into energy that connects with the audience, the anxious writer can learn to transform anxiety into energy on the page.

But this transformation takes time, and it takes effort, and it takes writing--a lot of it. The AI cheerleaders seem delighted that these new tech tools will allow students (and others) to write less when what they really need is to write--and think!--more. 

But I can't tell the radio experts all that, and even if I could, why would they listen to me? After all, I"m a dinosaur facing certain extinction in a world in which writing and thinking will no longer matter.