A thing that bothers me about wizard schools in popular media – outside of the magic-grade-school stuff, anyway – is that they're typically depicted as being basically magic universities, but their actual curricula and pedagogical approaches look much more like those of a technical institution. Like, buddy, that's not a wizard university, that's a wizard trade school. You can't just slap university student culture on top of trade school pedagogy. It doesn't work like that – the one emerges from the other!
I'm coming to COLORADO! Catch me in DENVER on Jan 22 at The Tattered Cover<, and in COLORADO SPRINGS from Jan 23–25 where I'm the Guest of Honor at COSine. Then I'll be in OTTAWA on Jan 28 at Perfect Books and in TORONTO with Tim Wu on Jan 30.
I come from a family of teachers – both parents taught all their lives and now oversee Ed.D candidates, brother owns a school – which has left me painfully aware of the fact that I am not a great teacher.
I am, however, a good teacher. The difference is that a good teacher can teach students who want to learn, whereas a great teacher can inspire students to want to learn. I've spent most of my life teaching, here and there, and while I'm not great, I am getting better.
Last year, I started a new teaching gig: I'm one of Cornell's AD White Visiting Professors, meaning that I visit Cornell (and its NYC campus, Cornell Tech) every year or two for six years and teach, lecture, meet, and run activities.
When I was in Ithaca in September for my inaugural stint, I had a string of what can only be called "peak experiences," meeting with researchers, teachers, undergrads, grads and community members. I had so many conversations that will stick with me, and today I want to talk about one of them.
It was a faculty discussion, and one of the people at the table had been involved in a research project to investigate students' attitudes to their education. The research concluded that students come to Cornell to learn – because they love knowledge and critical thinking – but they are so haunted by the financial consequences of failure (wasting tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars repeating a year or failing out altogether, and then entering the job market debt-burdened and degree-less) that they feel pressured not to take intellectual risks, and, at worst, to cheat. They care about learning, but they're afraid of bad grades, and so chasing grades triumphs over learning.
At that same discussion, I met someone who taught Cornell's version of freshman comp, the "here's how to write at a college level" course that every university offers. I've actually guest-taught some of these, starting in 2005/6, when I had a Fulbright Chair at USC.
Now, while I'm not a great teacher, I am a pretty good writing teacher. I was lucky enough to be mentored by Judith Merril (starting at the age of 9!), who taught me how to participate in a peer-based writing workshop:
In high school, I met Harriet Wolff, a gifted writing teacher, whose writing workshop (which Judith Merril had actually founded, decades earlier) was so good that I spent seven years in my four-year high-school, mostly just to keep going to Harriet's workshop:
I graduated from the Clarion science fiction and fantasy workshop (where Judith Merril learned to workshop) in 1992, and then went on to teach Clarion and Clarion West on several occasions, as well as other workshops in the field, such as Viable Paradise (today, I volunteer for Clarion's board). I have taught and been taught, and I've learned a thing or two.
Here's the thing about every successful writing workshop I've been in: they don't necessarily make writing enjoyable (indeed, they can be painful), but they make it profoundly satisfying. When you repeatedly sit down with the same writers, week after week, to think about what went wrong with their work, and how they can fix it, and to hear the same about your work, something changes in how you relate to your work. You come to understand how to transform big, inchoate ideas into structured narratives and arguments, sure – but you also learn to recognize when the structure that emerges teaches you something about those big, inchoate ideas that was there all along, but not visible to you.
It's revelatory. It teaches you what you know. It lets you know what you know. It lets you know more than you know. It's alchemical. It creates new knowledge, and dispels superstition. It sharpens how you think. It sharpens how you talk. And obviously, it sharpens how you write.
The freshmen comp students I've taught over the years were amazed (or, more honestly, incredulous) when I told them this, because for them, writing was a totally pointless exercise. Well, almost totally pointless. Writing had one point: to get a passing grade so that the student could advance to other subjects.
I'm not surprised by this, nor do I think it's merely because some of us are born to write and others will never get the knack (I've taught too many writers to think that anyone can guess who will find meaning in writing). It's because we don't generally teach writing this way until the most senior levels – the last year or two of undergrad, or, more likely, grad school (and then only if that grad program is an MFA).
Writing instruction at lower levels, particularly in US high schools, is organized around standardized assessment. Students are trained to turn out the world's worst literary form: the five-paragraph essay:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3749
The five-paragraph essay is so rigid that any attempt to enliven it is actually punished during the grading process. One cannot deviate from the structure, on penalty of academic censure. It's got all the structural constraints of a sonnet, and all the poetry of a car crusher.
The five-paragraph essay is so terrible that a large part of the job of a freshman comp teacher is to teach students to stop writing them. But even after this is done, much of the freshman comp curriculum is also formulaic (albeit with additional flexibility). That's unavoidable: freshman comp classes are typically massive, since so many of the incoming students have to take it. When you're assessing 100-2,000 students, you necessarily fall back on formula.
Which brings me back to that faculty discussion at Cornell, where we learned first that students want to learn, but are afraid of failure; and then heard from the freshman comp teacher, who told us that virtually all of their students cheated on their assignments, getting chatbots to shit out their papers.
And that's what I've been thinking about since September. Because of course those students cheat on their writing assignments – they are being taught to hit mechanical marks with their writing, improving their sentence structure, spelling and punctuation. What they're not learning is how to use writing to order and hone their thoughts, or to improve their ability to express those thoughts. They're being asked to write like a chatbot – why wouldn't they use a chatbot?
You can't teach students to write – not merely to create formally correct sentences, but to write – through formal, easily graded assignments. Teaching writing is a relational practice. It requires that students interact extensively with one another's work, and with one another's criticism. It requires structure, sure – but the structure is in how you proceed through the critiques and subsequent discussion – not in the work itself.
This is the kind of thing you do in small seminars, not big lecture halls. It requires that each student produce a steady stream of work for critique – multiple pieces per term or semester – and that each student closely read and discuss every other student's every composition. It's an intense experience that pushes students to think critically about critical thought itself. It's hard work that requires close supervision and it only works in small groups.
Now, common sense will tell you that this is an impractical way to run a freshman comp class that thousands of students have to take. Not every school can be Yale, whose Daily Themes writing course is the most expensive program to deliver with one instructor for every two students:
But think back to the two statements that started me down this line of thinking:
1) Most students want to learn, but are afraid of the financial ruin that academic failure will entail and so they play things very safe; and
2) Virtually all freshman comp students use AI to cheat on their assignments.
By the time we put our students in writing programs that you can't cheat on, and where you wouldn't want to cheat, they've had years of being taught to write like an LLM, but with the insistence that they not use an LLM. No wonder they're cheating! If you wanted to train a graduating class to cheat rather than learn, this is how you'd do it.
Teaching freshman comp as a grammar/sentence structure tutorial misses the point. Sure, student writing is going to be bad at first. It'll be incoherent. It'll be riddled with errors. Reading student work is, for the most part, no fun. But for students, reading other students' writing, and thinking about what's wrong with it and how to fix it is the most reliable way to improve their own work (the dirty secret of writing workshops is that other writers' analysis of your work is generally less useful to you than the critical skills you learn by trying to fix their work).
The amazing thing about bad writing is that it's easy to improve. It's much easier than finding ways to improve the work of a fluid, experienced writer. A beginning writer who makes a lot of easily spotted mistakes is a beginning writer who's making a lot of easily fixed mistakes. That means that the other writers around the circle are capable of spotting those errors, even if they're just starting out themselves. It also means that the writer whose work is under discussion will be able to make huge improvements through simple changes. Beginning writers can get a lot of momentum going this way, deriving real satisfaction from constant, visible progress.
Replacing freshman comp with dozens of small groups run like graduate seminars is expensive and hard to imagine. But it would create a generation of students who wouldn't use an AI to write their essays any more than they'd ask an AI to eat a delicious pizza for them. We should aspire to assign the kinds of essays that change the lives of the students who write them, and to teach students to write that kind of essay.
Freshman comp was always a machine for turning out reliable sentence-makers, not an atelier that trained reliable sense-makers. But AI changes the dynamic. Today, students are asking chatbots to write their essays for the same reason that corporations are asking chatbots to do their customer service (because they don't give a shit):
I'm not saying that small writing workshops of the sort that changed my life will work for everyone. But I am saying that teaching writing in huge lecture halls with assignments optimized for grading works for no one.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I feel like conversations around "gifted kids" and whether trauma related to that is an actual thing really ignore something really key and important to the argument.
Which is that taking a bunch of six- to ten-year-olds, officially labeling them as Different (good kind), and then putting them in separate classes from their peers, all of which are basically officially called Class for Kids Who Are Smarter Than The Rest, is literally a completely guaranteed way to create social division and resentment from other kids and teens.
And that is completely the fault of the people designing and running these programs, not the kids funneled into them.
An interview with Dana Elle Murphy, whose work explores how drafts, fragments, and literary lineages expand our understanding of Black women
In JSTOR Daily's latest Ask a Professor interview, Dana Elle Murphy, Assistant Professor of Black Studies and English at Caltech, reflects on Black feminist criticism as a practice that moves across genres: poetry, theory, drafts, festivals, fragments, and memory.
Murphy asks us to reconsider who counts as a critic. In Foremother Love: Phillis Wheatley and Black Feminist Criticism, she positions Wheatley not only as a poet but as a foundational theorist and describes the process by which Black women’s writing becomes criticism, archive, and theory. She also reminds us that fields are dynamic. Writing circulates beyond the university and later “trickles back” in new forms.
Returning to drafts and ephemera—materials not always read as “scholarly”—Murphy shows how a single crossed-out word can unsettle critical consensus. An inserted “we(?)” in a Lucille Clifton draft complicates a poem long understood to remain in the third person. An added word in pencil, an excised line, and other details open new questions about collectivity and evidence.
In the interview, Murphy emphasizes humility and flexibility, acknowledging that claims can change and that error, multiplicity, and revision are generative practices.
Pedagogy threads through the conversation, too. She speaks of students “calling in with love” and recalls the idea that “a good teacher makes him/herself obsolete,” a vision of teaching that centers transformation over authority.
If you’re thinking about drafts, theory, archives, or the classroom as a collaborative space, this interview offers a lot to carry with you.
I want to share something for those of you who are teaching and want your conservative students to be more open-minded to liberal ideas that you’re presenting.
I grew up in a conservative family and a conservative town, and like most conservative kids, had been told that colleges were hotbeds of liberalism, so I was already defensive politically when I started college. My first semester or two I was really skeptical of everything political that my professors presented me with.
And then I took a women’s studies course (required at my college). And on the first day, the professor said,
“You don’t have to be a feminist. There are days when I’m not a feminist. But we’re going to discuss feminist ideas in this class, and you might find that you agree with some of them and disagree with others, and that’s fine.”
And that took the pressure off. By telling me that I didn’t HAVE to be a feminist, that I didn’t HAVE to agree, that professor started me on the road to becoming a feminist. I particularly remember her giving us information about what a huge percentage of the housework was still done by women, even in [hetero] couples where both the man and woman worked outside the home. And after that I remember saying, “I’m not a feminist, but I can see where they’re coming from.”
Within 5 years, I was claiming the term and coming out to my mom as a feminist.
So when I taught college writing, I assigned politically liberal essays to my students, many of whom came from conservative backgrounds. And before they read the first one, I would say,
“The reading for the next class--I want you to know that you don’t have to agree with it. You don’t have to agree with anything that your professors teach you in college. But the point of a college education is to have your mind opened to other points of view. So you’re not required to agree, but you are required to approach the reading with an open mind. You might find that you agree with some things the author says and disagree with others. And that’s cool! We WANT you to use your critical thinking and decide for yourself what you think about things! But to do that, you need to give people the benefit of the doubt and be open-minded to what they have to say.”
And I have to say, it worked really well for me! I remember in particular that after I assigned the essay “Black Men and Public Space”, one of my students wrote in her reading reflection,
“I was taught in school that racism in America ended with Martin Luther King. I am appalled to discover that this is not true.”
Priming your students to be open-minded, while also encouraging them to use critical thinking, can help to break down some of the automatic defenses against new ideas that students are often taught. Approaching your students’ comments during discussion with an open-minded view yourself, validating their experiences while also making gentle counterarguments, can do a lot as well.
The bureaucracy implied by the so-called “boilerplate” access statement not only confines disability into that which is legible (and “reasonable”) to an office of disability services, a medical professional or team of professionals, and/or the professor-as-gatekeeper, it also segregates the language of “access” from the discourses of risk and danger populating other parts of the syllabus. Mad students ––usually euphemized as “students with mental health needs” ––are rarely addressed directly in boilerplate access statements, or in the discourse of formal accommodations themselves. Rather, “mental health” resources ––occasionally outside suicide/crisis lines, more often simply the phone number or web address of student counselling services ––are listed separately, to be accessed in times of exception, of crisis. Other accommodation practices (extension and absence policies being notable examples) typically exist separately from statements regarding accessibility, despite the ubiquity of extended deadlinesand relaxed absence policies as University-granted accommodations to individual students. Likewise, issues described as “mental health”-based are most often outsourced, as illustrated by this composite statement:
To access mental health services, call [Student Counseling Center]; in case of an emergency, please call 9-8-8.
There are several reasons for this “mental health” statement to be listed separately from the boilerplate access statement. The first is the semantic gap which remains between disability and “mental illness.” Another is the legal implications and mandated reporting requirements associated with students in crisis, which renders, as we discuss later on, the instruction of Mad students a form of “risk management.” The last, and most highly telling, reason is the imagined root of a student’s personal crisis: a mental health section appended to a syllabus is not, in the writer’s mind, geared toward a student with ongoing psychosocial disability or distress, but rather to the student pushed to a state of crisis by the demands of the University. The student who may be what might be called “durationally Mad” (Mad in ways not solely explicable by acute crisis related to the university) is nowhere in sight; imagined not to reach the University at all. Nor is the possibility of care and reimagination they and their comrades may offer.
Cavar and Rottier, "Speculative Syllabi: Imagining Pedagogies of Madness and Hope," [emphasis added]
So there's a post going around that I'm not going to engage with because my point is entirely different than what the discussion is covering there...
It's this thread: https://www.tumblr.com/galileosballs/783607164314976256/some-of-the-responses-to-this-have-been-in
(I will not be weighing in on that thread)
Here's the thing about schooling and Kids These Days from the elementary to the college level using generative AI (which is Bad for many reasons; I am not defending it):
School (for the purposes of this discussion, public school in the US because that's the only kind of schooling I personally have extensive experience with) is not designed to promote learning.
Lamentations about the ethics of the students who do this, about how this is devaluating education, about how it's frightening that future doctors etc are cheesing their way through medical school with AI all have their eyes on a particular symptom of a much, much bigger and deeper problem. That problem is ULTIMATELY capitalism, but on the way there it's about pedagogy.
I, from the perspective of not having been beholden to school for many years, can confidently say that I did not learn a single fucking thing in school between fourth grade (age 9; I learned how to do long division) and college (age 18, learned a lot of different things, absolutely none of them particularly relevant to any paid work I've ever had). School was a six to eight hour time sink (plus however long homework took) in my day that actively got in the way of me learning things WHILE piling a bunch of stress and trauma onto me that I had to spend years recovering from.
School, in the US, is designed from the ground up to train children into compliant workers. It's about showing up on time, being willing to follow arbitrary and often unfair rules, doing as one is told by figures of authority, and giving the desired answers to direct questions (while asking as few clarifying questions as possible). Curiosity and creativity are actively punished by public school.
"Does saying things that are true and that you know are true only matter when someone is giving you a little prize for it?" Literally yes, that his how the system is built. Under capitalism, there is no motivation to say true things that are true that you know are true. It is likely, in fact, to get you punished! If you want to change that behavior, YOU HAVE TO CHANGE THE SYSTEM THAT PRODUCES IT.
This quote, in particular, seems to miss the point hugely:
"Some of the responses to this have been, in essence, "well, it's not our fault for being raised in a bad educational system that prioritizes grades over comprehension". And you're right, it's not your fault.
But you freely admit the system is bad. That it values the wrong things.
So why do you limit yourself to only achieving what it values? Do you not aspire to be better than a system you know is wrong? Don't you want to change the world?" with a post script of "the system is bad and that fact absolves me of moral responsibility to be a good person” is CEO rhetoric frankly"
It should be noted that absolutely no one in the thread has espoused a belief that 'hat fact absolves me of moral responsibility' - they are all talking about ways that the system is rotten from the ground up and needs to be dismantled and rebuilt. Many, many people reblogging the chain are ascribing malice/excuse-making to people who are merely correctly identifying the problem. Explanations are not excuses; sorry that someone taught you that at some point.
No one in that thread has said "I use AI, and think that it's a good and laudable thing to do!" - that is not a position that anyone seems to be holding.
There are a lot of people in that thread who are indignant that anyone is going to college who isn't deeply invested in learning, as if that's the goal that sends people to academia.
We do not live in a world that rewards learning. We live in a world that awards the possession of credentials.
We do not live in a world where people pursue careers because they are inherently important and meaningful to them - they pursue them because they want to survive under capitalism. Most people are not going into healthcare, for example, because they genuinely want to help heal people who are sick or injured; they're doing it because it's a stable career that generated a livable income. I say this as a person who works in healthcare and deals with others working in the field.
"If you're using AI to get through your education you've not fucking earned your qualifications. That AI did."
No one has ever 'earned their qualifications' re: possession of a college degree. They have merely shown a capacity and willingness to jump through the required hoops.
Do you think that you can shame people into not using shortcuts?
I want readers to look at this thread:
which has a much more coherent idea of what the problem is and what can be done about it. I want readers to look into pedagogy; check out these old-ass videos:
And just... just go watch every Ted Talk by Sugata Mitra.
I think we as a society need to be far more honest in what the goals we have are and how they're best achieved. Most of the jobs that people end up spending their lives doing should not be asking for college degrees. Most people do not want or need to go to college. Most people in college, in school at all, are there under duress and the threat of destitution.
I really want people to reblog and reply to this with thier own thoughts - I know that's no longer vogue on tumblr, but I am trying really hard to bring it back. No, the replies will NOT be opened. Fucking reblog it.
