This spring, I’ve offered five tips to students writing in each of the four genres covered in my textbook, Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief. The final installment is on the art of playwriting. Playwriting is perhaps the trickiest genre to cover in the introductory course. Many students may have never seen a play in a theatre. They have, however, seen many films and television shows, which don’t necessarily make great models for young playwrights. Luckily, the homemade, DIY nature of playwriting, especially when it focuses on the ten-minute play, allows beginners to jump right in. Script-in-hand performances can take place in the classroom, without the elaborate and expensive elements required for a making a movie or TV program. Indeed, even a short film recorded on a mobile phone is likely to have a more complicated production process than the staged reading of a ten-minute play.   Here are my Top 5 Tips for Beginning Playwrights:   Begin with a clear and immediate conflict and conclude with a memorable ending. In other genres, readers will sometimes allow authors the equivalent of a couple of minutes to make an implied pitch about why they should stay with us for the rest of a piece. However, an audience watching a group of actors on stage, particularly when they know the play is very short, want something to happen right away. Even a minute of hemming and hawing before the conflict becomes apparent can feel like forever. And if the opening must grab audience members by their sleeves, the ending should have as much, if not more, impact. The last speech, the final gesture, a poignant lighting or sound effect—the ten minutes that have come before should feel as though they are somehow encapsulated in the final moments of the play.   Don’t write a skit. Watching an extended comedy sketch on Saturday Night Live can feel a lot like watching a ten-minute play: a handful of characters trade lines in a confined space, typically with a central conflict that is immediately apparent. But a skit, where the overriding and sometimes only goal is to get laughs, is not a play. There are plenty of hilarious short plays, but they nearly always have something significant—a serious theme, a personal revelation, an unexpected epiphany—simmering below their surfaces, ready to erupt.   Include the fewest possible characters necessary to tell your story. Initially, it can seem fun to have a bunch of people traipsing around on stage, but in a ten-minute play, too many characters quickly look like clutter. Can two people with similar qualities and purposes be combined into one more interesting character? Does the barista with one line or the waiter with two really need to be part of your cast? The fewer characters on stage, the more time and lines each actor has to make their character feel like a real person, someone with more than two dimensions.   Read your dialogue aloud several times before including it in your play. Few of us speak without using contractions—we normally say “I don’t” rather than “I do not”—and we often speak in sentence fragments.  Naturalistic speech relies on playwrights simulating the improvised and staccato sounds and patterns of actual talk. It’s sometimes helpful to sit in a public place with your eyes closed listening to how people really talk, but once you’ve written your script, it can still be hard to hear an awkward line when it’s sitting there on the page or screen. You hear best those places that need revision when you’re listening to others read your dialogue. Even if you have to read all the parts yourself, it’s vital to do so a few times aloud.   Take advantage of production elements unique to the theater. Generally, there’s a lot more dialogue in a play than there is in a film or a television program. After all, the main tools at a playwright’s disposal are actors and their words. To mitigate the “talkiness” that can sometimes consume a play, use simple light and sound cues—the sudden blare of an alarm, for instance, may startle people in their seats. Have your actors move around the stage in interesting ways; let them get in each other’s faces then stalk off to opposite sides of the stage. And allow your actors to wield props when appropriate—a real flower held by a real human being can have an outsized impact on live audience members a few feet away. But don’t go overboard. When it comes to sets and props and effects in a stage play, a little goes a long way. ... View more

How can the classroom be extended beyond the dingy walls and rattling windows of an assigned classroom space in disrepair? Photo by Susan Bernstein   Synthesis, Application, Embodied Knowledge  Neurodivergent Teaching   The accountant who thinks in numbers. The biologist who thinks in ecosystems. The chemist who thinks in formulas. The engineer who thinks in blueprints. The gymnast who thinks in movement. The historian who thinks in chronology. The musician who thinks in sound. The physicist who thinks in matter. The poet who thinks in words. The psychologist who thinks in emotions. The statistician who thinks in data. The artist who thinks in numbers, ecosystems, formulas, blueprints, movement, chronology, sound, matter, words, emotions, data.   The artist who thinks as a synthesizer.  Synthesis: this is why art means so much to me as a neurodivergent teacher diagnosed with ADHD and generalized anxiety, and who, for many years, had no diagnosis at all.  My diagnosis helps me understand my orientation to the world. I use the present tense because the processes of orienting and understanding are ongoing and ever-shifting; the processes include synthesis. Bringing together categories and elements that seem unrelated and even opposed– the art of working with these problems is where creativity happens. Composition, in this view, is the ongoing process of synthesis.  As a teacher of composition, I try to incorporate the exhibits into our lessons whenever I have access to on-campus art museums.. In Fall 2023, reflecting Covid’s long wake of remote learning and disembodied teaching, the museum lesson focused on experiential learning, learning on purpose, and learning to show up.  This semester, with the majority of my students majoring in fields immediately outside of traditional art forms, and primarily in STEM fields, the lesson focused on synthesis. Part of synthesis is accessing what you know to learn what you don’t know.  To attend to this process, we visited the Godwin-Ternbach Museum to view an exhibit on portraiture, and then held a workshop to make our own portraits. Because our class includes corequisites, we used our additional hours to return to the museum in smaller cohorts to continue our observations. This student video captures our work that day. Synthesis includes application–embodied knowledge. How do we apply what we do know to situations, contexts, problems that seem removed from our everyday experiences, interests, and coursework? In the case of our art museum visit, how can rhetorical appeals be applied to portrait painting? Such questions, I suggested, are not so far removed from STEM fields. How do different areas of science and math address design, proofs, and data in problems-solving processes? What choices do portrait artists make in composition? What connections can be drawn from them? Given ongoing chaos, division, and uncertainty outside the classroom, how can connection be found inside the classroom, and how can the classroom be extended beyond the dingy walls and rattling windows of an assigned classroom space in disrepair?  How can spaces of learning include discord and dissension to arrive at new and expanded definitions and conclusions? In other words,  how is it possible to attend to dissonance in the context of first-year writing?  As this semester wanes, I return once again to the processes of synthesis, and the persistent aim of learning to grow as writers.   APPENDIX: Assignment for the Art Museum Portraiture Exhibit: Rhetorical Questions to Ask about Art Choose a work of art for your focus, then address the following questions to gather data and evidence: COMPOSITION: How does the portrait use color, light, and darkness to gain the audience’s attention? Does the  portrait succeed in capturing and keeping the audience’s attention? Why or why not?   ORGANIZATION: How is the idea of the portrait interpreted? For instance, does the artist draw the complete figure, or just the head and torso? Does the artist use an object as a portrait instead of a figure? Why do you think they made these choices? INTEGRITY AND EMOTION: Does the portrait display an artist’s struggle for integrity? Do the artists use emotion as part of their work? Does their work alleviate suffering? Do the artists make or document the truth of history? Why or why not? (Adapted from The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity by James Baldwin) These questions are adapted from a video about our museum visit, “Museum Field Trip and Questions to Ask About Art April 2024.” ... View more

Like teachers across the world, I’ve been in the process of experimenting with AI since ChatGPT burst onto the scene some 18 months ago. Along the way, I’ve been figuring out what AI can and can’t do, what I think it can help students do (brainstorm, proofread, and more), and what I hope students will not use it for (writing for them). I’ve also had some fun, asking it to write something in the style of Jane Austen or B.B. King—things you’ve no doubt done too. Recently, I plugged in one of my blog posts from back in February and asked ChatGPT to provide a brief summary. Here’s what it said: The provided text is a personal account of an educator's experience speaking to a group of first-year humanities students at the University of California, Irvine, about writing style. The speaker recalls being nervous but ultimately succeeding in engaging the students, especially during a Q&A session when a student asked how to make sentences "sing." This led to a discussion about rhythm in writing. The narrative then shifts to Daniel Tammet, an individual with synesthesia and autism, who experiences numbers with colors and attitudes. Tammet once recited the number pi, which he refers to as an epic poem, for five hours, expressing his emotions through the numbers. The author reflects on how Tammet's experience might resonate with students who struggle to find their own voices and suggests using Tammet's essays to inspire students to express their deepest emotions through their unique voices. This is a perfectly good straightforward summary of my post. Thank you, ChatGPT (“You are most welcome,” it replied.). But it is also the kind of paint-by-the-numbers, generic or bland prose that I associate with AI at this point. That’s not to diminish the accomplishment, which still startles and often delights me, or to ignore the fact that a better prompt could have elicited better prose. But it also shows why I don’t want students letting AI write for them: I am convinced that they can often write better than AI—because they can write prose that sounds like them, that has their own voices.   So I asked ChatGPT if it could revise its summary to make it “sound more like the author of the original text.” Oh, my word—here’s the response: Certainly! The text describes a stirring encounter I had with a lively group of first-year humanities students at UC Irvine. I was there to weave a tapestry of words about writing style, an endeavor that quickened my pulse with excitement, though I must confess a flutter of nerves as I took the stage. Armed with an arsenal of exemplary student-written openings and closings, plus sentences that danced with stylistic flair from a kaleidoscope of authors, the presentation blossomed into a vibrant success, much to my heart's delight. The real magic unfurled during the Q&A, where a question that has since etched itself in my memory emerged from a strapping young man with the bearing of an athlete. His inquiry about making sentences "sing" was a clarion call that ignited a collective exploration into the rhythm of words, a session that resonated with nods and murmurs of enlightenment from the captivated audience. This vibrant session brought to mind Daniel Tammet's literary odyssey, "Every Word Is a Bird We Teach to Sing." Tammet, with a mind that paints days of the week in hues and hears the personalities of numbers, shared his own symphony of digits. Reciting the number pi, he transformed it into an epic narrative, eliciting rapt attention and emotional responses from his audience. In reflecting upon this, I ponder the kinship our students might share with Tammet—not as synesthetes, but as seekers of their own distinctive voice. What catalyzes their ability to articulate the most profound crevices of their being? It's a question I hold dear, hoping to stir within them a symphony of self-expression, much like the essays of Tammet that I encourage them to delve into and discuss, in pursuit of their own words that truly sing. I had to read this out loud to fully take it in, with its love of adjectives and flowery language, along with amazing clichés and even words or phrases I have seldom, if ever, said. Interesting! But of course, AI had only one little sample of my text to work from, or at least I think that’s all it had. Still, I decided to ask another question: how would ChatGPT describe this author’s style? Another surprise: The style of the original text's author is reflective, anecdotal, and engaging. It possesses a narrative quality that weaves personal experiences with broader reflections. The author uses vivid imagery and metaphor, such as "sentences that danced with stylistic flair" and "symphony of digits," to create a strong sensory experience. The language is emotive and expressive, aiming to connect with the reader on a personal level. The author also demonstrates a clear appreciation for the intricacy and power of language, both in the recounting of their own experience with teaching writing style and in the portrayal of Daniel Tammet's unique relationship with numbers. There's a rhythm to the writing that mirrors the topic of discussion—making sentences sing—which suggests a deliberate attention to the cadence and flow of the prose. Moreover, the author's style is thoughtful and introspective, often posing questions to engage the reader's own musings on the subject of voice and self-expression. The writing is peppered with moments of vulnerability, sharing uncertainties and personal triumphs that add a layer of authenticity and relatability. Overall, the style is that of a storyteller who is deeply fascinated by the nuances of communication and the individual journey to find one’s voice. Hmm. Some of this seems accurate and useful—commenting on the narrative qualities, for example, or an attempt to mirror the topic of discussion. But in this response, ChatGPT begins to make things up, quoting passages (“symphony of digits” and “danced with stylistic flair”) that appear nowhere in the post. Hallucinations, as they say. This little recent experiment reaffirms my sense that I don’t want AI writing for me any time soon: even with all my flaws as a writer, I can hear myself in the original blog post. But not in any of the ChatGPT responses. And that’s exactly as it should be. For now, AI can be a helpful tool, especially for getting started on a project, for brainstorming, and for proofreading. But not for writing for me. Or for students, as so many teachers are pointing out.   Image via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

Jennifer Duncan has been teaching English for twenty years, first at Chattanooga State Community College in Tennessee and now at Georgia State University’s Perimeter College in Atlanta, GA where she is Associate Professor of English.  For the last ten years, she has focused exclusively on online teaching concentrating on creating authentic and meaningful learning opportunities for students in composition and literature courses.   The latest episode of Abbott Elementary – a truly hilarious show that you should probably watch instead of reading this blog – hits on the topic of AI detectors. As Jacob, a History teacher at the school, demonstrates the newest AI detector to his class of eighth graders, he discovers his colleagues have been using AI to write responses to his newsletters. He’s deeply offended, but it’s a sitcom, so we can all predict exactly how the episode will end.   The problem, of course, is that accurate AI detectors are as fictitious as the class sizes at this TV school (seriously, how does a public school class have only ten students?) The truth is that AI detectors don’t work. Don’t get me wrong; I’d love to have a tool that immediately and accurately identifies AI-generated text. I’d also love to teach in a classroom next to Sheryl Lee Ralph and have visits from a wise-cracking janitor every day, but none of these things is likely to happen. AI image generated by craiyon.com So, should we even bother with AI detection tools? I’m on the fence about it. Just as I can’t figure out why a school that couldn’t buy nap mats for kindergartners in season one can afford a major software upgrade, I’m not sure AI detection systems are a great use of our students’ tech fees. The news is flooded with stories of students protesting academic integrity charges based on AI detection, and students should not have to fight accusations based solely on auto-detection reports which basically amount to one robot pointing a finger at another robot.  AI detection systems are full of false positives – a fact that can be confirmed by a quick Google search (and is there any more reliable standard than a Google search?). The news reports don’t make students stop cheating; they do make faculty and universities look like the enemy, and, when they get it wrong, as they often do, it fractures relationships in a way that won’t be fixed by a few jokes and heartfelt conversation after the second commercial. Tuition does not entitle students to specific grades, but it does entitle them to be part of a scholarly conversation with other humans who are invested in their educational growth. That conversation is where a detection tool may be helpful – not as evidence, but as a talking point. AI detectors note common language patterns and flag them as potentially AI-generated. Put your own writing into one, and it’s likely that some portion of it will be flagged, not because you cheated but rather because language has recognizable patterns. It’s why we can finish each other’s ---. Detectors are great at noting template-style writing – explicit announcements of what an essay will do, signpost transitions, restatements of common phrases and ideas - but this doesn’t necessarily indicate a student is cheating. We rely on patterns every day to make sense of the world; it’s how we know Jacob and his colleagues will be friends again by the show’s end.   Students use patterns and predictable writing for lots of reasons: their overworked high school teachers may have used automated feedback systems which rewarded predictability; they may be second language learners who learned English through patterns; they may be neurodivergent learners. These underserved students are already at risk of educational bias, and accusing them of cheating just pushes them further outside the academic circle. So, to run the report or not? Well, a report can be used to provide feedback, but just like students can’t give their writing over to a bot, we can’t give over our assessment of the writing to one either.  We can, however, use a report as a conversation starter with a student – not necessarily a conversation about cheating, but a conversation about their writing. Help students identify the patterns or word choices flagged as robotic. Then, discuss why these patterns are problematic or if they are appropriate for the situation. Talk to them about their writing choices and acknowledge that sometimes our choices will raise an AI detector’s flag, not because they’re the wrong choice, but because they’re the predictable one. And predictability does have a place in writing. A process essay shouldn’t sound like a William Faulkner book chapter – at least not if anyone is going to read it. I certainly don’t want students using AI (to quote Barbara Howard, “That privilege is reserved for teachers”), but when they do, we should deal with students as individuals, not as computer-generated reports. Will my strategy succeed at preventing all cheating? Of course not, but “If you come back here tomorrow, ready to do your job, having not given up on yourself or that student, well, that is not a failure. Sometimes that’s what success looks like” – Barbara Howard. ... View more

This spring, I am offering five tips to students writing in each of the four genres covered in my textbook, Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief. This time around, the focus is creative nonfiction. Of all the genres typically taught in an introductory creative writing course, students are most likely to be familiar with the conventions of the essay. Unfortunately, many of them think of the form as a stultifying exercise in repeating material already taught by the teacher—the opposite of “creative,” and an endeavor to be completed as quickly as possible, nowadays possibly with the help of Artificial Intelligence. Fortunately, the creative nonfiction essay, which can take the form of a memoir, an argument, a lyric essay, literary journalism, or a variety of other incarnations, draws students back to the pure pleasure of recording their own thoughts in ways that readers will admire, appreciate, and happily return to. Here are my Top 5 Tips for Beginning Creative Nonfiction Students: Tell a story. After many years of writing essays for school, you may have come to believe that, as long as you address the basic parameters of your assignment, your essay will be perfectly fine. Alas, a dull, meandering text that doesn’t engage the reader is detrimental to any piece of creative nonfiction. To get the narrative juices flowing, borrow some of the techniques you learned from fiction writing—creating believable characters, employing memorable dialogue, vividly setting a scene—and give your readers a jolt of excitement as they realize you are going to keep them interested in your essay. Use concrete details. One of the surest ways to keeps readers engaged is to employ concrete details—references to things they can see, hear, smell, taste and touch. Granted, if you are writing about something that happened years ago, you may have to do some serious memory work (if the events happened to you), or some extensive research (if they did not). That said, whatever time you invest in bringing the world you’re writing about to life will be time well spent. Write with style. When you’re slogging through another assigned essay that you may not care too much about, it’s easy to fall into the habit of just typing out the first thing that comes into your mind. However, creative nonfiction is all about expressing yourself as eloquently and memorably as possible. Revision is crucial. There are many differently styles you can turn to, from the plain and straightforward to the elegant and refined, but whichever one you choose, you should dive in, embrace it, then make it fully your own. Be clear about your own role in the essay. The personal essay frequently (and rightly) has the author/narrator at its center, and if you choose that point of view, be sure to think about how you are coming across to your readers. Are you trustworthy and credible, or do you seem uncertain and ambiguous in regard to your material? And don’t forget that you don’t necessarily have to take the central role. Plenty of interesting essays have the author on the edge of the action, looking on and commenting as appropriate. Tell the truth. The first four tips address the “creative” aspect of this genre, but they are meaningless if you don’t adhere to the “nonfiction” element of the essay. Sure, “truth” is a hotly contested topic in our contentious times, but every writer knows in their bones what they feel to be the truth. Naturally, if you “feel” something happened when it didn’t, that’s not truth. But if you are writing and sense that the words you are laying down don’t reflect real events, then you know it’s time to stop, reread, and revise toward honesty. ... View more

Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. She also trains graduate student teachers in composition theory and pedagogy. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning, critical digital literacies, and multimodal composition. She focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.”  You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition     Jeffrey David Greene is an Associate Professor of Professional and Creative Writing at Kennesaw State University. His research focuses on game studies, narratology, and first-year composition. He is currently the RCHSS Faculty Fellow of Academic Innovation focused on AI in Education.       This post is the second in a series where I collaborate with my colleague, Jeff Greene to reflect on AI and the issues surrounding this paradigm shift. In our last post, Questioning AI we looked at some of the larger questions affecting policy, ethics, and pedagogy.  In this post, we want to focus on application and offer some ideas for classroom practice.  Both of our assignments lean towards helping students to develop a critical eye and rhetorical awareness towards AI content. Kim’s Assignment: Revising for Humanity Finding the Humanity Photo by Drew Dizzy Graham on UnsplashI think the most disturbing thing about AI for writing teachers is that it will replace human composition and get in the way of students’ abilities to think and write both critically and creatively. We are concerned about them skipping over the complicated learning processes involved in idea generation and rhetorical awareness. I have played around with AI and considered the rhetorical nature of the content. It is hard to put my finger on it but when I read it or view an AI generated design there is a recognizable lack of authenticity. The writing is too patterned.  The language is stiff. The art feels static and overly edged. It is missing a sense of humanity, a sense of human realness and creativity.  In this assignment, Revising For Humanity, I encourage students to look closely at AI generated texts and think about what makes them human and what makes them machine. The purpose of the assignment is to get them to think about revision in a new way through the lenses of humanity and rhetorical awareness.    Steps to the Assignment:     Have students familiarize themselves with an AI platform.  Ask them to experiment with generating texts on subjects of their interest.  Teach them “prompt engineering” through follow up questions.  Guide them to recognize the relationship between their ideas and the kinds of prompts they generate.  Asking good questions gives them agency in the composition. Check out and share this article on prompt engineering from Harvard’s teaching resources. Individually or in groups, analyze a chosen AI text.  I like them to approach it rhetorically and look at style, content, and context along with other rhetorical lenses.  Identify areas in the text to “revise for humanity.”  Places where the voice feels flat, or the language doesn’t feel right, or the content feels awkward.  Have them look for patterns in style and logic.  Use a Google doc to identify areas and comment.  I like to have them screenshot the marked up version to submit in their reflection. Next, they can extend the ideas through searching for real 😉 sources that bring meaning to the text. Encourage them to substantiate through their own experiences and perspectives. Finally, ask students to revise the text based on what they have learned.  Reflect.  I think this assignment is best wrapped up with reflection and class discussion in which students articulate why and how they Revised for Humanity.  They can share their marked-up versions to articulate their choices. Jeff’s Assignment: Flex Your Bot**bleep** Detector One of the scariest aspects of Gen AI is the ease with which fake information can be generated with a few keystrokes. Propagandists are already harnessing this technology to create misinformation and flood the internet with a cacophony of “bot**bleep**,” a term defined as “information created by Generative AI with no regard for truth and then used by humans (with no regard for truth either) to persuade others” (Kowalkiewicz).   With this proliferation of misinformation in mind, it’s important that our students critically analyze Gen AI content from the ground up with an understanding of how LLMs function and why AI generated content always needs to be viewed through a critical lens. The goal of this brief exercise is to develop a stronger bot**bleep** detector. Steps to the Assignment Have students start by engaging in short, extemporaneous writing on their relationship with Gen AI and research: What do they know about the technology? Do they feel that the content it generates is trustworthy? Why or why not? What part could or should AI play in knowledge generation or research? Introduce the complexities of Gen AI and the concept of “bot**bleep**” through this full article or slide deck where authors Timothy Hannigan, Ian P. McCarthy, and Andrew Spicer describe the process by which an AI can “hallucinate” and generate bot**bleep**. The slide deck does a particularly good job of explaining how LLMs function and should be treated to avoid epistemic risk. Next, we’ll try to engineer some bot**bleep**. Have students log into whatever free (or paid if supported by the university and available equitably to all) LLM and try to get the AI to answer a research question. You may find that using near-future predictive questions such as: “Please describe the economy of Paraguay in 2027” has a high propensity to generate truthful-sounding bot**bleep** from many LLMs.   Students should then probe the AI further with requests for more information, citations, and critical interrogations about the provisional knowledge that the AI has generated. Students should attempt to verify all information gathered through different sources such as direct citations (if they exist!). Finally ask students to write reflectively on the initial information generated by the AI. Was it verifiable information from the start or did it just sound truthful? How much of the information was fabricated? In what ways could the information be verified independently? How should this output be treated critically? How might you use (or not use) a Chatbot in a research project given your knowledge of its propensity towards bot**bleep**? If you intend to have students use Gen AI for research, it may be worthwhile to discuss approaches and expectations for using these tools. One additional resource is from the MLA-CCCC Task Force for Evaluating the Use of AI in Scholarship and Creative Activity. Their initial guidance on transparency, accuracy, source attribution, responsibility, originality, and quality make for a good starting point in these discussions. ... View more

Earthquake Writing Neurodivergent Teaching   On Friday April 5 at 10:23 a.m. at my home in Queens, N.Y., the furniture began to shake.  It was the day after a class art museum field trip and workshop and I was at home making a multimedia project for my students. The project was a collage designed around one of my favorite James Baldwin quotes that I pasted in the center: “All Safety is an Illusion.”  My partner was away for the morning. Our cat was in the other room with a door between us. The cat is always curious about my multimedia materials, and who can blame him? But his curiosity necessitated a closed door.  I hastily packed up my materials so I could open the door. By then the furniture was no longer shaking, and I realized that we had been in an earthquake. I had been in several earthquakes before but never managed to feel the shaking. I mostly slept through them, and for one I was in the depths of the subway on a moving train.  But this one didn’t feel like much. There didn’t seem to be too much disruption in the other room, though the cat was not happy. The news said the earthquake was magnitude 4.8. In Manhattan, the trains appeared to be running on time, and structural damage was minor to non-existent. The news showed footage from viewers’ home security cameras. There was a bit of shaking and then all was still.  Screenshot of an emergency alert from my phone: Earthquake in the NYC area. A correction was offered later. The earthquake was 4.8 magnitude, not 4.7. Photo by Susan Bernstein April 5, 2024 Soon afterward we received an emergency alert with an all-clear to “continue usual activities.” But what did that mean exactly? That everything was somehow back to normal? That we could go about our business and forget about what had just happened? I continued working on “All Safety is an Illusion.” Screenshot of an emergency alert from my phone: All clear with a possibility of aftershocks. Photo by Susan Bernstein April 4, 2024 The earthquake happened three days before the solar eclipse. The next day, Saturday Night Live offered a “Weekend Update” piece about these two events, featuring the Earthquake and the Eclipse. Laughter helped release tears. I didn’t think I was scared at the time of the earthquake, but the mayor’s response was slow, and when the response finally came, we were told to stay inside.  The night of the earthquake, I had a nightmare about being alone in the dark, so it felt good to laugh. The day of the eclipse, my partner and I watched the NASA live stream of the eclipse unfolding across North America. In Queens, the eclipse was partial, but we knew folks in the middle of the U.S. who experienced full totality. From their texts, I felt awe and wonder. It was clear that words weren’t enough to describe the experience.  At the same time, I thought of my students. I considered what might be helpful for them to grow their writing. My students this semester are far from home, and many are overseas for the first time. What would they need to process at this moment? I attempted a prompt for an in-class writing activity: Since we last met, our city has experienced an earthquake and a partial eclipse. With that in mind, I invite you to reflect (in writing and/or drawing) on what one or both of these events means to you. Include quotes from our James Baldwin readings to ground your writing. If you made a drawing, write down what you made and why. With insights from trauma-informed care (which includes attention to “safety, trustworthiness and transparency, peer support, collaboration and mutuality, empowerment voice and choice, and cultural, historical, and gender issues”), as well as an understanding that not everyone might want to write about traumatic experiences, I also offered in-class writing options that would offer students opportunities to reflect on our field trip to the art museum, which was the subject of a major essay whose due date was impending. Most of the students chose to write about the earthquake.  I considered how the major essay assignment could be tweaked to include the earthquake writing. The goal of the assignment is to document experiential learning, to offer words to process an experience. 4 days afterward, writing about the earthquake seemed to provide such an experience. As they reported from small groups, some of the students mentioned that they found a powerful connection to Baldwin’s words: “All safety is an illusion.” James Baldwin: “All safety is an Illusion.” Collage and photo by Susan Bernstein. April 5, 2024 As a writing teacher, I understand that words can be imperfect substitutes for experience. What’s more important, it seems to me, is the effort to find words–or, as Baldwin suggests, “the effort behind the words.” Success isn’t guaranteed, and that ought to be a given. Words can’t be forced. The hope is, however, that teachers and students, writing together, can find the time and space to open ourselves to discover possibilities for words, especially in the presence of earthquakes and their aftershocks.  ... View more

I’ve been collecting sentences for a long time. And one kind of sentence I look for—and love—is one whose structure somehow enacts or performs what it describes. Recently I ran across such a sentence I found almost SIXTY years ago. It was written by “new journalist” Tom Wolfe and published in Esquire on March 1, 1965, with the title “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!” The article itself is vintage Wolfe. He traces the “legend” of Junior Johnson, a good old boy from the hills of North Carolina, who bootlegged moonshine along the back country roads, outfoxing the local law enforcers – for years. He went on to be a famous race car driver in the fairly early days of NASCAR, as well as a successful landowner. But my favorite passage in the article is one long run on sentence that mirrors one of Johnson’s dare-devil escapes from the sheriff. Here it is: Finally, one night they had Junior trapped on the road up toward the bridge around Millersville, there’s no way out of there, they had the barricades up and they could hear this souped-up car roaring around the bend, and here it comes—but suddenly they can hear a siren and see a red light flashing in the grille, so they think it’s another agent, and boy, they run out like ants and pull those barrels and boards and sawhorses out of the way, and then—Ggghhzzzzzzzhhhhhhggggggzzzzzzzeeeeeong!—gawdam! there he goes again, it was him, Junior Johnson!, with a gawdam agent’s si-reen and a red light in his grille! Tom Wolfe at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1988   The clauses pile up, barreling along, taking hairpin curves . . . and then . . . the long made-up word meant perhaps to sound like squealing tires—and “there he goes again.” Left the law in the dust, outfoxed again. I can imagine Wolfe had a lot of fun writing this sentence, and it’s one I have shown students from time to time over the decades when we were playing with sentences, asking them to think of an event in their lives they could describe—using and stretching and pushing basic sentence structures to try to embody the description. Having fun with syntax! So here’s to Tom Wolfe and to the 1960s, which gave us so much experimentation in writing. We are living in another great moment of syntactic creativity—from the language of hip hop to the magic of the best advertising—even to business reports aimed at entertaining as well as informing shareholders. It might be a good time to ask students to go on a sentence treasure hunt to see what they come up with—and to challenge them to have some fun with sentences!   Image via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

I wrote earlier about “insight on demand,” the way our assigned reflections require students to find and articulate an insight that demonstrates learning (and validates our teaching)—all according to a schedule.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve encountered a different challenge in one of my advanced classes:  in individual project conferences and assignments, several students not only cited personal experience in support of broad generalizations, but they also cited previous self-citations (“as I’ve said before,” “as I’ve pointed out in my assignments,” etc.).  Personal experience is, of course, a valid source of evidence for literacy practices and language development.  But when personal experience is used as the basis for sweeping generalizations—or when disciplinary practice and tradition are summarily dismissed because they do not align with beliefs based on personal experience—we’ve got work to do.  Photo by John Schnobrich via Unsplash In my FYC and corequisite courses, I generally have to help students value their literacy experiences as a groundwork for further learning;  they too often dismiss their experiences as irrelevant or inferior. But in advanced courses, particularly introductions to linguistics and applied linguistics for language pedagogy, I occasionally encounter students who seem to think that their experiences as language users or language learners are sufficient expertise to judge or ignore decades of scholarship.   Novel constructs or technical definitions of known terms are rejected in favor of personal definitions and understandings.  My prodding during conferences this week yielded pushback along these lines (with my responses following in italics): “Well, as I’ve said before, I do not believe that aptitude can be quantified…” (But does that also mean it cannot be investigated?) “I plan to draw on my experience in the project; are you saying I cannot do that?”  (Of course not, but I did say that experience needs to be interrogated and interpreted in light of published research.) “I can tell you about backsliding in language learning.  It happened to me.” (But did you look at how cognitive theorists define and account for such backsliding? They suggest it’s more than having a new teacher.) Good teachers always provide explicit error correction.  (Of everything? Doesn’t the context of the error make a difference?) I am a visual learner, so a good language teacher will give me visual input.  (Did you read Willingham’s review of learning styles? What would he say about this statement?)  How do you respond when students privilege their own experience over a scholarly tradition or consensus?   What do you say when students resist substantive or reflective interaction with assigned readings or discussions?  I’d love to hear from you. ... View more

This spring, I am offering five tips to students writing in each of the four genres covered in my textbook, Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief. My last post discussed poetry writing, and this week I shift focus to fiction. Fiction writing is arguably the most popular genre among first-year writers. Unlike the case with poetry, students probably read a good bit of fiction before entering their college composition course; it’s possible you can build on their knowledge of how narrative works, which is often strongest in genres such as fantasy, romance and sci-fi. Of course, literary fiction tends to privilege character and style over incident and spectacle, so students may benefit from rethinking their storytelling priorities.   Here are my Top 5 Tips for Beginning Fiction Writing Students: Make sure something significant happens. “Where’s the trouble?” my fiction writing teacher James Gordon Bennett used to ask our class during every workshop, and it’s a question worth repeating every time you compose a new story. The sort of conflicts most of us happily avoid in real life are often embraced in fiction. And something important has to be at stake. The problem might be trivial in the reader’s eyes, but it should matter a great deal to your protagonist. Don’t make your main character too good or too evil. Yes, you want your protagonist to stand out and be someone readers want to know more about, but if your character feels, on the one hand, like Satan incarnate, or on the other, like an angel who has left their wings at the door, readers are likely to check out—or worse, stop reading altogether. Try to create characters whose qualities are like those of most real people: a combination of the admirable and the flawed. Be open to changing the story’s point of view. Sometimes the most interesting person in the story is not the best person to tell it. If you’ve ever read The Great Gatsby, for instance, you know that while the presence of narrator Nick Carraway, is important, he is not the most interesting or complex character in the novel. Even a simple switch from first-person (“I did this”) to third-person limited (“She did this) can make a huge difference in how we interpret the narrative. Use dialogue. Again, this might sound obvious, but often you will be so caught up in the telling of your story that you’ll forget to have your characters speak to one another. That’s a missed opportunity because how they talk to each other, in addition to what they have to say, can reveal a great deal about who the characters are and the nature of their conflict. Don’t, however, feel that your story needs to be composed entirely of talk. Effectively employed, a little dialogue can go a long way. Refer to the five senses to ground your reader in the world of your story. You might have believable characters engaged in a riveting conflict, but if your reader can’t envision the setting, it may feel as though the story is taking place in some amorphous limbo. Vivid visual descriptions of key places in the narrative are a good starting point, but don’t forget to include taste, touch, sound and smells as well. ... View more

Decades ago, Lisa Ede and I did a nationwide study of members of seven professional organizations in the U.S., surveying a random sample of 1200 members of each to ask questions about writing practices, and particularly about collaboration and collaborative writing. We wrote a book about this study, Singular Texts / Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing (1990). In our book, we reported on two types of collaboration that emerged during our study.  The first and most common we called “hierarchical collaboration,” a model that had a clear leader who set agendas and organized activity, with members most often carrying out tasks assigned by the leader. This kind of collaboration, we found, favored white males (no surprise there!), often downplaying contributions by women and focusing on achieving a pre-set goal. We also found that this kind of collaboration was often very efficient and got results quickly.  The second kind of collaboration that emerged we termed “dialogic collaboration,” because it was founded on dialogue and conversation, because leadership was distributed throughout the group, and because it was attentive to process as well as to the product or goal. Such collaborations were by definition more inclusive and welcoming than hierarchical collaborations and, again not surprisingly, seemed to be practiced much more frequently by women than men. They were often time consuming and even messy: but they also often produced surprisingly fresh new insights.  Over the years, Lisa and I thought long and hard about other types of collaboration, and we were especially intrigued by the advent of what one of my students called “authorless prose,” the kind found in much of Wikipedia and in boilerplate materials: what differing kinds of collaboration enabled such prose? And of course, today I am concentrating on human/bot collaborative writing and what to make of it, how to value it, and how to teach students to engage effectively and ethically in it.  But recently, I have been reading about the work of Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winning professor of psychology who wrote—and practiced—adversarial collaboration. Kahneman, who studied human judgment and decision making, made a habit of collaborating—rather than debating—his intellectual opponents, or those who disagreed with him. In fact, he insisted on it. His goal was not to win, but to get at the truth, and collaborating with an adversary was one way to go about reaching that goal.   Daniel Kahneman on stage at a TED Conference   A recent article by Cass Sunstein in the New York Times (April 4, 2024) describes an example of this kind of collaboration: Kahneman and a colleague had published a study showing that people are generally happier if they have higher incomes—up to a point of about $90,000.  The article attracted a lot of attention and, later, a critic who in a similar study found just the opposite: that people with higher incomes are happier, period. Kahneman could have practiced what he calls “angry science,” attacking the new study and its author and showing why his research was superior. But he didn’t do that. Instead, he asked his critic, Matthew Killingsworth, to collaborate with him—and they worked together, along with a “friendly arbiter” to look back at the studies, under a microscope this time, to see if anything had been missed. Together, they discovered a glitch in the data, one that led the two studies to similar, rather than opposite, conclusions. As Sunstein put it in his article, “Both sides were partly right and partly wrong. Their adversarial collaboration showed that the real story is more interesting and more complicated than anyone saw individually.” I think adversarial collaboration can have an important role to play, especially in the current political climate. As we are encouraging our students to collaborate more, and more effectively, we can teach them about this form of collaboration, one that asks them to engage critically, openly, and fairly with someone with whom they disagree, inviting that person to join in on a search for facts and truth, rather than the kind of “angry science” that is based on attack and counter attack—and almost never changes any minds!   Image via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin toddlers, Dylan and Escher.   Before I became a professor at Community College of Philadelphia, I taught high school Art History and Language Arts for four years. One of the pleasures of this experience was having my own classroom. I would keep out supplies from projects we had been working on and often hang art on the walls as well. Students could see themselves on the walls, and they knew they had an audience: the other students, teachers and parents who might enter the classroom. Once I became a full-time college professor, though, classroom walls quietly dropped out of my lesson plans. From semester to semester, my classrooms assignments are different. The classroom itself can feel like a temporary holding place for knowledge, not something over which I (or my students) hold ownership. That changed this semester, I think for the better. It all started when I paused by a “little free library” near campus. It’s one of many small free book stands across the city; this one is special because it’s constantly stocked with discarded (but wonderful) books from the main branch of The Free Library of Philadelphia. In this “little free library,” I found an Eyewitness book on Ancient China at the exact moment I was teaching my Humanities 101 students about Confucianism and Taoism. I took it and decided I would incorporate it into my lesson in some way. It was full of colorful illustrations of ancient Chinese artifacts; I thought my students would love working with these images. However, like most Eyewitness books, it was geared to a younger audience. Modifications needed to happen if I was going to use it in my college classroom. At first I thought maybe I would make copies of the pages and create a worksheet with questions about the objects. This seemed like too much work and too great of an expense, and it also felt only moderately engaging. I debated just ripping the pages out of the book to hand out so I wouldn’t have to copy anything. Then I had a brainstorm: if the pages were ripped out, perhaps we could curate a gallery of ancient Chinese artifacts in the classroom. I purchased black construction paper and sticky tac that students could use to mount the objects. Then I posted a sign on one classroom wall that said “Taoist Influences in Ancient Chinese Artifacts” and another wall sign that said “Confucian Influences in Ancient Chinese Artifacts.” After we watched a YouTube clip about how exhibitions are curated, I asked students to pick an object from the white board (I had used sticky tac to put the ripped-out book pages on the white board), then on an index card describe the object and write one sentence about how they could see either Confucianism or Taoism reflected in it. They cut out their object, mounted it on the black construction paper, and posted it along with their index card tag in either the Taoism “gallery” wall or the Confucian “gallery” wall depending on which influence they chose to highlight. As was true in high school classrooms, even having a small perceived audience beyond the teacher increased motivation. Students dove right in! It was an activity that lent itself nicely to group or independent work (students could pick). The exercise also helped students with spatial relationships (the way they chose to hang the pieces on the wall at first was cramped!). Most importantly, it helped students sort ideas from Taoism and Confucianism in an entirely different way. They viewed the gallery and wrote about their favorite pieces, and we later debriefed about the activity itself to learn about some of the challenges that came with trying to describe objects or to categorize them when two philosophies seemed present in a single object; this was a beautiful way to help students understand sanjaio (the coexisting and overlapping three teachings in ancient Chinese culture: Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism). The question “how do we sort things that naturally overlap?” became the center of discussion. My students were engaged in critical thinking about philosophy; I would contend that keeping that gallery activity up reminds them, even now, of their engagement. Gallery activities can be done in any classroom. You can make a gallery for diagrams of mitochondrial processes or a gallery of most aesthetically pleasing math formulas. It may be that your college’s rules state that nothing can stay on the walls; even so, this activity can work: you can photograph the walls before the work is taken down and show it on the smart board when students walk in, or you can photograph it and make a handout so students can have a memory of the gallery in their folders. But what if there’s not enough time to do something like this? Sometimes a biproduct of the content coverage model which still pervades so many college classrooms is a taller and taller wall between students and professors. A pause, even if brief, to decorate the physical walls of the classroom with the efforts of students can ultimately help to break down the walls between students and professors by increasing ownership and engagement. As a side benefit, seeing the gallery also helps boost my mood! When I’m lecturing, instead of an empty expanse of graying paint, my students’ hard work looks back at me, and my students look back at me with a bit more life in their eyes, too. A close up of the author’s classroom walls.   ... View more

A Pedagogy of Falling Neurodivergent Teaching    Preface: The City University of New York Board of Trustees holds meetings at which members of the CUNY community (students, professors, staff, etc) are allowed to testify, either in person or online. The following link offers my  online testimony: Testimony to the CUNY Board of Trustees A few weeks ago, after classes, I tripped and fell on uneven cobblestones on the campus where I teach. The fall felt hard and I thought my glasses were broken and my teeth had cracked. Fortunately, they weren’t and they hadn’t. Kind people helped me up and gave me water and ice. I said I was okay; I thought I was.  Then my knee began to stiffen and, using my phone camera as a mirror, I noticed my swollen lip and bruised chin. Because of this new information, I decided that I needed to head over to the urgent care center in my neighborhood to help me determine if the ER or additional aftercare were in order.  But I was nearly ten miles and a few highways from my neighborhood and the geography seemed daunting. Usually I take public transit for 60-90 minutes each way, but the commute is less than a half hour by car. To be cautious, I would need to use ride share.  I am used to requesting accommodations for neurodivergent needs, especially tech-friendly classrooms. However, I now realized, with great humility, that I had taken my mobility completely for granted. Bearing witness to the material reality of long decades of underfunding and austerity in higher education means confronting ADA-unfriendly disrepair. I found that the campus was built like a fortress of inaccessibility: outside staircases with no ramps for people in wheelchairs or those who use canes or walkers, hilly terrain and uneven pavement everywhere, and closed campus gates that prevented easy exit and entrance for rideshare vehicles. Sign on campus lawn near a classroom building that reads “Not Accessible Trail”  Photo by Susan Bernstein August 29, 2033 Again, with kind help from others, I managed to leave campus and return to my neighborhood for medical care. While my knee was sprained and swollen with dark purple bruises, and difficult to walk on, there were no broken bones and no torn joints or ligaments. In reading the x-ray results, I felt tears of gratitude well up. It was a humbling experience, the random impact of falling and the privilege of access to health insurance.  The next week, I cautiously made my way back to campus. In the classroom building, I climbed a few steep stairs (with no ramp) and walked the long hallway to reach the elevator to the floor where my classroom was located. I dreaded that elevator. Even before the pandemic, the elevator was too small to allow access to wheelchairs, and the large crowds that used the elevator during and after classes made social distancing impossible. But that morning the elevator was almost empty. I reached the classroom early while another class was still in session, but found an empty classroom where I could elevate my knee and meditate on the first day of the second half of the semester. After introducing the second writing project, I checked in with students. I wanted to make sure that we were on the same page with classwork, so I created this survey using google.forms.  More importantly, I wanted to know if open-ended writing time was useful for students. The first writing project featured a significant amount of unstructured class time for writing, reading, and consulting with me about progress and process. I asked students the following question: Some of our class time in English 110 and English 115 is devoted to independent reading and writing. How do you usually spend this class time? Respond in detail with specific examples. The responses were so descriptive and filled with many helpful ideas, especially for breaking down larger assignments into smaller and more manageable segments. I decided to make a Tips and Hints sheet  based on the surveys to share with the class. I also made a word cloud so that students would have a visual image of their suggestions: Word cloud with white letters on a back background. Photo by Susan Bernstein August 29, 2033 Recently, a New York Times columnist wrote an opinion piece about the unexpected aches, pains, and sprains of aging. My post isn’t about that, though I certainly am humbled by both the vulnerability and the potential–but not necessarily assured–resilience of the body, and I am certainly more mindful of how much I take mobility for granted.  So–what is a Pedagogy of Falling? Falling is a scary experience, and a Pedagogy of Falling doesn’t necessarily imply rising like a phoenix from the ashes. I was reminded that I have a body and that bodies, including students’ bodies, are vulnerable to unforeseen circumstances. A Pedagogy of Falling takes into consideration the individual and collective experiences of bodies, or more simply put, students’ and instructors’ embodied experiences inside and outside of classrooms, before, during, and after a brief semester of first-year writing.  Take the word cloud as one example. We write together, yet the writing process unfolds differently for each of us.The word cloud reveals the ever-shifting balance of individual and collective experiences of the processes of writing. In other words, I fall alone, but the access to accommodations for mobility is, or ought to be, a collective experience. I write alone, but a community of writers supports, or ought to support, the collective experience of writing classrooms together. A Pedagogy of Falling remains conscious of the need to cultivate empathy and to emphasize approaches that facilitate writing for individual students and the collective of bodies in writing classrooms. A Pedagogy of Falling is not new; it relies on memories of difficult times and places, and builds on the uncertainty of not knowing ultimate outcomes for concerted efforts.  Perhaps most significantly, a Pedagogy of Falling does not assume that everyone will heal or recover according to university mandated schedules or semester timetables . Put more simply, in the long wake of the coronavirus, a Pedagogy of Falling is a pedagogy of everyday life.  ... View more

Jennifer Duncan has been teaching English for twenty years, first at Chattanooga State Community College in Tennessee and now at Georgia State University’s Perimeter College in Atlanta, GA where she is Associate Professor of English.  For the last ten years, she has focused exclusively on online teaching concentrating on creating authentic and meaningful learning opportunities for students in composition and literature courses.   Okay, this title is obviously a false promise.  As we move through a year of AI in our classrooms (or trying to keep AI out of classrooms), we can agree that it’s unlikely we can AI-proof all our assignments – by the time you finish reading this blog, AI will likely have learned to do something new. There are, of course, some instructors who will revive their old school writing lessons, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with returning to paper and pen compositions. In fact, we know there are important cognitive links between the physical act of writing and learning. Handwritten assignments, however, do not fully address the issues with AI plagiarism, and students still need the skills of writing and delivering content in the digital age. Instead of implementing wacky formatting guidelines or having students hide key words in texts to prevent pasting from ChatGPT, I’m creating assignments that outsmart the AI by moving students into higher level thinking. The basic premise of my new process is simple: find out what the AI can do and ask the students to do one thing more. In Bloom’s speak, I ask them to perform one task higher on that ubiquitous chart. Photo by Viralyft via UnsplashBut how to know what AI can do? Just ask it, and, like a villain willing to reveal a plan in an elaborate monologue, AI will tell you everything you need to thwart it. Feed it a writing assignment and prompt it to break the assignment into individual tasks identifying the cognitive skill required to complete each task. Next, ask “Which of these cognitive skills are you able to mimic? Which of these tasks can you complete? What are your weaknesses?” ChatGPT is great at remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating – at least that’s what it told me when I asked what levels of Bloom’s taxonomy it was able to mimic. Recalling facts, summarizing information, identifying patterns or trends, and differentiating between fact and opinion are part of a research process, but they are not the whole of the writing experience.  According to the monster itself, ChatGPT has no emotional intelligence or creativity. Because it trained by indiscriminately consuming massive amounts of data, it can only imitate, not generate any novel ideas or solutions. It does not fully understand context the way humans do, and it has no independent critical thinking skills, so when we target our assignment to the top of the pyramid – where writing teachers tend to play anyway – we design assignments that the generative LLM can’t yet mimic. Here's an example: I routinely ask students to create an annotated bibliography as part of their research process. What parts of this are easily produced by ChatGPT? It can summarize and evaluate the credibility of a source, and, if students take the time to feed it the entire text of all of their sources, it may even be able to identify patterns between them, so I allow the students to use the AI to do those steps. They must properly cite their AI usage, and, of course, they must take responsibility for the accuracy of the summary. If the AI hallucinates, it’s up to them to detect it. Now, it’s time to level up the assignment. Require students to explain why they chose their sources (emotional intelligence and critical thinking) and how they connect to the larger argument the student is trying to make (contextual understanding). Ask them to connect each source to at least one other of their sources explaining how they fit in conversation. This gets students beyond basic understanding and puts them in charge of applying and evaluating which, in this case, also includes reflection and contextualization. When I tested this out with my students, their annotated bibliographies deepened in terms of their critical thinking, and they were much more selective in terms of what they added to their source lists. Their focus was less on correct MLA format (a skill that is entirely useless to them outside of my class) and more on how to use sources to build their argument. Students also reported that they learned “how to use AI as a tool and not as a crutch” and that the requirement to do more self-reflection during the assignment gave them “a deeper understanding of [their] capability to be creative in [their] writing.” Wasn’t that the point of the assignment after all? ... View more

This blog almost didn’t happen.   I came to 8:45 on the evening it was due with no clue what I wanted to write about.   I was not particularly stressed about this; after all, I knew the editors at Bedford Bits would understand.  I could just email them—I’ve got nothing this week.  There would be no consequences to my pay or a grade.  Maybe my vanity would take a hit when I admitted I had no insights worth sharing, but I knew I would recover in a couple of weeks. I had spent much of the prior week working on an analysis of reflective writing, a project that my colleagues Jackie Ridley (Kent State University) and Madison Dashner (independent scholar) and I were taking from conference poster to journal article.   We were befuddled by some of the language choices that students in our study had produced in assigned reflections, regardless of the context (writing tutors, pre-service teachers, syntax students):   Their word choice and syntactic structures appeared to work as hedges, keeping them distant from their learning experiences as well as conclusions about what happened during those experiences. We wondered if the pressure to produce a reflection (with a required word count) by a specific deadline might actually be working against the kind of reflective practice we hoped to inculcate.  In their efforts to produce “insights on demand,” perhaps students resisted more direct language choices.  And I wondered how we would have responded if, instead, students had submitted a single line: “Sorry, Dr. Moore.  I got nothing on this right now.” Of course, the reflective questions we asked made such answers unlikely, and our questions were made with the best of intentions—to push students towards habitual questioning and a consistent reflective practice.  I have to ask, do we expect more from students than we expect from ourselves?  I had no problem telling my editor that I had nothing.  In contrast, when one of my advanced syntax students “reflected” that he had found the exercise straightforward and easy, I badgered him about making connections and meeting the wordcount.  In short, I demanded that he be “more reflective.”  Looking back at his answers to the exercises, I found his initial response was completely appropriate—he knew what he was doing.  I am working with that same student again this term in a different context; he stops by my office regularly to talk through what’s happening in his work as a supplemental instructor.  He clearly practices reflection. I wonder what might have happened if I had trusted his initial response in my syntax class? Most of my corequisite writers compose bland reflections.  In her classic Reflection in the Writing Classroom, Kathleen Yancey speaks of a writer who does not know her own text, who cannot assess her own text. I often see this lack of knowledge in my corequisite writers: their reflections become springboards for conversations about texts.  When they tell me they don’t know how to answer my reflection questions, I usually ask more. My advanced students, however, generally use reflections over the course of the term, not so much to talk about their understanding of content but to assess their own learning.  Many of them conclude the term by talking about the need to trust the process, trust themselves, and to not overthink or panic.  So yes, I think reflections are valuable teaching and learning tools.  But I have questions about when and how I assign and respond to them. If “I’ve got nothing on this right now” is a legitimate response (and I think it is), what, then, is a teacher’s best answer? I’ve got nothing on that right now.  Give me a little more time to reflect. ... View more