(Re) Checking Yourself

The last week I noticed that I was starting my classes of 30 with 5 students. Students were then coming late, up to 30 minutes of a 50 minute class, if they showed at all. I received a couple of emails about absences, and telling me to send them what they missed. A student took a phone call in class. Another Face Timed during class.

I admit my kneejerk reaction was to be mad. I felt disrespected. I was upset. I felt like all the work I'd done for five weeks about class culture and community was a waste of time.

Because I'm new here, I asked my upper level classes about it. They had a couple of things to say- the first was that I should do what other teachers do and give a pop quiz the first five minutes of class as punishment. And then they said that it sounded pretty typical of a first year class. As I told them punishing and policing wasn't my thing, I started to recheck my assumptions.

The first thought I had was that last week was week 6 of the semester. The point at which the novelty wears off, the workload of classes has sunk in, and homesickness is an issue. It's right before midterm exams, so stress, and work can seem to or start to pile up.
The next thought I had was if I was going to build my class around NOT policing behavior then I needed to NOT police behavior. Which meant too, I couldn't get upset about it. The simple fact is, we do the work in class. Attending class is valuable. They got to design their own assignments, pick their own topics. They choose and argue for their grades. I've done everything I can to make my class personalized, interesting, and engaging. But if they're not there, it may not have anything to do with any of that. I need to be secure in that I've done all this. I need to support my students who are there, and not stress about the rest or let it be personal.

In my composition class we spent the first month slow walking a lot of things. There's a lot of culture building as well as skill building to create together. We grade conferenced on our first major writing assignment, and while there's always with this the "I get an A no matter what" for the most part, the stuff I'm doing this semester, the new stuff, the approaches, all bore fruit.

But in light of my reflection, I am doing a couple of different things. I've been creating detailed class notes and making them available online. I've always liked the accommodation, and providing resources for students to be able to refer back to. BUT, this past week I wondered if by doing this I was signalling to students that they didn't need to attend class because they could just read the notes and not come to class and participate in the workshops and in class activities. Now, this ultimately will affect their grade as 75% of their grade is the low stakes assignments, and showing up for class. BUT, in first year composition I wasn't necessarily sure they were thinking that way.

So at the end of the week, I did not do class notes.
A student asked where what they were doing today was on the notes, and I explained. They stopped, and thought, and said "yeah, that sounds fair." I'm hoping too that peer pressure does some work here. We've talked about how being late, interrupting class, not coming, affects our groups, our discussions, our workshops. We've talked about how these behaviors disrespect the work we do in class. Now, with no displayed class notes, if students are late, they're putting a burden on their classmates who were there on time and working, and I've already seen some peer pushback on folks coming late and expecting others to catch them up.
Likewise, I have pushed back on being asked to reteach what I taught at the beginning of the class. I didn't do it in a negative way, or in an angry tone. I just explained we already covered that.

I'll tell you, I'm not sure about any of this. I did feel less stressed at the end of the week. I think it's a balance between being clear and teaching new students what's important and how to negotiate things in a way that is not punitive. But it's still a form of policing I think, so that's what I'm not sure about. We'll see. I'll adjust as needed.

This week and next will be a little odd because midterms start Thursday, run Friday, then next Monday through Wednesday. I don't give tests/midterms, so I cancelled class. I explained why, explaining that I knew they did have classes that had midterms, and were perhaps stressful, so I was hoping this arrangement were help relieve some of that. Instead I asked students to sign up for a conference time to meet with me about how they're doing. Not everyone has, most have, and that's a choice. I also told them I'd have fruit and snacks in case they needed/wanted a place to just chill for a bit.

Another shift I made this week was in my Brit Lit survey and Shakespeare class. These are small classes, and in both, like the composition classes, I've spent a lot of time teaching the skills they need and that the rest of the semester will build on. I tend to run these as seminar classes, which means they're pretty dependent on them coming to class prepared, having done the reading, and with things they want to talk about. This doesn't always work out.
So, I tried to think of what I could do to help. SO, since our close reading is out next big assignment, I posted some notes on how to prep for that in our classes. And I brought back a revision of something I used to do in my survey class. I created discussion boards in Blackboard for every class where we're discussing a text and asked them to take a picture of their notes for class and upload them. I figured this will do a couple of things. I gave them a model for taking notes. I'm asking them to be accountable. Class discussions will be more grounded in the text and I can see the notes and see what gaps or misunderstandings there are in order to better teach next class.

In all my classes, when I make changes or decisions like this, I am always explicit in explaining why to students so they don't think they're arbitrary. I always explain the pedagogical reason, what gaps or needs I'm trying to address, and where I want us to head. I hope that this conveys to them that I'm listening and paying attention to them. I hope it lets them know that I'm a reflective teacher, and provides a model for them for what that looks like. I hope it lets them know that I will always give them the tools they need to be successful in my class.

It's the same approach I've tried to apply in my actively anti-racist teaching in the survey and Shakespeare. I've tried to lay out things clearly, let Scholars of Color scholarship speak, actively point our the racist arguments of scholars that we're fighting against. I'm trying to contextualize the arguments, the history, and then laying out the better way. These classes are hard for me, and I often say to them, "I'm not sure if this is the right language, or way to talk about this, but bear with me." I tend to speak slower on these days, working my way through, taking detailed notes, following them more closely than I'm used to. Because it's important to get right. I need to make sure I'm tracing arguments they can understand, and frame things in an actively anti-racist manner. The Shakespeare class is focusing on this more than the survey. But in both classes, it's going well. I think. They seem to like the discussions, tell me they're learning things. Making connections. As a white teacher in a class of majority Black students, I am aware every day of what is at stake with my teaching, how much is riding on me getting it right.

We'll see. I can reflect, and tweak, and make different choices, but it's a lot of moving parts and I'm still learning a lot about my students and the culture on campus.

Grading this Semester

So between last week and this all five of my classes have turned in their first major assignment. I am not grade free in my classes for a variety of reasons, but this year, my first at university, I am trying new things, building on high school grading changes I made in the last couple of years. In my both my composition and content classes* (early English survey and Shakespeare) in class activities are 75% of their grade and done for completion. You do it it's 100. The composition classes decided this should be based on attending, so in a 3 day class 100 for all 3, 75 for 2, 50 for 1. They also have two low stakes assignments as prep before the major writing assignments, so these count in the 75% as well. In the content classes it's generally an activity, formative assessment I do once a week. Maybe close reading practice or an organizer or thesis statement. I give feedback and return. In general I wanted a system where if you were showing up and doing the work, putting forth the effort, you were going to pass.
The other 25% of their grade are the summative assessments. In the composition class these are their major writing assignments. In the content classes they are a project, close reading, scholarly response, and final project.

For every LSA, MWA, summative, I do not grade.
No taking papers home. No rubrics. No grading. Nada. Nothing. None.
Not in my composition courses, not in my content courses.

Instead, for each assignment on the schedule there is a workshop day followed by grade conferences. On the workshop day they work on the assignment in class. I walk around, answer questions, look at things, make corrections, but mostly they work. I am there if they need me. For grade conferences, they come up, show me the work, and tell me what grade it should get and why. I ask questions, I offer feedback. That's it.

Last year teaching high school I did grade conferences for the major assignments and really loved it. It forced me to teach more what the elements each assignment needed, which got me thinking about WHY I assigned it and WHAT I wanted students to get out of it. This transition to all grade conferences is new, as obviously, the move to university.

One thing I like in the composition classes about the low stakes assignment conferences is that I get to sit and talk with all my students. Ask how they are, what's going on. Even though all my composition classes are working on different assignments, the first LSA for most was what did you choose and why? Whether it was a profile, historical marker, or movie. That day in class I tell them to bring other work, and some students want to be first, and some stay behind, and it all works out. They come up front, answer the question, I ask clarifying questions (sometimes) and ask if they have any questions about next steps.
I also like, as we've moved onto the second LSA that they had to dig a little more. One class had to tell me what demographics they were choosing to focus on for their movie choice and why.  I don't know if they realized what a big deal it was, but they researched demographics of school then chose a demographic to focus on and argued to me why that was their target audience.
For the content classes their first big assignment was an intro to research project, a presentation type thing that was a chance to explore a topic related to class. I think I want to tweak the assignment in the future, because it doesn't quite do what I want, but again, the conversation, their argument, my feedback, is really cool.
They tell me what grade they think it is and why, and we talk about how a "C" is average. And that's okay. That it's okay if English isn't your thing. If you have a busy or stressful personal week and perhaps didn't do what you wanted. Because I've told them I don't care about grades but care about them and their learning, they know this is more about how our class culture runs and not about half-assing work. I've told them why I don't use rubrics. Or give lengths (it needs to be as long as it needs to be in order to accomplish X). I tell them I care about growth and feedback. And they appreciate that.

Once I'm back in my office I put the grade in Blackboard, so their grades are always up to date.

At the end of the first big assignment they take a survey on how class is going, giving me feedback, so I can course correct if needed.

I like that they're thinking about what they're writing, who for, and why, and using this.
I like that they're presenting oral and written arguments.
I like that they all chose their own topics, and explored them.
I love the engagement and investment this has.

So far, I'm really happy with how it's going. And this was all the toughest learning curve, introducing them to all this, so I hope now that they have the pattern that the rest of the semester goes well. I'll keep you posted.

*Look, I know someone is gonna give me the "what you don't think composition is content" comment. So let me stop you. Of course it is jerkface. I chose this term because it's easy to distinguish between the types of courses I teach. Ratchet down.

Planners, Notebooks, and Stickers.

When my mom died she left behind dozens of notebooks. A room full of magazines. Stacks and stacks of torn out pages and recipes. Like many things in the wake of her death, it was a mess. A disaster. There was no order to most of it so the magazines and torn pages went straight into the trash with no look to see what treasure there was inside that caused Mom to save it. It didn't see like there was time to take for all of it.

But her journals I saved. I put them in a wine crate, put them in the garage, and put them aside. It was a couple of years later before I was able to read them. I am sorry I did. The journals were varied and interesting. Cloth covered journals, day planners, lined paper, blank paper. All different but all joined together by my mother's handwriting. It was a jolt to see it, the handwriting that wrote me notes in my lunch box, cards and letters when I was away, cute notes on the coffee maker. Even now when I come across a Post-It or scrap she wrote on it jolts me now.

But in those journals, chronicling decades of her life, reading them felt like an intrusion, and it took me a long time to get over what I read in them.

My mother led an unhappy life, caused and effected by many things. She had a firm belief that happiness, a better life, was just over the horizon, in another job, another place, with other people. And because she always looked for outside answers I believe she never found her happy spot, although she found bits and pieces.

They were sad stories. And stories of joy. And loss.

There were also pages and pages of empty pages. Some journals only had a few lines, started then abandoned. I used to do this, and used to buy notebooks and never fill them as though the expectation was too much. I could feel them judging me.

I don't do this any more. I think it's the usefulness my writer's notebook has. It is a daily habit, always with me. Each page is important. I have something to say. LOTS to say, more than enough to fill every page. And I write it just for me, so no more judgey expectations from others. Not even fancy notebooks.

Towards the end, as she was chronically ill but not terminal, the stories were full of vitriol and hate. At the end she hated me. The journals were long lists of all the things wrong with me, how awful I was, how she could not stand me.

They were hard words to read. I think I failed my mother in those last years I moved home, feeling the need to come home and help but also feeling like my adult life was on hold with no end date in sight. Mom was sick but not diagnosed. No longer seemed herself but angry, violent almost when confronted with this truth. She wanted a different life, and I could not give it to her, and often resented the life I had.

All of this crept up on me, I never meant it to happen. I foolishly thought I'd have days, months, years, to make it up to her. To make it right.
It was not all bad. She was still my best friend, which I think made it harder. I still told her everything. She was still my fiercest champion against the outside world, listening to stories of others and defending me.
I still called her every day at lunch and checked in with her. Which is why my last words to her were "Love you" as I hung up that day and not something else.

In a lot of ways I did not, do not, want to be my mother. I do not want to look outside for happiness. I do not want to settle for a life because I am too scared to live one on my own. I do not want to spend my whole life fighting demons and not living.
In a lot of ways I am everything due to my mother, from the amber scent and cocoa butter I wear to the Dr. Bronner's I use, to the boxes and boxes of journals I keep.

I have kept a journal as long as I could remember. First a diary with a lock and key, then a variety of journals and diaries that so often became screams into the void. A litany of complaints. A downward spiral that never seemed to result in anything.

My first year teaching in Brooklyn I was introduced to Ralph Fletcher's Writer's Notebooks and things changed. Writing became productive, had a purpose again.
Years and years later, the idea of a bullet journal changed it again.

I also get from her my love of fifty billion types of pens and markers and writing utensils. Drawers of them, more at work.
There's a whole scene in Roxanne about him finding just the right pen and stationary to write his letters and I have rarely felt so understood by a movie.

Along with the pens and journals Mom was also a collector of cards. She loved snail mail, and I get them from her too. I kept her cards, I have boxes that in the eight years since she died I've used, sent to friends, sent out into the world. Towards the end one of the things she hated was that she couldn't focus, couldn't get things done. That the Christmas letter she started working on in October didn't go out until February.

I am also very found of stickers. Mom was notorious for glitter bombing cards, so that when you opened envelopes you had to be careful or glitter would go EVERYWHERE and you'd never get rid of it. I loved it.
I still do.
The image of happiness for me is glitter everywhere.

As a teacher, my love of color coding, pens, markers, stickers, and notebooks is put to good, daily use. Each class is a color coded folder and notebook. I color code my grades. I keep a running to-do list. These spinning, concentric circles of organization keep my world turning. The more stressed I get the more regimented things get. Even on good days the order, the color coding, grants me peace. Enhances my calm.

The last few years I've used a variation of a bullet journal/everything notebook.

I like the recycled composition books best. I put in my monthly and weekly planning in it. But I also put article ideas, rants about selfish people, long term plans, wish lists. I like structure and order, but other than an index and some common pages that go in each notebook (budget, list of accounts, long term planning, goals) I do not keep a strict order like the bullet journal and everything notebook require. I like the fact that my notebooks are whatever they need them to be. They are all parts of my life.

This year, with starting a new job, moving to a new place, I tried a different planner. I've done this before. I have a Day Planner I LOVE. Like, love, love, and have loved since I first saw one in Working Girl. I will use it, realize it doesn't quite fit, and after spending $50 on Day Planner fillers I'm back to my $10 composition books. I thought maybe now that I was a professor I needed a planner planner so I got Sarah's Scribbles because I thought the cartoons and stickers would bring daily happiness. But it started in September and school started in August so I ended up making my own pages. Then what happens is what always happens. I went back to my composition books. 

There's always a period of guilt that follows, for the money wasted, the failure to conform. My notebooks very much reflect my neurodiverse brain, a thing I struggle with, and work hard to accept. Maybe one day I won't even attempt to fit into other people's expectations, skipping the anxiety that comes from failing to meet them, and just jump straight to the stickers and markers.

I think it's because I am a writer and a teacher and a planner and there are no hard boundaries between these parts of my identity and at any given moment I want to Crayola marker next week's schedule, and then sketch out a future article, and then jot down ideas for a class. So I need all of these things easily accessible all the time. If I ONLY have a planner then my writer's notebook is elsewhere. Guaranteed when I need one thing it will be not there and I'll lose the thread, the thought, the idea.

My weeks in my notebooks have to-do items, appointments, ideas. I color code my pens. I put stickers on rough days and weeks to make things better. I layer my weeks in multi-colored Post-Its.

I go through LOTS of notebooks. They stack up and stack up.

It always makes me laugh when I watch a movie and a character has a single notebook that they've written in their whole lives. Are you kidding me?

Never happen.

At some point they'll move to a bookcase I imagine, stacked on the shelves in chronological order. There's a story in them, "This Is Not a Memoir" a book I'd love to write some day. And when/if I'm ready the pages will all be there to flip through, remember.

I think a lot about what happens to them all when I die. 

I am not always kind in them. I tend to be sharply analytical of people I feel have failed me. The pages often reflect what a hot mess I am as I struggle with difficulties in a life lived alone. I try to celebrate as much as I kvetch (a lesson learned from Fletcher's Writer's Notebook). My notebooks are as much scrapbook as anything else. I print pages out, pictures, and glue them into the pages, layering with writing and Post-Its and drawings.

When I die, there is no one to sit down and go through it all so I'm not sure why I worry. The instructions in my will say to dump anything personal and take the rest to Goodwill. I am deeply affected by my mother's death in this. There will be no one left after me, but I also don't want to leave a mess for whoever does have to deal with it all. It's been a guiding thought in my paring down. 

The thing is once I'm dead I don't care. Let the things be of use. I suppose it's the same reason why I'm an organ donor, a Body Farm donor. I'd like to be of use. Despite my faith I do not know that I believe in what comes after anymore. That too is my mom. Given how she dies I really think that if there was anything after I would have seen her. And I never have.

I don't think my notebooks would ever be of use. Maybe if I can refine them, mold them like Play-Doh, share what I want them to be. But in their unfiltered form? They're strange artifacts of decades of an odd life. Out of context and incomplete.

I feel better when I color, mark them out, plan in color coded order. They make day to day life better, easier. I often show my students pages from them, as I provide models of process, thinking things through, how an article or chapter or post evolved from one thing to the next. Quite a few of the scribbles end up here more fully formed, detailed, and hyperlinked then sent out to the world.

I have always been a writer I guess because I've always been my mother's daughter. I have always been a reader. A dreamer. These things worked together feeding into each other, feeding each other. It was only years later that I encountered the gate-keeping idea that only some people could be writers or readers that there were checklists and expectations on how this looked and who could do it. This made me feel bad, like an imposter, like I did not have a right to claim the title of writer. One thing that my writer's notebooks have given me back is the core sense that I am a writer. 

I always have been. 

I write stories and novels and articles and chapters and blog posts. 

I imagine worlds and criticize them. 

My tools are Crayola markers and tape and stickers and rulers and color coded pens.

I prefer not to think of them as artifacts waiting to be left behind but instead as creative pieces I haven't yet sent out into the world.

Resistance is Futile

Despite being really, REALLY excited for it, it took me over a week to get through The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. I would watch an episode, then stop, then a couple days would go by, then I might get through one or two. It took me a little bit to realize why I was having such an issue.

I loved seeing that kind of puppetry again. I loved the background details.

One of my favorite bits was the book eating library dude.

I loved how so much is done with so little. Small or no movements convey really big ideas and emotions. It is an art of storytelling, and I loved seeing it.

But I finally figured out what was bothering me. The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance is a ten episode walk towards genocide. All the Gelflings die. They are systematically exterminated by the Skeksis. In The Dark Crystal (1982) there are only two Gelflings left- Jen and Kira. So Age of Resistance, with its hopeful tone, and gathering of the clans to resist the evil Skeksis, is pointless. We know they fail. We know their stories all end. We know darkness spreads across the land, and nothing stops it. No one can stop it.

So that's why I could not binge all the episodes in a single day or weekend. That is why I kept starting and stopping. I knew how this ended and I had no desire to watch genocide in slow motion. The show does its best to totally ignore this fact. The final episode ends on a hopeful note, with the Gelflings who have finally come together defeating the Skeksis, finding the shard of the crystal that will restore Thra, and celebrating. Aughra, the living symbol of Thra comes back to life, in a shining example of how righteous their cause is. How assured their success, their triumph over the Skeksis' evil.

But it is all a lie.

I love that a whole new group of people, families and children, are experiencing the magic of The Dark Crystal through this show, but I wonder what their reaction is or will be once they move from Age of Resistance to The Dark Crystal and realize they've been betrayed. That it was all for nothing. That the Gelflings and Podlings that helped them all died. That the very planet they lived on died. That almost all knowledge of their culture, and customs, died with them.

When Rogue One (2016) came out I was not super excited, mainly because I did not understand why we needed that story. We already knew how it ended, so I didn't get it. The movie is beautifully shot, and some of the characters we meet are great, and different, but not only did we not need the story because we already know how it ends, but I did not need to spend two hours and thirteen minutes getting to know characters, only to watch them all die in the end. And frankly, I still do not understand why that does not bother more people.

Maybe the last few years have made me bitter and jaded. 

But to blame it all on the political situation of the last few years is naive and ignorant. The later half of the 20th century is defined by genocide, by seeing portions of the global population as less then, not human, not worth saving.

• Genocide in Cambodia 1975
• The Somali genocide 1987-1989
• The Bosnian genocide 1991-1995
• The Rwanda genocide 1994
• The Darfur genocide which began in 2003
• Genocide in Syria 2011
• Genocide against Yazidi people in 2014
• The Rohingya Genocide in 2015

It is not a bug it is a feature.

And the sad truth is, I'm pretty sure I'm missing some. In the United States we don't seem to care when people are decimated, destroyed, around the globe. These events get mentioned after the fact, barely reported in the news. Interesting if someone makes a movie for an American actor but generally not something that registers.

But these horrific actions no longer just occur across the globe, in spaces that the US can ignore. Actually, that's not true. Despite the hashtag activism, in the Untied States there are still children kept in cages. These numbers are not doing down with public awareness, they're going up. Children are dying. People are denied basic human needs. The conditions are worsening. Almost as if the public scrutiny and disgust has no effect. 

The government is sending people to their deaths.

Even if these children survive, they will suffer a lifetime of trauma because of these experiences.

In 2019 we're having to argue, actually argue, that Nazis and white supremacists are bad. Not a side that needs to be heard, not a differing viewpoint, BAD. EVIL. HATEFUL. Dangerous. Hate crimes are on the rise. 

Citizens, particularly young, Black men, are killed by the state, by police, in what should be an alarming manner. 

Newspapers report on these stories. Some sections of the government hold hearings. And none of it seems to matter. It all keeps moving. The gears of the machine grind on.

I was six when I first saw The Dark Crystal and the Skeksis terrified me. I remember having nightmares. The Emperor's death scene was scary, but it was the Chamberlain that scared me the most. Maybe because he was active, maybe because that "mmmmm" was just creepy as hell. Maybe because he stalked Jen and Kira.

While the Skeksis terrified me they were not the thing that haunted me about the movie. There was always one thing that I never understood, was never able to grasp.
The Mystics are presented as kind, gentle folks. They raise Jen, they live in peace. While the deaths at the beginning now seems to clearly link the Mystics and Skeksis, my six year old mind missed that.

The thing that haunted me, the thing both six year old and forty-three year old me does not understand is how this could happen.

At the end of the movie the Skeksis and and the Mystics join, they become what they were meant to be, restored to their former selves.

And no justice is done.

The Skeksis decimated the planet. They exterminated the Gelflings. They committed atrocities, torture. They enslaved the Podlings. And nothing happens to them. The UrSkeks mention their arrogance, blaming it for their split, but they skip right over the atrocities. The murder. The torture. The Skeksis get a pass and that never sat right with me, then or now. 

When I finished Age of Resistance I rolled right into The Dark Crystal to see if it changed my mind. It did not. As a child I did not understand how a group can commit such horrific, monstrous things, and get away with it. As an adult I realize that this is how it works. If you have money, and power, and privilege, then you can rewrite the truth, act with impunity, and there is no one to stop you. There are no consequences. There is no reckoning, no justice.

I don't know if I see a way out anymore. I don't know how people have faith that it will work out. I teach, so I experience on a regular basis what the world can be, the promise of possibility. I just don't know if it's enough anymore. The machine is vast, the system is rigged, the mechanism of checks and balances seems broken.

I hope I'm wrong. 

But I worry that the general populace is watching people throw their bodies against the gears from a distance. That it's watching genocide in slow motion. That even IF there's a future where the atrocities stop, that there will be no justice. No consequences. 

Serve Your Students

For a short time when I was very little, we lived in a commune house outside of D.C.

I have no memories of living there but I DO have very clear memories of my hippie mom TELLING me we lived there. Mom was perhaps not a great hippie, more into the drugs and rock and roll than the beliefs, but I was much older before I realized that. When I was little I only knew that people were supposed to live together, help each other out, care about the environment, stand up for what is right. My vegetarian godfather who always had t-shirts from Northern Sun featured in this narrative as did his support of Greenpeace.
All of this had very clear impacts on me, especially as I became a teacher. I do believe in a more socialist model, that we should make real efforts to make sure everyone is taken care. That as a community, a collective, we (schools, teachers, students, families) should work in concert to provide the best education we can.
As I've radically changed how I teach the last few years due to people like Kevin Gannon and Jesse Stommel, and informed by teaching in Albuquerque, I've come back again and again to this idea of community and commune.

I want my students to do well in my class. I want them to feel comfortable. I want them to feel valued. I want them to feel challenged. I want them to explore. But I also want them to BE well. I made sure to mention to all my classes Thursday and Friday that they needed to take today off. That a day off was a day OFF. That having a plan and schedule for doing things was good, that setting aside time on Saturday or Sunday was good, but that they should give themselves Fridays once they got home and days off and breaks off. That their mental and physical health is important. That they need to rest. Not use it as a day to cram, or stress, or catch up, to rest. Go out in the sun. Eat some ice cream. Go home, spend time with family.

I don't think if you'd asked me several years ago if I would thought to say this so explicitly. Certainly I've always cared about my students, but I am much more clear and outspoken now, recognizing how important it is to be so. To tell the student having a panic attack in my office that I too suffer from anxiety, and asking what they do to try and calm down and how I can help. To email students if they've missed class to check in and make sure they're okay. To tell my students to prioritize their health and wellness.

Caring about my class as community also means in these first three weeks of class I did not spend a single second going over my syllabus or the course information and policies. Instead, I spent time showing my students what my class culture was. The first day we did a land acknowledgement and history of our school because the Weapomeoc Tribe whose land we're on was wiped out. In my British Lit I survey and Shakespeare class we talk about how they've never heard of them, and how narratives and peoples are erased from time. I also talk about the history of the Weapomeoc as, sadly, a microcosm for Anglo-Indigenous relations and history. In my composition courses, as we talk about the history of our school, I end with them considering what their voice is. What the context for their writing is. That I care about what their narrative is.

From day one my students know their voice matters. When they then (in my composition classes) vote on the genres and topics we'll cover in our writing assignments they also know this. Then they vote on when they want me to be available in my office. Each step focuses on them. Centers them.

As we move into the content of our composition courses they also see this in how the class is designed. We go over a mentor text, using it as a model for the work we'll do. In class we do the work giving them time to research and think, and rethink, with me there walking around to answer questions, listen, intervene and clarify. They also get used to working on their own, then sharing in groups and pods, listening to other's ideas, offering feedback. I offer no feedback or guidance here. It comes organically out of their work, and builds on the class culture I never had to artificially construct.

And this is a big thing to me. With schools starting the last few weeks I've seen a lot about reviewing the syllabus, ice breakers, and whether to lecture or do class activities. I have been struck by two things in watching all these conversations. The first is that rather than being genuine, honest, and building a class community, many activities seek to pretend to do this but are really just methods of control that disguise themselves as student centered policies. The second is that many of these conversations are presented as absolutes and totally out of context. How can you make a decision about how much lecturing or activities you have to do if you haven't met your students yet? Or see how they're doing with the current topic? Why are you teaching the same course each semester when your students aren't the same?

I hear a lot that my ideas, what I do in the class, seems interesting but that people don't have the time to do this. I hear you. But first, if you're a teacher, you do what's best for students not what's easiest for you. Second, it's really not more work. Last week I was explaining to another professor how I do grade conferences. They asked how I had time to read the assignments in a grade conferences. I share my explanation here.

• Grade conferences are check ins for the first two low stakes assignments, feedback on how to proceed, a chance to answer and ask questions. Only the conference for the major writing assignment is summative.
• By the time they sit down to conference with me I already know what they'll say. I've watched them choose ideas, discard some, draft language. I've listened as they justify their choices to their groups, note their feedback, revise. I've read their notes and drafts. Because their class time is workshop time, it frees me up to walk around and observe all this, listen, and offer feedback, because I'm not the focus.
• Students learn to prep for these conferences, what notes and information they need to present at these conferences.
• So by the time I do see the final project I've already heard from them what topic they chose and why in a grade conference. I watched and heard their process to get there in workshops. I saw their outline in another conference, and watched their process to get there, what sources they chose and why, what questions they answered, how they organized their information.

When students ask me "how long does it have to be?" and I answer "as long as it has to be" I am not being glib. They understand because each of them chooses their own topic one person's answer will be different from anothers. They learn to think about how the genre, topic, audience, purpose should inform their answer. I don't leave them with no help, but I tend to ask them questions, refer them back to our mentor text, ask them to research. We just finished week three and already they're able to apply these answers, showing that they're transferring skills from one thing to another.

My Brit Lit I survey and Shakespeare classes have similar approaches with slightly different scaffolding because they're upper level classes. The first major assignment both have is a presentation. Which is not really a presentation. They don't have to stand up in front of the class or dress up. Instead, I call it that because they use PowerPoint or Google Slides to organize and share their information. I also call it that because this focuses on a visual aspect. They can choose any topic they want related to our class. No limits. This totally freaks them out. I tell them I'm willing to sit down and talk to them and work out ideas, but their choice is totally up to them. In class we've talked about what's expected of this, and some have been told very specific things about presentations- big images, only a couple of lines of text, have to explain things. We've talked about how that's not really accessible, how they should incorporate that, and I've shared how academics use presentations. We've talked about how citations are different in a presentation, not necessarily a works cited, but providing titles and hyperlinking where they got things from. They have similar conversations as the composition students as to how their presentation has a specific purpose, will be as long as it has to be to accomplish that purpose, and how there is no one answer.

In these classes we also spend a lot of time working in class. They looked at several different translations of Beowulf and had conversations about why translations matter, and did some close readings. The Shakespeare class did some close readings of Macbeth, with us doing one together, then them practicing these skills. What I tell all my classes is that we do this because for me, if it is important for them to learn something then I need to see them do it, see where the misconceptions are, be able to fill gaps, answer questions. If they're doing work at home I can't see these things. So my composition students do almost all their work in class and my upper level classes do enough practice in class for them to feel confident completing things on their own.

This is part of my class culture because they know I am there to teach and help them. That they will be given space to work at their own pace on their own interests. My students know I care about them in a hundred different ways.
I haven't answered a single "it's in the syllabus" question because I don't have to. They know there's no attendance policy but being in class, on time, is important because we do all the work in class. They know it's important to prep for grade conferences, but if they can't be there that day, they just need to schedule a different time because we've talked about that. If a student is working on something else in class or isn't there, there is no policing and fussing. If they start to apologize or justify I tell them that everything is a choice, they just need to be aware choices have consequences, and then I walk on to help the next group, listen to the next conversation.

I am not putting in extra work. I spend a few hours on the weekend prepping for my classes. I look at the week by week syllabus, I think of what students need for that week based on the previous week, I add resources to the syllabus, and plan what we're doing on our Class Notes Google Slides. That's it. I don't take grading home because we do the grade conferences in class. I actually think I spend less time lesson planning because I think in broad strokes, flexible enough to add something if students need it. So I think about what skills we need to cover, where we need to end up and the rest is up to what happens in class. I frequently write notes on the board, or explain things not in the plan as things come up. I also think I probably put less work in because I've centered all the work in class. My students do the same amount of work as my comp classes did six years ago, and that many other classes do, I just reframe how we do the work.

Look, none of this is magic. I am not special or unique because of these things. All of this is easy to replicate. I base things on two thoughts:

1. What is best for students not necessarily easiest for me?
2. What is my pedagogical reason for doing X?

A common critique of edu celebrities and many books that claim to teach you how to teach is that the idea of best practices, sharing what works and why, has gotten perverted. To understand why MY best practices work you need to understand that my students are mostly first generation, that their skill levels vary, that they may or may not have had things explained to them in a way that is accessible. You have to know that I am a first generation student who things working in how to college tips are just as important as MLA style. Best practices have become a checklist of things to replicate totally divorced from their context. So when people implement them they're probably not serving their students best because they're not asking what their students need and why they need this practice. Each semester, each class, teachers should be asking and observing what their students need and why and how best to give them this. One thing my class set up allows is the time for me to do this, implement this.
While not my field, too I think these lessons apply to accommodation and anti-racist policies. If you realize having access to class notes, resources, helps everyone- the single mom missing class because of child care, the athlete, the working student, then you realize it costs you nothing to make the things you're already prepping available to them. If you center your students, value their voices, then you stand for your students, integrating anti-racist policies into the fabric of your class.
By starting my class with how things are a matter of perspective and context, I immediately orient my class around uncovering narratives that have been ignored and erased. Then our mentor texts in composition, and our readings in the survey and Shakespeare class bear this out. We don't read diverse texts we read representative texts. I counter assumptions they may have about English literature, providing a variety of perspectives and viewpoints, placing what we read in larger global contexts.

I know that few PhD programs teach their students how to teach. At some point I need to update this, but this resource outlines how to plan a class, sketch out assignments, think about what you want to accomplish. I think too that if you ask your students what they need, and truly listen, you'll find that they'll tell you. You can then build your class culture from this.

My students attend class because they know we do the work in class. If they're late, they're considerate when entering, and ask classmates to catch them up, because we've talked about how otherwise they're disrespecting the work we do here.
My students don't plagiarize because the class isn't designed to. Students plagiarize because they don't know how to cite, or feel stressed and pressured. Neither happens in my class.
Students don't have to justify absences but know if they miss more than a couple classes because I care that they're okay.
I tell them to take breaks, come see me, offer tissues and granola bars, and cocoa butter, because I care about them.
I tell them to write what they want because I want to hear what they have to say.

So I encourage you to ask your students what they are interested in, what they need, and then listen when they tell you.