Problematic

I had never heard this word before I started working on my PhD. Then it became my favorite word. I overused it all the time, applied it to every situation I could. It sounded smart to me. It was my go-to word for years. Then I saw someone write that problematic was just white scholars' way of continuing to like what they wanted even if it was racist or misogynist or sexist or otherwise bad. And I felt that.

Since I've been working on this edited collection that deals with why we reboot, remake, revisit, and reimagine horror films, and how the answer is tied to both trauma and nostalgia studies, I've been thinking a lot about what we get out of these revisitings. Why do we return again and again to things? In turn I've also been thinking of all the things I can no longer revisit or do not revisit because I know they have deep issues and I don't want to taint my original memory of a thing. Growing up I loved Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, the Indiana Jones films, the Lethal Weapon movies. These movies though are not "problematic" they're rapey, racist, present white colonial narratives, feature bigot anti-Semites. I cannot watch them anymore no matter how much I once liked and loved them. I struggle to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer in light of reports of sexist behavior. I won't watch anything with Johnny Depp in them. Firefly has been ruined by Adam Baldwin's bigoted rants. But me losing things I once liked is nothing compared to decades and decades of celebrating racist, sexist, bigoted, predominantly white narratives. It's not problematic it is wrong. And there is just no way to get around that.

Over the holidays there were movies released online and I saw a flurry of several different threads appear on Twitter. One bemoaned fact that straight to online, skipping the theatre, movies meant people didn't respect etiquette of not spoiling films. Assuming everyone had access and therefore was watching immediately. Another talked about how if a person liked a thing and you didn't there was no reason to shit on the thing they liked. Yet another took a couple of the films that came out and laid out step by step how awful they were, for racism, classism, digital blackface, rapey storylines, non-consent, sexism, misogyny, poor portrayals of women. Maybe once, before Twitter and other social media, I could have watched a thing and liked it or not, perhaps changing my mind as I thought about things more. But now, when I read what people write about how a movie erases their identity, hurts them, continues harmful practices, I can't ignore it or pretend like it doesn't matter, or that somehow my enjoyment of a thing is more important than the hurt a thing causes.

It's a situation teachers face all the time. Too often teachers and professors dismiss the hurt of others, their students, their parents, other teachers, and do so in such a way that weaponizes their intellect. The teacher is knowledgeable, those others are not. The teacher represents a higher intellectual authority and must be listened to. The hurt of certain novels, portrayals, and teaching is ignored, dismissed, in order to continue the status quo. One of my most shameful memories is when I was a younger teacher and a Black parent told me that they did not appreciate their child having to say and hear the n-word as my class read To Kill a Mockingbird out loud. At the time I listened to the parent but dismissed them, claiming it was required reading, a classic. It was years before I listened and faced the horrible harm I'd done to so many students in my class. The canon gets used a lot in teaching as a way to say "screw you" to people. To tell whole groups of students that their narrative, or their discomfort and trauma caused by other narratives, does not matter. Labelling something "problematic" is used in similar ways. It is used to state that you know something is wrong and you don't care. It's not that movies from the 80s did not know that rape or racist stereotypes were bad. It's that they didn't care. It's not that people didn't know that X actor was an abuser. It that people did not care.

For too many fans and scholars it feels like once they label something problematic they are done and no longer have to deal with the issues in the text. They did their job, they paid lip service, but there is no onus to not teach it. Or teach it in such a way as to call out the racism, sexism, bigotry, anti-Semitism. Or teach an alternate novel or work and only mention the other text AS a racist, sexist text. 

In k-12 I've come to believe that there is no reason to teach the canon. I think if we ask ourselves what we want these foundational years to do the answer is to teach students to read and analyze and critically think about what they read. To learn to explore places, people, religions and cultures they might not know otherwise, but also to teach texts that show them their own narratives, and accurate portrayals of our country and its history.

When you get to college I'm of a similar mind. I think in most cases there are few pedagogical reasons to teach an unexamined canon. I think in many surveys teaching narratives students haven't been exposed to, or novels that aren't the one book from that one author everyone knows, are more valuable. I think using courses to correct or balance hundreds of years of biased, white narratives is important. 

A common argument in the canon wars is no one is telling you that you can't still read X. And that's certainly true. I would ask though why are you? What are you trying to accomplish? What do you want your students to get out of it? How does it fit in the goals of the class? Of your students? I wish more professors thought about what their pedagogical reasons were were teaching certain texts and scholars, to consider the harm they may be doing to their students in teaching certain texts and scholars, and rethink their approaches.

On Twitter the other day someone asked how many classes people had taught in their careers. As I tried to do the math in my head, I realized that while I have taught lots of British Literature I surveys, and Shakespeare classes, and Composition I and II classes, I have never taught the same class. Not when I taught English 9-12 or AP Literature and Language, and not now. First, I've never understood how people teach the same thing every semester, every year, year after year, for decades, because my students are different each semester. I think differently about topics and scholars each semester. The world changes, new texts come out, new technologies. 

I think if folks are dead set on teaching On the Road (a book I once loved), For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Adventures of Huck Finn, I think it's important to be explicit about why you are. I think you need to explain why you chose this book to your students. You have to face all the issues in these books. And have honest conversations about those issues. I think you need to particularly use scholars and specific work to highlight responses to these works in the time since they were published. 

These conversations can be transformative, and are not limited to that class or even discipline. I am a medievalist and early modernist who works in folklore and popular culture. Yet the classes that most shaped who I am as a scholar were classes on the American West, Chican@ Films, and Southwest Folklore. These classes introduced me to the idea of resituating The Last of the Mohicans as a the first frontier novel. They taught me about films and scholars that centered Indigenous and Chican@ narratives and called out the issues with Anglo directors, writers, structures, telling these stories. They introduced me to interdisciplinary studies, the value of readng across periodizations, and changing perspectives. It was these professors who had the most impact on me and the work I do. They taught me to ask questions, to "problematize" what I'd been taught, and provided models for my own work.

I would love to teach a class on the American West. Starting with The Last of the Mohicans as the first frontier novel, how it and our concept of what the West was is a microcosm for so many of our societal ills. Our privileging of certain narratives, the erasure of cultures, how this erasure, chaacterizing them as less than human was only to enable expansion at any costs. How these brutal, violent events get romanticized and revised almost immediately. How these stories that children grew up on enable them to provide these same views to anyone they encounter, in their communities, media portrayals, global politics. How modern adaptations use these viewpoints and the romanticization to justify continued stereotypical, racist, sexist portrayals. All while connecting to historical events, introduce them to the narratives they DON'T know. That's a class that I think would work. A class with no easy answers. I'd enjoy that. But it wouldn't mean I'd call The Last of the Mohicans "problematic." I would not frame my enjoyment of anything at the expense of others. None of us should.

So now when I read a thread by someone detailing how a movie, a portrayal, made them feel, I listen to them. I take their word for it. Because it's not my experience, not my lane, and so it's important I listen. I see a lot of people responding to these threads with "well actually..." or tying themselves into knots trying to justify why it's still okay for them to like it. I try not to do that. I try to listen, and then just not. 

I still have some things I wrestle with. I will always love Star Wars. The original Superman. But when I try to watch them now I see the sexism. The lack of actors who are people of color, or queer, or not American or British. I see the casual racism, so often presented as a joke. I see actors that I now know were horrible human beings. So less and less I return to anything I grew up with. These things are hard, because we do connect movies and tv shows with certain things we grew up with, sometimes magical experiences, sometimes small bright spots. It can be hard to separate those very personal experiences with what we now know. But it's important. 

It's the old adage about opinions and people disagreeing.

No tv show, no movie, no actor, is ever going to be greater, more important than the people those things hurt.

The fact that people's humanity is so often up for debate is a thing that weighs on me, makes me sad. It is a small thing I can do.

Writing in a Pandemic

I've been trying to write throughout the pandemic with very little success. Part of it is that I did not realize how much I depended on long weekends and summers and breaks to get my scholarly writing done while balancing my teaching and service workload. I tend to need huge swaths of time to work. Days when I have nothing else to do, when I can just sit at my desk at 7a and have the whole day stretch ahead of me, dedicated to work. I especially need this dedicated time when I first start, when I'm doing the heavy analysis lifting, writing to think. I tend to need shorter chunks of time when I get to adding scholarship, but longer days to read through the scholarship. Editing and revising takes a shorter time, half a day the first pass, another half a day to type up. I like to have time in between so I can play with the pieces in my head, moving them like Tetris pieces, making sure it's the best fit. The last seven years I've published four journal articles and three book chapters in edited collections, with another coming out next year. I've done all this while working multiple jobs, juggling PhD work, and I would have told you that I had a system that worked for getting scholarly work done while balancing all of this.

But the last nine months have shown me that's not true. I've been trying and trying to get this chapter done the entire time and it seemed like every time I thought I had a handle on both the writing process and what I wanted to argue it slipped away from me. I've teaching Advanced Composition in the spring, an upper level English course required for other majors, so I've been thinking a lot about process, and modeling, what we write and how. So I thought I'd share a bit about how this process went now that I finally sent the chapter off to my co-editor for feedback.

I knew I wanted to write about Carol Clover's Final Girl and deal with the idea that her work on this is often a misreading of the Final Girl as some sort of "gurl power" figure. But I went back and forth on what to use to look at it. At first I thought I'd look at American Horror Story 1984, then thought about Final Girls (2015). Ultimately I settled on Laurie Strode in Halloween (2018), revisiting the original Final Girl as a way of revisiting Clover's initial scholarship (1992, not the 1987 article). But that was really just a way in. 

This piece was written in a different way than anything else I've written, and it certainly changed more than anything else I've wrote. Part of my frustration was the last of solid, dedicated writing time, but a lot of it was I felt like I didn't know what I wanted to write, or rather I wanted to write lots of different things that were all similar but I couldn't make up my mind.

I never used to outline my writing, but during my dissertation my director suggested that I use the outline feature in Word to look at the first sentence of each paragraph to help me see the flow of my argument. Since then I've used outlining as one of my first steps of writing before I draft. I outline the topics, and as I draft I use the outline document as my basis so I can make sure I can keep the threads when it's so easy to get lost and veer off when drafting.

When I outline then draft I tend to be super wordy, 8,000-10,000 word chapters for 6,000 word pieces. I don't worry about this when writing, but once I draft I do like to jot down on the project folder what I see as the key ideas. In some ways this works the same as outlining, to keep me on track, but I also try to think of it as the takeaways. Everything for the project goes in this folder- outlines, notes, drafts, revisions, and the folder only gets thrown out/recycled once the article is published, so it contains everything. 

Because I did not have dedicated writing time all semester I kept outlining, revising the outline, then redoing it. It seemed to be the only space I had in my head. This meant I changed my argument a lot over the last months. It also helped though in that I was able to really refine my argument. I never veered away from the idea of the Final Girl, but I kept picking up and putting down ideas. It was a little frustrating, but ultimately the solution was to just finally sit down and draft. I ended up writing it all down, knowing that the heavy work would be done in revision.

In the folder I keep my latest, most final revision as well as my Post-Its and scrap paper notes.

When I revise I always print out my pages then hand write in a pretty color. I have to have a single color. If my pen runs out the revision process stops until I have a replacement pen. The highlighter color has to match the pen. I revise and write on the page, and draw doodles for larger inserts on the opposite page. When the insert is longer than what will fit on the opposite page I write on legal pads, and draw odd symbols or mark page numbers to track where they go.

Sometimes this system works. Sometimes it does not. Sometimes I can't see where I thought these parts fit, so part of revising is having to ask myself where it fits.

I draft in Google Docs until final, final when I export to Word for formatting, so I once I've hand revised, I type up all my notes page by page. One thing I've found though is that the delay between me writing the notes and typing it up ends up with some interesting things sometimes. Sometimes I can't read the note. Sometimes I decide that if I can't read the note it's not important and I just cut it. Sometimes I find better wordsmithing. I usually have multiple tabs of the document open especially as I move whole sections to improve flow and strengthen the argument. But my notes sometimes get muddled- where did the single star section go? Why are there two stars here and three stars there? I don't know why the logic of notes done the day before don't always transfer over. 

This chapter was 6,500 plus words before I added scholarship, so I knew when I revised I'd have to cut. There was a lot of background on Final Girls that I originally included, work about sequels, and comparisons to other Final Girls, but while I think all this stuff is interesting ultimately it did not belong in this chapter. These revisions, these cuts, are a part of the process I never thought I'd like but have come to love. When I can start to see the argument of the piece reveal itself, get condensed down to its purest form, that is one of my favorite parts now.

I also know I'm getting close when I start fiddling with the title, when what comes after the semi-colon starts solidifying. For me those listed parts are the subsections of the piece, the takeaways from the folder. So as I fiddle and play with the title, I pick up and set down the ideas that work or don't. I tend to fiddle with the title throughout the revision process, changing things, but once the title solidifies for me I know I'm close.

The last couple of weeks when I've finally had time to just sit down and write, no other appointments or obligations has been lovely. I love writing. I love this work. I missed doing it all semester. It reminded me too that being able to do this, be a professor, write, teach, is such a privilege and a gift.

I'll still have work to do on this chapter when I get notes back from my co-editor, and I'm currently working on revising our proposal for the collection. Knowing now that pandemic me doesn't have the schedule for academic writing, I'm scheduling accordingly. I'm trying to get both these things finished and the proposal off before we're back in class. Reading and providing feedback on the chapters that come in don't require me to have the same blocks of time as when I write, so that should all be fine this spring. I'm not planning on starting any other projects. This summer I'd be happy if I could revise my Guthlac article and send it somewhere else. But I'm not going to stress about it. There is stilla global pandemic. Teaching in this requires more out of me, and I'm not going to feel bad about that.

While I know I'll get notes on this chapter, I feel good about it. I think it does cool things, and I'm excited for how it fits in the collection, and look forward to you all seeing it.

Reflecting On Office Hours

In education you can set your clock by certain topics getting space at the beginning of the fall and spring semester. People will (wrongly) debate ableist tech policies, rah-rah for surveillance software, decry to dedication of students, complaining they lack "grit." Like many, I go involved in railing against these asinine comments at the beginning and now I just skip them. 

I think it is very important as an educator to constantly reflect on our own motivations, learning, practice. I think it's important that we be able to answer "what is our pedagogical reason for doing X?" in our classrooms. I think we should be crafting syllabi, choosing readings, revising and updating the primary and secondary texts we teach. I think it is our job to stay informed of what the conversations of the field are. I think too often we replicate the systems we came up and were taught in and rarely interogate them.

Especially the last few years it seems like office hours have become a place of where we can do better by our students. I've seen recommendations to call them "student hours" so students know the time is for them and not just when you're sitting in your office. I've seen professors make office hours mandatory so students can "see" how helpful they are. Some turn the hours into a workshop space. Some just want students to know their professors are resources. With so many classes and office hours moving online this semester professors have shared how they've set work times, like a lab, where students can work and ask questions. Some have set up Discord and Slack spaces that seem to lean more towards workshop spaces. Some professors offer actual workshops on Zoom, covering skills or common questions, and recording for any who can't attend. 

Every semester as part of my end of course reflection I ask students if they came to office hours, why or why not. I admit that I have not always paid as much attention to their answers as I should have. This semester their answers really hit me. Even though I had on campus office hours this semester, I rarely had students come in. Last year I often had students in my office, but it was usually just them dropping by and hanging out. Which I loved, but which also proved a bit problematic, because then when I students showed up wanting/needing help, they were facing a room full of students- a bit intimidating, and then if students didn't take the hint to leave, I had to tell them too. I was happy students felt comfortable being in my office, talking to me, but if I'd been that student in the doorway, I would have left rather than face that.  

Next semester I've moved all my office hours online. It just doesn't seem safe knowing what we know about how Covid spreads to sit in a 10x10 room with no/poor ventilation, even if masked. So I was already in a space to think/rethink office hours. So when I read my students answers to the office hours questions this semester I actually listened. And it got me thinking about what we as educators want office hours to do. We want students to take advantage of one on one help. We want them to practice/do the work of talking through ideas, forming an argument, revising, getting feedback. We want them to show engagement, curiosity, and use these things to stretch themselves in their work. We want them to show an interest.

I remember as an undergrad and graduate students being fascinated by the offices of my professors. I judged them based on how they did (or didn't) decorate their doors. I was always distracted by the books, the shelves, the layout. The rabbit warrens of a professional life on display. How professors placed their desks between me and them, setting clear boundaries. Professors with empty shelves. Professors with stacks of books versus them on the shelves (what was the secret? the system?). I've tried to make my office open and welcoming. I have snacks. And office supplies. And tea. And Kleenex And rubber ducks. A lot of this is a hold over from high school teaching, no one went hungry in my classroom. I want my office to be a safe, welcoming space, the same as I want my classrooom to be. I miss having my own classroom. 

When I read my students' answers to the office hours questions this semester I think I heard them in a different way. Few attended office hours and said so on their reflections. But it was what else they said that is what has stayed with me. When I asked why or why not they said overwhelmingly that they didn't feel the need to. They said I always answered their emailed questions quickly, always read and got drafts back fast, and they never needed to come to office hours. It was this "needed" that struck me. I also ask students about whether they regularly attended class, and if not, why or why not, and what I could have done more. Their answers to this and office hours had some overlap. Many students said they had to work so often could not come (to office hours or class). Many said that they had transportation issues. More said they had other responsibilities. Some said the times didn't work for them. In the past I've had students vote on my office hours to try and fix that but it didn't result in any more attendance in my office.

But here's the thing- none of them felt like these barriers interfered with them getting the help they needed. They all felt that they were able to get everything they needed from emailing me. Given their varying schedules, it certainly made sense. It got me thinking about office hours, their purpose, and what the technology of email does, and the ways that maybe I've been clinging to old ideas. It's a common complaint that students don't come to office hours. They don't realize what they're for. They don't take advantage of them. I think, reflecting on the list above of what WE as professors WANT them to be, that maybe not all those things are about serving the students. If I schedule workshop days into my classes, if it's the standard in my classes for students to send me drafts for feedback, if I answer all emails within 24 hours Monday through Friday, often quite faster, then what needs of my students are NOT being met?

We all know professors who don't care about teaching. We know professors who would not make an appearance on campus, do their jobs if not for that 10 or 15 hour office hours requirement. And these are horrible people who should not be teaching. But as with many things, are we setting rules and expectations 1) for antiquated ideas of what serving students look like and 2) as a way to make people do their jobs?

Too often these same people seem to like to frame students not attending office hours, "not taking advantage" like a personal failing. As though the student must not be dedicated or engaged enough to "care" about doing well in your class. First, not taking advantage smacks of some blechy you as savior crap. Second, it totally ignores the reality of the majority of our students. Even students who are full time and live on campus are juggling jobs and families and extra curricular responsibilities. They're not sitting around waiting for you to bless them with your expertise. And again- blech.

I'm not saying we should dump office hours. I have set virtual office hours for the spring. I'll continue to hold them when we return to campus. Maybe though we should ask about what we want them to do, what our students need them to do, and consider how we can meet those needs in other, better ways. If your students need  a model for thinking through an idea or paper then arrange for one on one conferences for them to do that. If you think your students need dedicated work time to complete an assignment then build that into your classes. If you want to set up a practice of drafting, feedback, and revision, then build that into your class. If you want to build a community of majors, alumni, professors, then you have to find a way to do that.

If the problem is faculty won't answer student emails, or show up, if you don't "make" them well that's a whole other issue. If you're at an institution where your professors won't prioritize teaching then you have a culture problem not an office hours one.

I think at least part of office hours is based in an antiquated idea of the sage on the stage- that students should come to the hallowed halls of your building, knock and hope they're admitted to your presence, and then supplicate themselves, basking in your knowledge. 

Yuck.

So I think next semester I'm going to stop asking about whether or not they attended office hours and why or why not. Instead I'm going to ask them about what they needed to succeed in class, what I did that helped, and what else I could have done. That is what I care about. That is what I want to make sure I'm doing.

Lesson Planning in a Pandemic

This semester I have thought a lot about lesson planning. Like many of my teacher and professor colleafues I spent all summer trying to plan my semester out, trying to plan for the situation, for accommodation, for the inevitable. I built full online courses in Blackboard, wanting them done before we started so students could see the whole class, have everything. As everyone can tell you, this is a lot of work. But even though we were stating face to face with the months we'd had over the summer, I really believed we'd soon be switching online, and I did not want a repeat of the spring.

Joke is on me for two reasons. One, we have one week of school left and we're still face to face. Second, our Blackboard went down the second week in September and I switched my classes to a Google Site and for consistency stayed there.

Many of our English majors want to be teachers so for their final "apply what you learned" paper they can choose to do a project based on lesson plans. They create a calendar for a module, a unit plan with standards and assignments, and then choose a couple, few lessons to do all out with all the resources. This plus the fact that the Intro to English Studies class has spent the last two weeks talking about teaching and learning has me even more reflective than I normally am at the end of the semester.

In twenty years of teaching this semester has been the hardest. It is the most work I've ever put into a semester. And most of it was for nothing. The months of work this summer building Blackboard courses ended up being for nothing. Because I built it figuring we'd be moving online, students were confused on what was supposed to be done in class or online, so I had to explain that we were doing things in class as long as we were face to face and the online stuff was back up in case we moved online. I divided classes over 10 into 3 assigned days to enable discussions and social distancing. Since my classes are all discussion based this had a huge impact. The vibe was so different AND I was teaching classes three times a week. On the rare day we DID all come together the difference was noticeable. It also meant that with everything going on this semester, classes/days that had 7-12 students assigned sometimes only had 1-2 show up, which was a very weird energy to try and have a discussion with.

I do not regret a single thing I did this semester even if in hindsight so much of seems to have been for naught. Here's why- I did it all to center students, lessen work, make things easier for them, and while I have a laundry list of things NOT to do next semester, I'm never going to regret putting my students at the center of my practice.

All this focus on lesson planning with the students, both for their projects and talking to my students, has me thinking about how I lesson plan. My syllabus is always created months in advance. I start them almost as soon as the semester begins, rough sketches of what I want to do. Then as ideas come to me, or I see readings online or on Twitter, I flesh out the readings, move things, change my mind about assignments, or skills I need to focus on based on things going on in THIS semester. By the time we do registration (for us, these last two weeks for spring) I can share a mostly finalized syllabus with students in case they're interested. And all my syllabuses are live Google Docs so the link I give them will always be up to date. They can look at see not just the books we're reading, but how the course is laid out, the assignments, and get an accurate idea of what class is.

For face to face classes, I sit down on Saturday mornings and for each class look at the syllabus, and flesh out the plan into lessons. Do the readings, make notes, look up research, create handouts or presentations, or any supplemental things students need. I like doing this on the weekend because then I can post those things and make them available to the students, as well as a weekly announcement that gives reminders and an overview of the week ahead, including any university dates or news. Lesson planning on the weekends means that during the week my time is freed up for student interactions and grading. They email me work, and I aim to return it with feedback in the same day (barring weekends). While I lesson plan on Saturday morning, I DO NOT log into work email.

In general, my upper level English classes full of mostly majors, did well this semester, even with everything going on. The general education classes had more struggles. I'm not rigid in my expectations or policies- no due dates, no deadlines, students choose topics, how to demonstrate knowledge-and I think for GE classes, in THIS semester, with many of them being first time freshmen, having spent the spring in limbo high school senior year or who knows what online format, this was a failure.

So, for the spring I have a once a week, 3 hour, night, Shakespeare seminar. I'm really looking forward to this, both the seminar format and the fact that I designed it as a Shakespeare and Adaptation course focusing on race and queer readings. Since it's face to face, I'll put some additional materials on the Google Site with Slack as an additional communication channel, but really just expanded resources or videos from the syllabus. I'm also teaching our Capstone class face to face, so same thing. I'm also teaching our Advanced Composition class. This is for our majors AND is a required class for our Interdisciplinary Students and that's an online only program. For this class I am also sticking to the Google Site and Slack. One, because I like it better, and two, it's easier for students to navigate and I want students to focus on work and not have the LMS be a barrier. I also have an independent study for History of the English Language. For all of these classes I am going gradeless with feedback on check in assignments but no grades, and their only grade being their self-determined midterm grade reflections, and their final paper/projects with reflections.

I also have an online Composition class. This semester I themed my composition classes for zombies, and students were not impressed. In the spring I've themed the course around fairy tales. One thing that became very clear this semester was that I needed to make the online composition class a lot more structured. I could not have practice assignments that built skills that were ungraded. I needed to provide more materials AND tie the practice assignments to grades. The choice and ungrading led to too much confusion for first year students in an online environment, specifically THIS online environment in a way I had not encountered last year in my face to face composition courses. So, I've decided to build this course in Blackboard. I'm going to redesign the structure from the default to be more user friendly and pared down. I teach composition according to modules, one for each genre, narrative, informative/argumentative, literary analysis, then their final writing portfolio.

I redesigned the major writing assignments because one thing I noticed this semester was that the assignments read too much like they were separate instead of building on each other. So, the major genres stay the same but the assignments are:

For narrative:

• Write your own narrative
• Choose one of the side characters in “Cinderella” and write a story from their point of view
• Be sure to include the narrative elements

For informative/argumentative:

• Choose a topic, tale in fairy tales,  folklore that you want to research 

• Create an annotated bibliography for your 2-3 chosen sources

Then for literary analysis, they pull these parts together:

• Write your literary analysis essay that analyzes a fairy/folk tale and uses secondary sources to support your analysis

Each module will have graded practice assignments, like defining narrative elements, annotating a piece for them, etc. The grade will be complete/incomplete and I'm still going to encourage them to focus on the feedback, but I found this semester that the ungraded but pay attention to feedback aspect of practice did not click. So the practice assignments are 50% of their grade. Just do it and you'll see a big impact on your grade.

I'm also going back to school myself in thinking how to redesign the course. When I first started teaching online in 2010, how I was taught was very prescriptive and rigid.

• Have a header that explains and gives an overview of the unit/module
• Use action verbs for each item they need to complete, READ this, DEFINE that, SUBMIT X
• Every learning material, every resource was tied to an assignment, a grade

I've spent a lot of the last 10 years UNDOING that kind of teaching. But, I think in these unprecedented times, with folks who come from a range of experiences, this form of teaching is not rigid, it is clear. So while students will still have choice in topics, and what they want to write on, I'm going to focus on being clear, and making sure the material is accessible to students who (if this semester is any indication) will not necessarily reach out, and need the course to do all the work. So paring down supplemental resources, tying materials to assignments, and being very clear about what they need to do, with no intervention by me during the week. Not because I'm not here or willing, but this semester, I'm sure for a variety of reasons, students did not take advantage of me as students in my online classes normally do.

Then the major writing assignments are 25% of their grade. Last year students did grade conferences with me, explaining based on elements we discussed as a class had to be included, what grade they thought their work earned and why. These conversations were really fruitful last year. Having them try to replicate these in email reflections did not work. There was a disconnect between what we said work needed to include and what it did include and the grade they argued for. SO, for the spring, I'm still going to have them email me grade reflections but in addition to this they also have to annotate the major writing assignment they turn in FOR all the elements the assignment required. I'm hoping doing that work helps them reflect more and focus more on the lessons the assignments are supposed to showcase.

The writing portfolio/end of semester reflection is the last 25% of their grade. This semester's students haven't turned theirs in yet, so I'm not sure what changes I have to do to that yet. From last year to this, I did cut down on the number of revisions, because I was more interested in quality than quantity, so I'm interested to see if that helps.

Even when I've had to make changes to things in class this semester, often on the fly, respnding to outside things, it's been okay for students because I always tell them what my pedagogical reason is for things- from readings to how I designed class to how and why I created assignments. So they trust that everything has a reason and they know they can always ask what it is. I am really proud of my students for all they've faced this semester. Not all of my students got through the semester. I'm sure most of us had students withdraw, stop coming, deal with mental and physical health issues, days missed due to sickness or quarantine. I wish I had magical answers to ensure ALL my students made it through the semester but I just don't. Having students out of class for 2 weeks for quarantine in a discussion based class sucks. But while that's certainly where the content is, in my classes, they were able to do the reading on their own, and complete the assignments, even if my stunning talking time was missed.

In the spring we're running pretty much the same schedule- roughly 50% classes online, the rest face to face in socially distanced rooms with specific caps. I taught face to face this semester and never once had an issue with students not wearing their masks, and I am grateful for the care we all showed each other. I think, while no one is relaxing with the pandemic, that next semester will be easier because so much was unknown this semester and next semester we are all coming in knowing how to do this face to face class thing under pandemic conditions.

I know a lot of folks did hybrid learning this semester, and are rethinking ways to teach in the spring, because as many have said, working through summer and the extra labor this semester is just not sustainable. I know for hybrid many are planning on dividing online work versus face to face workshop or office hour time more clearly. I've had discussions with the Intro students as we talked about teaching, and online teaching, this week, that while students coming off of last semester and this, which in many cases was guerilla teaching not "online" teaching, that I could understand why students thought a professor should just be able to "add" a student Zooming into a face to face class. But we've talked, and they've shared their experiences, on how face to face teaching IS NOT online teaching, that online teaching has different set ups, standards, requirements. Many shared that they would have had better semesters if professors had stuck to the face to face methods they were familiar with- 2-3 lectures a week, held on Zoom, recorded, regular type assignments, than failing spectacularly and piling on the work trying to teach online.

I think at least part of this issue is IF you don't have a clear pedagogy, and ARE just replicating what/how you were taught then the move to online became an adopting of a checklist of things folks may or may not have been comfortable with. Without a clear sense of WHY folks were doing things, a lot of things became arbitrary and the work piled on, and there was no reflection or course correction and it just got worse and worse.

I know a lot of people, for child care reasons and health reasons, were moved to online teaching that have no interest in online teaching and no experience, or only crash courses. I hope there is some reflection for the spring, a reassessment. Honestly, from what I hear from our own students, and reports and experiences from other schools I think the best thing those folks could do is NOT teach online. Survey students on the time that works best for most. Hold Zoom lectures during that time, on a regular TR, MWF schedule. Record and put in Blackboard for those who that time doesn't work. Assign your "normal" semester assignments. Do not worry about building anything online. I think teaching how you're comfortable will be a better delivery of content ultimately for the students.

I'm a huge fan of what online teaching can be. But I think in the last few months, for a variety of reasons, we collectively as teachers, students, and professors, have been calling everything online teaching instead of distinguishing "triage" teaching, which is still what many students got even this semester from true online teaching.

I wish in general, nationwide, that there had been more emphasis on centering students this semester and more preparation and resources, specific actions for professors on HOW to do this, from policies to cut, to things they could have done in their classrooms. It seems from reading that a handful of smaller schools had amazing Centers for Teaching and Learning that did this, but it also seems like the majority of places just did not have the buy in from faculty and/or lacked the impetus from above to make it happen. I am very, very sad for what that means for students. I hate that anything a professor did anywhere would have made this semester harder for anyone. And on a practical note, I know that while many folks are feeling more hopeful about the future, higher ed is still facing the culmination of twenty years of being defunded in the middle of the pandemic crisis. The news has been full of faculty cuts, department and school closures. I know a lot of places are worried about the dip in enrollment they're going to see ESPECIALLY with almost two months for most folks between fall and spring semesters. I can't help but think that while we should expect that as folks recover and reckon with the toil from this semester, that we could have prevented a lot of this is we had all collectively centered our students in every decision we made.

As we enter our last week of classes I know my students are exhausted. I'm exhausted. But I also feel good about what I WAS able to do for my students this semester and I feel really good about changes I can make for spring to better serve them.

I know this has all been hard, impossible even.

I hope everyone over the longish break can recharge their own mental and emotional batteries, do some reflecting on their practice, and redesign or course correct for the spring.

Grading and Ungrading Fall 2020 Updates

I have done a variety of moves the last couple of years moving towards ungrading. I've moved to students grade conferencing, telling me what grade they think their work earns and why based on required elements we've covered in class. I've tried it in all of my classes, composition to upper level English classes. In addition to this I've played around with ungraded low stakes, practice assignments where students get 100 just for turning it in, and these assignments counting as 75% for their grade, ensuring a student can earn at least a C. The last 25% determined by a final paper or project or portfolio.

For the most part these have all gone well. Students struggle at first with the idea of focusing on learning and practice rather than grades but for the most part they seem to like it.

It's rare- like 2-3 students maybe out of 150 in a semester- that students either do not accept the feedback I give or grade their work as an "A" when it's clearly not. I can tell you that I hamster wheel about those more than anything else.

This summer was my best version of all this. I taught technical writing and their only grade was their final portfolio at the end of the class. We worked all summer. They turned in work, they got feedback, they applied it. But their grade was their grade, which they argued for at the end of the semester, based on their portfolio which reflected their revised work from the whole class. 

As much as I loved how this worked, loved the approach to teaching, loved how students came around and embraced it, loved reading their reflections, I did not follow through on this this semester. I was worried that with so much else going on with Covid-19 and politics and all the stresses students would be under that it was a complication that might make things harder for students and that was the opposite of what I designed my classes this fall to do.

So in the spring I am moving, for all my classes, to a 100% of your grade is your final portfolio, where the students present a supported reasoning for their grade. We will do work and assignments and projects all semester that they will share and workshop and receive feedback on but these will be formative only. Their only grade will be that portfolio. 

1. This is where I want to be, so I'm going to stop taking half steps.
2. I think actually with everything going on this will help students because I think it will mitigate. how some feel if they've gotten behind they can't recover.
3. It allows me to spend more time on the teaching and feedback .

For my Shakespeare and Capstone classes I think this will be an easy sell because most of those students will have had me before, so their other classes with me and the stuff above we've done has prepped them for this. For my composition classes it'll take some more work. I plan on asking them at the beginning to reflect on their experience with grades and feedback, how it's made them feel in the past, what they think the point of grades is, and use all that as an opening for talking about my rationale for doing this.

I've made a new page for my class webpage that lays out my rationale, pulls together a lot of disparate thoughts, and tries (and I hope succeeeds) in explaining to the students how and why I'm doing this. I've tried to gesture towards all the really smart people who have done this groundbreaking work for decades. What I'm doing is not new it's just trying to figure out the best way to apply what others have set up.

For what it's worth, even with struggling and trying to figure out what serves students best, I think all this is better, even with not totally ungrading, I think all this is better. It is better not to base your relationships with students in antagonism. It is better to let students have agency over their learning. It is better to teach students how to advocate for themselves and present solid evidence to back themselves up. 

What Scares Me

 I am not easily scared.

I write about horror for most of my scholarly work, and have finally acknowledged that, stopped feeling ashamed by it (thanks weirdo elitist academia), and love the work I do.

I have been scared by only a handful of things in my 44 year old life:

• A Girl Scout sleepover late night VHS viewing of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street
• The first season of American Horror Story
• The Haunting of Hill House 
• The Haunting of Bly Manor

It took me a bit to finish Bly Manor this weekend mainly because I could not watch episodes before bed and even WITH watching something else in the hours before bed I still was careful to shut the bedroom closet, eyed the dark hallway with a sense of unease, and was leery of turning my back to dark corners. Friday, Saturday, Sunday nights, it was all the same feeling, the same unsettling.

I could not have told you exactly what I felt uneasy about or what fear tickled the back of my brain, but it sat there, coiled, dark, unsettling.

Like I said, I don't scare easy but I felt haunted all weekend and it got me thinking about the other rare times I'd felt this way. I felt it when The Haunting of Hill House came out, but I also felt it the first season of American Horror Story, and I started turning over in my mind what these things had in common.

One thing that struck me was that for all of these, by the end of each story, there is nothing scary at all about any of these things. By the end of each the total narrative, the explanation, the history, has been revealed, laid out, and that reveal removes the shadows. 

Season one of American Horror Story ends when Ben (Dylan McDermott), Vivien (Connie Britton), Moira (Frances McCoy), and the other ghosts of the house have created a life for themselves. They decorate the house for Christmas, a perfectly normal scene, even with Tate (Evan Peters) still on the outside, still waiting for Violet (Taissa Farmiga) to forgive him. 

At the end of The Haunting of Hill House, the Crains family retunrs to Hill House to try and save Luke, who is destroyed when he seeks to destroy the house, ensuring no one else is lost to it. But Nell, the sister who was also destroyed by the house when she died by suicide, unable to escape the trauma of her haunting by the house.

In each of these stories the characters are haunted and traumatized by the events of their past, both their individual pasts and the generational pasts of their families and homes. All of these narratives convey this through flashbacks to the past, connecting these traumatic experiences. These flashbacks serve two purposes, they terrify us with the initial event, like the terrifying presence of the Bent-Neck Lady in Hill House, but they also eventually serve to explain the terror, reveal the source.

What makes these narratives terrifying is the idea that we can be haunted, dogged, incapable of escaping the events of our past. The idea that it does not matter where you go, what you overcome, what you accomplish you can never escape these terrors, these horrors, is itself a terror. Yet each narrative reveals a logic, an answer to these horros. In each story the answer is the story itself. AHS, Hill House, Bly Manor, each spends their episodes, their seasons revealing the stories behind the horror. The ghosts, the dead, those left behind and the traumatized, each have their story told and once their story is told they are no longer a horror, or rather they are still recognized as a horror, as a traumatic experience, no one in these stories is erasing or retconning the events of their past. Rather each set of families, characters, is only freed from the haunting effects of their past, their experienced horrors once they have had the chance to tell their stories.

Ben learns the truth about the ghostly inhabitants of the house and it is that and not any of his other actions that enables him to fix his family.

The Crains face the truth of each of their collective horrors, coming together to face the truth, and only once they've done that does Nell save Luke, and in doing so save them all.

Carla Gugino as the literal storyteller reveals the ultimate truth of Bly Manor, and in telling Dani's story tells the story of Viola, and how the ghosts of Bly came to be. Dani's acceptance of Viola's story frees the ghosts, and ensures no more will be created. The Storytellers narrative also frees Henry and Owen.

What each narrative seems to tell us, the lesson, seems to be that revealing and facing the past, learning from the stories of the past, is the only way to move forward. So why are they so scary, so haunting, if at the end we know it ends up okay? The ghosts that haunt these houses are horrifying in different ways. In AHS ghosts were created by dismemberment, death by suicide, self-immolation, and their actions, their forms of death, their trauma, for many of them is written on their bodies, the cause of the terror, the horror, their appearance evokes in others. In Hill House, both Nell and Olivia who died by suicide show evidence of their actions in their haunting, and the ghost of Abigail Dudley cannot leave the grounds she's killed on.  Bly Manor is haunted by ghosts who have forgotten their narratives, their names, their origins, seen in the wiping of their faces, the loss of their identity.

Perhaps these ghosts are terrifying because it is so easy to see how they are haunted by their lives, their actions. For many the cause of their own terror, which now terrorizes others, is written on their body. Their bodies then become the object lesson, and since so many of these ghosts are denied their own voice, their bodies are the only way their story can be told. Once the origin of their trauma has been revealed only THEN are they free, and are the inhabitants free of their haunting.

Even if we suspect that the endings will end up okay, the single episode narratives, the hauntings, the terrors are all still horrifying. We can say we understand that there's nothing under the bed, hiding in the dark doorway, waiting for us to turn out the light to get us, but knowing that and feeling that are different things. I still held my breath as I turned out the lights. I still didn't want the closet door open. I FELT the possible presence, threat, even if I KNEW it was irrational, not real. 

And maybe the reason why we're scared is because we've learned that personal traumas follow us, haunt us, keep us from doing certain things, living our lives. Maybe there is no dismembered ghost waiting to strangle us as soon as we turn off the light, but lights on or not WE are still left with our own personal horrors. We carry our traumas, our experiences with us, in the light and in the dark. The dark is not a comforting escape, it does not provide a respite, there is no hiding. Not all of us wear our own horrors on our skin as warnings or horrific narratives told to others. 

The end of each of these narratives either safely contains their ghosts and traumas or exorcises them. By the end of each the terror and horrors have been revealed and are not a source of fear. AHS shows the beginning of a new life for the family, Hill House finally frees the family members to move on from those events, and Bly Manor ends up freeing the ghosts, Flora, Miles, Henry, and ends up a love story.

It should be comforting that there is a way out of the trauma, a way through these experiences, a map for living a life free from horrors and terrors. But if that was truly true then we wouldn't jump at shadows, check under the bed, or not be able to sleep, right? Shouldn't KNOWING a thing make it easier? Yet somehow it is not. The ghostly shadow is still terrifying. The jumps real. The feelings of unease, of fear, is darker, deeper, and tickles that lizard part of our brain.

Maybe it's because we know that trauma is real, we experience it, it haunts us. It is real and we carry it with us each day.

Happy endings and resolutions on the other hand seem harder to believe in.

How are you still this horrible to students?

I've written here before that I used to be one of those "well-meaning but still doing harm" teachers. I replicated systems I waas taught- I bought in that rigor was rules and compliance. I thought controlling small things, the broken windows approach to teaching, was the way to ensure larger things didn't go off the rails. I believed in hard deadlines and not taking late work. I used to give 0s.

Over the years my pedagogy has radically changed.

My classes have sign in sheets, not to punish students for attendance but so I can email and check in with them every week or two if they've been missing. I tell students why- when I was in undergrad, I had an 8a art history class. I had an A in it on all my tests.  She had a strict attendance policy and she failed me for being one over. I had to repeat the class senior year. It was totally not fair.

I focus now on what the pedagogical reasons for readings, assignments, activities are in my classes.

I design my classes each semester around the students in front of me, what will engage them, what they need.

Students get 100s for turning in work, receive detailed feedback, and write grade reflections for larger assignments where they tell ME what grade they think their work earns.

There is no penalty for late work. Students don't have to justify or explain absences or beg for extensions. 

It's taken me longer than it should have.

I was given a few opportunities to learn and resisted. Cognitive dissonance is real.

But I eventually got here, and try, really hard, to keep learning, doing better. 

Education programs really need to start training teachers in the most recent research about how students learn, equity, and focus more on pedagogy than a checklist of best practices that are decades old. Most education programs and certainly the majority of school systems are still training, and expecting their students to perform, as though they wish for some artificial reconstruction of the "good old days" of teaching (not so much of an emphasis on learning).

Sadly, I've learned that higher education is not much different. Too many professors have no interest in teaching, or learning how to teach. They seem more concerned with holding students to out-dated, inaccurate models of "rigor" and arbitrary rules that "prepare them for the real world" than anything else. These people seem to be totally secure in their positions, happily bragging and ranting on the internet about their lectures, lack of student support, failing students, making fun of students, both their behaviors and assignments, in public spaces.

Their pedagogical style seems designed around punishment, them as the authority that cannot be questioned and students as the peons who should worship at their feet.

These people should not be teachers. They should not be entrusted with people's learning. They do active harm with their policies, and content choices, and approaches.

The last few months have revealed another aspect of horrific teaching. It's not a new issue, but with the massive move to online learning, it's certainly been moved to forefront. There are a vocal number of professors who assume their students are cheating, cannot be trusted, are dishonest, and must be surveiled. They must turn their cameras on, show professors a 360 of their surroundings, record themselves taking tests. 

They do not trust their students to complete their own assignments, listen or participate in class without their camera on, take a test with the time they need, accomodating all the possible thing that might interupt a quiz or test like poor Internet, family responsibilities, or anything else.

There is a vengeful glee that I have noticed in professors who are not concerned with how their students are in a literal world on fire, with protests against systematic injustice, state sanctioned violence, during a global pandemic disproportionately affecting and killing those who are already marginalized but are VERY concerned that we use X software so students can't cheat.

There is everything wrong with this. 

First, how, as a teacher, do you live every day with this negative assumption of your students? If your view of your students is as cheaters, people who are looking for the easy way out, looking to fool you, that colors your entire pedagogy, all the decisions you make in your classes and your teaching.

Second, have any of these professors stopped to ask WHY their students are cheating? Do they not know how to cite? Were they under a time crunch, painted into a corner, and felt they had no choice? What is the professor doing that contributed to this?

Third, design better assignments, unique ones where students choose their own topics, and *poof* suddenly you stop having issues with "cheating."

These professors are actively harming their students.

The professor requiring you to produce a death certificate to be allowed to make up an exam or an assignment is actively harming their students.

The professor not choosing texts or tailoring their content for the students in front of them is actively harming their students.

The professor not granting extensions, or penalizing students for late work, even if we're not in the middle of the worst nine months of our lives, is actively harming their students.

Most of the good teachers or professors I know have horror stories of things they experienced, like me and my art history teacher, and how it informed or changed their practice.

For too long these professors have been able to do this harm for a variety of reasons. Students have not felt comfortable advocating for themselves against this harm, there has been no support when they do, other professors refuse to hold their colleagues accountable, and students often have no choice in taking a certain class or professor.

On Twitter I've seen a lot of students sharing the awful things their professors are doing. I'm also seeing a growing frustration by students on professors who are dumping more work on them because they think they're just sitting home doing nothing, professors who are failing them because of tech glitches or not complying with surveillance software.

These behaviors are unethical and awful in normal times. During all this? I think it's horrific. 

Our students should be at the center of what we do. We should be basing decisions on what is best for them in this moment. 

Students should not feel they have to apologize for sending a professor an email.

Students should not be afraid to ask their professors for help.

Students should not have added stress or anxiety because of anything a professor is doing.

I cannot fix or even begin to address, or in some cases comprehend, what my students are going through and experiencing. I have a steady job, I can pay my bills, I have so far managed to stay healthy, although I've grieved as I've lost people to Covid and struggled with the state of the world. 

But here's what I can do for my students.

My classes do not have due dates, or penalties for late work.

I set aside a week for us to workshop major assignments, time for them to work on it in class, ask questions, get help. I tell them so far as time management that they should aim for turning it in sometime that week so they don't then find themselves behind as we move on. But the line I always repeat is "you are adults and I trust that you will make the decisions you need to." It costs me nothing to do this. I set a deadline, a week before the end of the semester that's a hard deadline for turning any/all missing work, so I can grade it and the students know what their grade is before the final paper/project, but other than that, no deadlines, due dates, restrictions. So students don't have to request extensions, or share personal reasons for needing extra time, or justify their trauma or things they're struggling with. They just get the time. Automatically. I've heard some professors complain about the work this creates, that the burden is put on them. First, having done this for years I can tell you I've never seen this. The nightmare scenario that these professors like to describe- that somehow all 150 of your students will wait until the day before class ends to submit all their work never materializes. It just doesn't happen. In my years of having this policy each semester there is at best in each class a handful of students that take advantage of the extra time. Not a burden, or extra work. And while I totally understand that depending on your status and role at a school your labor conditions are different, and often unequitable, if you are a professor your job is to teach and you need to do that. You need to serve your students.

Students can revise any assignment for a higher grade.

For some classes the grades are 75% practice assignments they write grade reflections so we can calibrate where they think they are versus where I think they are, but they get a 100 for turning it in and the final paper that reflects all the practice is the final 25% and they argue for what grade they think it earns based on our work all semester. In other classes they have major assignments with ungraded formative assignments that practice. In all cases if they do not like their grade, or want to revise to practice or improvetheir skills, they're welcome to, and the higher grade replaces their previous one.

There is no attendance policy. 

I tell them we do most of the work in class, so attending class is important, but I trust them to do what they need. I have students who have child care issues, who have responsibilities at home, who have not felt comfortable attending class after hearing about campus parties in light of Covid. Others have issues with work schedules, or their commute, or struggling with depression or stress or anxiety. Again, it costs me nothing to NOT penalize students for these things.

Policies that penalize students for these situations and issues are inequitable and often ableist. They reward students with advantages and privilege and punish students for conditions beyond their control.

There has been a lot of talk about how *waves* all this provides an opportunity to interogate these systems and build better environments, better approaches. A recognition that our classes do not have to be this way, and we can do better.

In the scheme of things, these are all really small things. They require almost no effort on our part as professors and make sure a big difference to our students.

I cannot do anything about my students having family who are sick, or vulnerable. I cannot do anything about students worried about their job prospects in this new world. I cannot do anything to cure a students' depression, or stress, or anxiety. If anything, the list of things I cannot help with or improve has only grown in the last few months. I can listen if students want to talk, I can be sympathetic, which helps some students just to have someone to talk to, even if I can't DO anything to actually help. I feel more powerless than I have in twenty years of teaching. So with all the things I CANNOT do it really seems like the least I, or any of us can do, is these small moves that can help our students so much. Because I CAN take late work. I CAN make sure my class is not an additional source of stress or anxiety. I CAN tell students I'm happy to see them. I CAN email and check in with them to see if they're okay.

I am not a magical professor. Not all students will take advantage. Not all students will come to class, turn in all their work, love my topic. There are things my policies and approaches can't, won't, fix. These things are not magical fairy dust. They are literally the least I can do to help though. So I will continue to do them, and reflect on ways I can do better. Make my class more accessible, more accomodating.

So here are the small moves folks can do to help:

If you screw up admit it, fix it, move on.

If you can make a change to how your class runs that will benefit your students, make it. Even if you're halfway through your semester, there is no rule that says you can't tell your students that you've realized X and want to change some things to help them so now you're going to do Y.

When students email you apologizing or feeling like they need to make excuses, don't underestimate the power of saying thank you, but you don't need to do this. Of telling them you're happy to help. Of asking HOW you can help.

Be sure to tell students how they can do better, end the class well, catch up. Sometimes students can't see a way out, and just give up. SHOW them there is a way to finish class.

As so many have pointed out though, I don't know how to tell you that you should care about other people. The educational research and evidence shows the harm these types of policies and behaviors do. There is no excuse for continuing them.

If you continue to view teaching as a form of control, as a way to be cruel to students, to belittle them, enhance your own power, then I think you're an awful human being. You are actively harming your students. You are doing lifelong damage to your students, and how they view learning. You should not be trusted with students. You should not be a teacher or a professor. You're in the wrong job.

We can't solve a lot of these issues.

But we can certainly not make things worse, harder, for our students.

Fall 2020 Midterm Reflections

Since 2010 I have taught and built classes in Blackboard and Moodle and Google Classroom. None of these LMS are great, although they have varying issues. I dislike a lot of the surveillance built in. I dislike the addition and use of things like TurnItIn and Respondus Lockdown Browser. I've also written here a lot about how my teaching has fundamentally changed, especially the last few years.

Before all this (waves at the multiple apocalypses) I had planned on trying just a simple page/website for class, inspired by and modeled on Jesse Stommel's. I was looking forward to the challene of teaching in this new form, a way to focus and refocus on what was important in my classes, the connections I made in my classes, with my students. It seemed the natural pedagogical progression of my moves towards ungrading, grading conferences, less work, more open work, trusting students.

But then this summer my university said they created Blackboard shells for everyone to use. I knew the semester was going to be hard on my students for lots and lots of reasons and I did not want to become one more thing that was hard so I put aside my ideas and built my classes in the prescribed shells, following the guidelines. All the layouts were the same, with the idea that students would know where to find everything because all their classes would use the same layout/shell.

I was really horrified over the summer on the sheer number of conversations I heard from professors, laser focused on catching students "cheating" and properly using respondus lockdown software. These crap attitudes seem to have only gotten worse in K-12 as well as higher ed as the semester has gone on, with teachers and professors demanding students turn cameras on (I've been told in meetings *I* have to have mine on), forcing student to reveal their studying situations, punishing students for things SEEN in these meetings, and other, totally crap things.

Like many, I spent the summer trying to imagine and plan for as many scenarios as I could for teaching this fall. Trying to center care for my students and awareness of what they would be dealing with, and then balance this with covering some content. 

I planned out, and created, all five of my classes in Blackboard. I had three face to face classes and two totally online classes. Two of my face to face classes were 20 and 35 students, so I divided them into three groups because they were MWF classes, and assigned each a day. I figured having the modules/classes totally built would allow me to spend the semester responding to students, and things as they came up versus feeling stressed about building modules and staying ahead of students.

As a result of this planning my courses have less work, few readings and assignments this semester and I am fine with this.

Students mostly seem to be enjoying class, appreciating the design of class, and the flexibility built in.

But a couple weeks ago our systems went down, with everyone losing access to Blackboard on a Sunday afternoon. Monday I emailed all my students to tell them not to stress, that they would of course not be penalized for this, and to go take a walk, or a nap, or something. By Wednesday morning we still did not have access and had no idea when it would be restored so I went ahead and returned to my plan of an outside webpage/site for class.

https://sites.google.com/view/drkshimabukuro/home

I built the bare bones, and sent my students emails Wednesday morning, before we had class, so we could go over it in class, answer questions.

I also told them that we would not be returning to Blackboard because I though stability was important, and I was not going to go back and forth on them.

Because I already use Google Docs all the time in my classes, all my syllabi are live Google Docs, my resources and notes are Google Slides, it was fairly easy to transition. I told the students I was not going to back build the past 4-5 weeks, what was for most classes the first module, so I could focus on prepping what we were doing NOW. But I also told them that if there was something they needed/wanted/noticed was missing, just to let me know and I'd happily add it.

I designed the page so that the home page had general information and announcements.

Then each class has a separate page with everything for their course on a single page.

There are then separate pages for resources and class policies.

Based on the students' comments, this is all working really well, and they like the new site.

One shift was in the assignments since Google Sites does not have a submission system. But again, this had a pretty easy fix. I just asked them to email me their work with their grade reflection. It's a lot of email BUT I like it better. First, it has made me refocus on making sure I'm giving good, detailed feedback. Also, the format allows me to make comments, but also ask questions like "can you explain to me what your revision process was like?" and the format of email is more conducive to these conversations. It also made me realize that I had duplicated class work/discussions in Blackboard, planning for the eventuality that we'd have to move online, and this was confusing to students. They weren't sure what work they were or were not supposed to do. In making the move to the site I was able to just focus on the major assignments, and the idea of formative assignments just for feedback and learning became clearer.

Students had already turned stuff in through Blackboard and I of course did not have access to that, so I did a couple of things. I asked them to email what grade they had if they remembered. I had also put in Fs for missing work (even though they could make it up) just so they had an accurate idea of their grade and could prioritize. I told them I'd be removing those for the first assignment and that if they wanted to not make up the missing first assignment it would not count against them. That we'd focus on moving forward.

Another issue I had to find a solution to was a channel for discussion. This was less an issue for my face to face classes, but was something I needed to figure out for my totally online classes. I ended up introducing Slack for this. We're easing in, because I told them I wasn't going to throw 50 things at them, but I also figured easing into it the rest of this semester would help me beta test it for the spring. For ease of use, I just created the one workspace, and each class has a separate channel, with a channel for general questions. We'll see how this works, it's a work in progress and still pretty new. My main thought with the one workspace was that I could be "on" during office hours, and "see" everything, and not have to worry about having to flip between multiple pages. I TOO am juggling a lot and could do with fewer new things.

Some general observations:

I designed the class to NOT focus on handouts, paper copies, hard copy peer editing, etc. I have been mostly paperless the last few years with things available on Google Docs, but still had some things I handed out. Concern about germs this semester meant I got rid of this.

This is a little hard for me because I do like have students write informally in class and turn stuff in, and the hard copies ARE easier for me to grade. But it's been fine.

In one class we're in an auditorium, so it's really easy for me to walk up and down the aisle, see folks' screens and stop and intervene, ask if they need help, answer questions. This has worked out well although I can tell you I'm often not 6' away. 

My other face to face classes are in a more traditional classroom, and during discussions I'm up front, more than 6' away, but not when they're workshopping a piece, then I'm walking around, sitting next to them to read stuff.

I just can't do my job standing in front of the room all the time.

I was really worried about access with so much being online. Students use their phones, iPads, laptops, Chromebooks in class and seem to have been fine BUT I have also scheduled lab time for workshopping assignments in my general education course for ease of use.

I've also had students come during some days, get the opening instrctions, lecture, and tell me they're going back to their rooms/home to work, since it'll be easier on a regular computer, better wifi, not on their phone, and that's worked out fine too.

Attendance has been an issue, but maybe not as bad as I thought?

I try to email students one every week or so if they've not been coming, not as a "gotcha" but as a literal check in. Some were quarantined, some were sick, and these long term absences are just a reality. They can access everything online and turn in work, even for the face to face classes, even if it's not the same. Others are dealing with a lot, as many of our students are, family issues, extra work shifts, stress, anxiety, depression. I've gotten frantic emails about needing extensions, and apologies. It has been a bright spot for me to be able to repond that they never need to apologize to me, that my class has no due dates, no penalty for late work, and that I trust they will turn in the work as soon as they can.

Except for a couple of guest speakers, I am not holding class in Zoom, although I am using it for major meetings, workshops, and office hours. I prefer Hangouts, and used it this past spring when we moved online, but too many students have had too many issues with it, so I'm using Zoom now.

Some students have expressed concern with not feeling safe coming to class (because of elder family, feeling like students were partying, and not wanting that exposure, etc.). I admit because my classes are scheduled face to face, I don't have a good answer for this other than to tell students I understand if they don't feel comfortable coming to class. But I haven't been holding hybrid/dual classes like I know some are.

On our campus we've had 27 reported cases, 17 recovered, 11 in quarantined, which I think even for our size I think are good numbers and I hope we get through the rest of our semester. We haven't heard yet about spring, but I'd guess we're looking at a later start, then a similar semester- about half of classes online, then a semester with no breaks, straight through until May.

Our Blackboard access has been restored, but like I told my students we are not returning to it. 

We are using it ONLY for students to check their grades. I put in the grades from our work the last couple of weeks, and cleaned up the gradebook so ONLY the major assignments, not the formative feedback ones, showed. I took out the Fs for the first assignment, so they don't count against them. There have been a couple of glitches, things I missed, but students have emailed me and I've corrected those with no issue. I also went through and hid the content, so there's no confusion about using Blackboard and made the My Grades the landing page, so they don't have to go hunting for the one thing we're using Blackboard for.

I'd love to find another way to do grades moving forward, and think because most classes have 4 major assignments, one for each module, and usually they're each 25%, I could post a math lesson in the course so students could figure their own grades. That way I wouldn't need Blackboard at all.

So far I am happy for the move. I like the simplicity of it, I like the ease of integrating my resources and materials for students from Google Drive. I think it's easier for the students to navigate. I also like that I've refocused on the feedback conversations through email.

Midterms are this week, so we're officially halfway through our semester. Given all the things we had to deal with, account for, and try to address, I think it's going as well as it could be. I love teaching, and I'm enjoying my classes and my students. I think that my classes in the spring will look like my classes do now. The only thing I don't think I'll be doing is splitting the larger classes up, teaching the same material three times. And I do plan on asking students what else I could do to support them when/if they don't come to class. But other than that I think we've done the best we can, and it's been because the university made X plans and changes, faculty then built on that making Y plans and changes, and then the students did their part.

I know it's all awful and traumatic and didn't have to be this way, but surviving the semester, making my students are okay, and that I'm supporting them as much as I can, understanding and caring for them, is what I'm focused on.