Notebooks in the Composition Classroom

I used to be one of those people who collected various forms of notebooks as though finding *just* the right one would solve all my problems. It's a common joke. After I was introduced to Ralph Fletcher's Idea of A Writer's Notebook, I found filling notebooks, using them consistently, easier, and more helpful. My office closet is full of 60+ notebooks from the last 23 years. Since the beginning of Covid, I admit they are more journal than full on writer's notebooks, but I also keep a separate notebook of article/book chapter ideas that's a writer's notebook, as well as another notebook for teaching ideas and reflections.

I have tried over the years to get my students to see the light with writer's notebooks to no end. When I taught high school the interactive notebooks I had them create and use were great. Students loved the organization, layering, and interactive nature. But introducing writer's notebooks to college students, English majors, was a failure when I tried it here my first year. They found them constrictive, fiddly, and most of our last week of class discussion was about how much they (jokingly, but not really) hated them. At the end of that academic year Covid shut everything down, so the combination of factors meant no more tries with writer's notebooks.

But I ran into an earlier Tweet than this, but using the same quote:

"“The word text, like textile and texture, comes from the Latin root textere, “to weave.” Writing is rarely purely personal or purely technical and objective—it’s a mix, a hybrid, a text.” ⁦@Tom_Newkirk

This inspired me to start my Composition I class this semester with a textere activity. Students weaved together pictures and poems. They were great. I enjoyed starting class this way because I felt it set a great tone for how we would view things in class. Today in class we read “Rebecca Nagle on Craft Lessons from (a Different Kind of) Crafting" because it was such a great coda to our class. And students SAW it! Which was even better.

I always end up having books I read for homework that shape my ideas for classes. One year it was Ordinary Notes. Then The Trayvon Generation. Sometimes we end up using the book, sometimes it's just the idea of it that I use to build my syllabus.

These are the books that I'm noodling on for spring's Composition II. I've always loved Lynda Barry's Syllabus and have used it in Advanced Composition.

I also often bring these books in to SHOW students specific examples of what I was thinking when I designed the class, or chose a reading, or built an assignment. I also often revisit these texts, come back to them, when refining or revising something for class.

I think I'm going to try a version of the writer's notebook in Composition II next semester for a couple of reasons.

1. Students really enjoyed the tactile, arts and crafts stuff we did this semester.

2. No tech days and assignments are not only valuable for the different ways we think about things but also for the mental break it provides.

3. I talk a lot in class about process and revisiting ideas and layering and some students really get it. It is a struggle though to see through when students are absent a lot (for all very valid reasons, this is not a shaming statement) and may not complete, do all assignments. It's hard to ask them to revisit an idea or piece of writing if it's not done.

So I think first day- decorate notebook, make it yours. I'll provide if you need one (old school composition, by design not made for tearing stuff out). I have gone back and forth on accessibility of this, but won't have any issue with digital versions.

Then I'm going to provide an index they can insert. I figure I'll do this by module, steal from interactive notebook. Students can know what we did if they missed, see my example if they need to.

Then for the pages, I want to have a mix of notes, brainstorming, drawing, scrapbook-y stuff, that they then will "mine" to type up for larger assignments. I want them to revisit ideas with Post-Its and layer thoughts. 

I have three sections of Composition II next semester, so we'll see what they think.

I'm also going to have independent reading in all my classes next semester. This semester was just my Tuesday/Thursday classes.

Concerns in the Classroom Fall 2024

The Chronicle of Higher Ed posted an article, "Customers in the Classroom: Students increasingly treat college as a transaction. Who--or what-- is to blame?" (McMurtie, 2024).There are valid considerations in the piece and a lot of "kids these days" but it did not offer really any solutions or interventions that professors could try or consider to push back against some of these ideas. So below are some of the interventions I'm trying this semester/academic year to try and address some of these, and other, concerns.

The article addresses fearful faculty and contigent faculty so I think it's important to state that while I am a queer, heavily tattooed professor with a shaved head, I am also white and tenured. I teach at a small HBCU with a student enrollment of roughly 2200.

Care

• "Few uncaring and dynamic professors"
• "in many cases the academic benefits of a college education prove difficult to demonstrate"
• Students don't see value in subjects
• "Studeets were highly attuned...to whether their professors seemed to care about their subject and about their students"
• "students rarely speak openly about why they feel disengaged or shortchanged by their education"
• "desperate for a connection"
• "Colleges don't offer sufficient services to help students in need"

I start most classes with "it's nice to see you," "how are you," "how was your weekend?" It's a simple thing but I think demonstrates a lot. When I walk around class looking at work, seeing what they're doing, I also comment on it. Talking to them, asking questions.

I do check in surveys in week 3, 7, 12. I do them in Google Forms, put the link on the syllabus, and students complete them as a "do now" when they come into class. 

The first one asked how they are, what barriers they're facing, if they feel like they know where to get help, asks about their planning and time management. I made a little brochure of resources on campus and give them a blank weekly planning calendar. I also go through and read to see if there is anything specific I need to follow up on.

In the following weeks the questions are similar, offering different tips with questions, like eating right, taking breaks, dealing with stress and anxiety and again I follow up. I usually do a funny "on a scale of" of cats or Muppets. The last question is if there's anything else they want me to know.

Each week there is a sign in sheet for class and at the end of the week I put into our admin system. But I also identify students who were significantly absent and email them checking in on them.

I also ask, for assignments students turn in, if they're alright with me displaying. There is student work all over my classroom and my office.

There are lots of ways to show students you care.

If I see a students nodding off in class I ask if they're okay. Then I tell them to go home and sleep. Same with being sick. I send them home.

There is a caveat of course with all of this. This kind of work tends to fall onto women. It's extra emotional labor. If your version of care does not fit gender-conforming ideals or is not the type of care students expect, there can be issues.

However, I think there are lots of ways to provide care that can be easily implemented. The emails at the end of the week take less than five minutes. The conversations in class take nothing. And I'm a firm belieber that the payoff is a hundred fold. I think it can support students, especially adult learners returning, first gen, previously under-served, under-represented students.

But it's worth a discussion amongst lecturers, adjuncts, women, Women of Color, queer faculty in your spaces about the pitfalls unique to your situation.

Some of the easiest parts of care are beyond faculty and rely on the institutions.

Decades ago I remember someone saying that the easiest way to show students you care was in your building. Were windows cleaned? Trash taken out? Bathrooms clean? Supplies always available? Floors mopped?

These seem like givens but I constantly see pictures online from students and faculty of leaks in ceilings, moldy spaces, no paper towels in restrooms, broken classroom furniture. I'm not even talking about asking for working technology, or smartboards, or anything fancy. I'm talking about simple environmental factors.

Especially now, with temperatures rising and new viruses and allergens and in some areas continuous wildfires, working air conditioning and heat and air filtration, clean air, is vital not only to our students' health but how well they can engage and participate.

Care can and should be built into design.

If you have a lot of adult learners, commuters, is there a place for them? Literally? Is there easy parking, night or weekend classes, housing for families? Signifcant online classes? Specific advisors to address their needs?

What about first generation students? Students who need access? Colleges should be able to provide laptops and notebooks to students that need them. Support and answers on "how to college." Spaces where they feel safe.

Classes should be accessible for all. ADA compliant at the least. Classrooms that all can navigate. Texts that can be read aloud. Materials written in fonts that help learning disabilities. Classrooms that use closed captions and microphones. Events with sign language interpreters. Shuttles that operate dependably on campus.

Campuses and classes should be built with the most accommodations in mind.

Care should be baked into everything.

Students should not have to feel as though they have to share or perform their personal lives, details, traumas, in order to be treated with basic decency.

Many campuses have on-site food banks, some may offer housing for the unhoused. What resources, how good the supports are though vary widely from place to place. Campuses should offer all students need. Housing and food should be free. For all students, including off-campus ones. PLUS the food bank. Housing should include options for families. Student health should be all-encompassing. Pharmacy, mental and physical health, vaccinations, meal planning. Computer laps AND laptop rentals. Clothes banks. 

Relevance of Coursework and Its Presentation

• "Coursework feels repetitive"
• "classes in which instructors read off of slides"
• "cheating as a defensible response"
• "When describing the context in which they cheated or not, students taked about whether they trusted the professor"
• "professor's job is merely to provide content"
• "in their lived experience, integrity has not been highly valued"

I hear a lot from first year students that they are frustrated having to take the "same" math, science, history, language classes "again." For students coming straight from high school they feel like they just TOOK algebra, chemistry, and do not understand why they have to take them again. 

General Education classes that first year feel repetitive to them. The issue from my perspective is that these classes should NOT feel repetitive. They should be the foundational introduction to a liberal arts education. They should both build on and challenge their previous educational experiences. They should actively ask students to reconsider and reexamine what they know and think they know in new lights. 

When I was in undergraduate I had an 8a art history class. I liked it. But a dark auditorium first thing in the morning after I'd often worked late, was often a challenge. I got As on all tests but failed it because of a strict attendance policy. I often share this with students as the beginning of my issues with attendance policies. Then and now it struck me as unfair. 

If I was in a class where the professor just read off of slides, I would have a hard time seeing why I needed to be there too. I'd look for a shortcut. And if you think you wouldn't, think about how well as a faculty member you're engaged in a faculty meeting or completing mandatory online HR training.

There's an old teaching adage that students respect what you inspect. 

If a course seems designed to not care, I understand why students might assume that professors might not care about cheating either.

Professors and teachers have said for years that the easiest way to stop plagiarism and cheating is in assignment design but it's also in how the assignment is baked into your class. In my classes if the end of module assignment is to create an informational text on a social issue, students choose their own issue. We have conversations in class about why they chose that, why they care about it. We have group discussions about what they learn from initial research and why it matters. They choose how to represent all this- flyers, models, posters, presentations. And I watch them work on these, craft them, in class. I see it come together. Then they conference with me, presenting the final product to me and answering questions about their choices. Because of the design and process, students can't cheat on this. But more importantly, they don't want to.

There are a thousand different ways to show students that your content matters, why it matters, and what they need. 

Trust your students. They are adults with full lives and capable of their own decisions. This doesn't mean a free for all, or that the role of the professor with both content knowledge and experience is not important. It is. But the infantilizing of students, referring to them as "kids" is a special blend of condescension and elitism. My content knowledge and experience teaching means I can guide students. But it is also what allows me to design classes with broad strokes and let them fill in the specifics. To change my live syllabus if they need more time, or if a better reading would fit them, or if I need to try something else because what I planned is not the best fit, or does not best serve the students in front of me.

Every class, every semester, has new folks. The last few years our lived reality radically changes each semester. Profesors should explore and experiment. Add new readings, a new artist, a new approach. Think more of your class as a living, changing, experiment and not as a locked in set of pieces that only go together one way.

During the pandemic "triage" teaching the first few months set an awful precedent that colleges, faculty, students, have not challenged since and it's doing a lot of damage. MY content knowledge on how to teach and WHAT to teach, is valuable. I went to school for a long time to learn it, I read and learned on my own to tweak and experiment what worked and didn't. But my greatest gift in the classroom is my ability to look and listen to my students and adapt. This is true of good teaching in a face to face or online classroom. At the beginning of the pandemic professors who had no training, or in some cases interest, were rushed to put their classes online and this often looked like just replicating what they were doing in their classrooms before. They recorded and uploaded lectures and PDFs.  They paced things the same and expected the same work.

But the ground shifted under our feet, the world tilted on its axis and we are all permanently changed.

Year five now in the ongoing pandemic and many professors are still teaching this same way. My incoming first year students this year spent the end of middle school and all of high school under pandemic conditions. Teachers and students constantly out. Classes merged for supervision but not necessarily focused on content or learning. Instability of classroom communities because of these interuptions means that students struggle with talking to each other, looking up from the tech devices they've been TOLD to, TRAINED to, constantly be on, and serve as woobies, their only connection in many cases to online friends and relationships, perhaps the only ones they have. Then there is the grief, the trauma, that no one has been given the time to deal with. On top of all this is the economic stress of rising prices due to corporate greed and struggling to help or support families that are themselves struggling under incredible weights of elder care, more people in the house due to no available housing or riding housing costs.

Content dump teaching is not teaching. Watching a ninety minute lecture is not teaching. Completing an assignment that is only ever marked turned in or not is not learning. Teaching and learning is a flexibility. It is a give and take. I understand why this approach has continued. It's easy. It builds on the egalitarian promise of MOOCs and places like Khan Academy- the democratization of education. It also builds a vast depository of information universities own and can use to teach AI with the ultimate end of replacing in person teaching. It's the ultimate end for the neoliberal university, tech bros, and billionaire "philanthropists" who insist on reinventing education even though they do not have a single clue how it works. 

It is, and will continue to be, the justification for cutting and not replacing full time faculty, for abusing contingent professors, and increasing exploitive work conditions.

Faculty and students need protection, and in some places unions are doing their work here. But not nearly enough.

Exploring and Experimenting

• "Rather than taking risks and exploring new subjects, students are laser-focused on maximizing GPAs and building résumés."
• student has "an exaggerated fear of failure"

There is a ton of research and ink on ungrading, the harmful impact of grades, and various experiments and how they work. I won't duplicate that work here but I will share how things work in my class.

The last few years as students conference with me, the last step if they email their final product with a reflection on the work, the process, and the feedback they received. I also had them write, based on all that, what grade they think the work earned and why. It was an alien concept to all, and some struggled (mostly folks who always got As, and defined identity by grades), but after the first module, it becomes (based on their end of semester reflections) one of their favorite parts of class.

While the syllabus language says I reserve right to argue against grade they argue for, I almost never do.

This all ends up tying into the above- students are more willing to experiement, do a hands on project, try a difficult subject or approach, because they know they will not be punished.

Hard core STEM students draw and make models. They cook meals. Projects and versions of unessays are common parts of my class. But so are writing assignments with specific audiences and purposes- PowerPoints for elementary students, or graphics for a nature trail, or an argument to a town for climate change recommendations. Part of this is because the structure of the class frees them to. But part of it too is because the last few years, I've actively rebelled against the "prepare for job" trend in English classes. My students learn software skills, and how to use programs, and think about design and layout, but the main focus is them learning what they think about a variety of things and then supporting and expressing those.

We look at art. We read articles about social issues. We read poems and essays and food blogs.

I'm vocal that the purpose of my classes and humanities classes in general is to make better humans.

Most students enjoy this and it engages them. It helps them see how the class matters to them, how they can transfer these skills to their other classes, to their lives.

This year, students still conference, and I do the check in surveys, but I've changed so when the university asks me to report progress report grades (are they at risk of failing or not), midterms (letter grades), and end of semester final grades (letter again) I ask the students to write a detailed reflection on their work, process, engagement in class, ideas, etc. and tell me what to post.

Students' Reality

• "spend so much time working to pay for college that they can't take advantage of all it has to offer"
• "faculty member spent the bulk of class time rehashing the readings because few students had done them in advance"
• Students don't read

For the most part, the structure of higher education assumes that every student they serve is 18, lives on campus, does not have to work, can afford supplies, has access to technology, and the privilege to navigate college and advocate for themselves.

None of this is true anymore. Students work, often full time jobs, and often may have to miss class to pick up shifts. Yet the class schedules and out-dated attendance policies don't reflect this. In 2024 the assumption that everyone has a computer is countered by so many students trying to complete their work on their cracked phones, often forbidden in class, so they sit in the parking lots of McDonald's to access their wi-fi. Huge swaths of the United States are internet deserts but programs, loading videos, online textbooks, often require high speed internet.

On campus resources of computer labs, libraries, dining halls, which might fill these gaps close and 5 or 6, locking out working students.

Students may be trying to follow a class on Zoom while at their desk at work.

Students may not have childcare that day.

Or maybe daycare or school is closed because of mass illness.

Students may not understand or have ever had the value of a dedicated working space.

Maybe no one taught them how to study.

Some may live an hour away and some weeks can't afford the gas.

Students get sick and often a full recovery takes over a week, but again, draconian attendance policies don't allow this. So students come back after a day or two getting others sick as well as ensuring they'll be out again the next week because they're not recovered. They email their professors photos of them in hospital beds right after surgery or giving birth, begging their professors not to penalize them. In a world where not everyone has health insurance, or maybe can't afford the copay, or can't sit in an urgent care for six hours to be seen, or is just too sick to get out of bed, requiring doctor's notes or documentation is beyond cruel.

There are lots of reasons ADULTS might need to miss class. MAKE class important, SHOW them that, then trust them to make the decisions they need to.

In the United States there is a toxic expectation of work that the pandemic has only made worse. If you're home sick you're expected to still attend the Zoom meeting, check email, complete work, produce. If you're exhausted from your regular week too bad because you still need to work nights and weekends. Returning to care, one of the easiest, best things you can do for your students is simply give them permission not to participate in this toxic feedback loop. Throw out the punitive attendance policy. Tell them to feel better and not worry about work when they email you they'll be out sick. Not only will sick students be more likely to stay home, which is better for everyone, but they'll BE better.

I am always surprised when administrations ask faculty some version of "what can we do to accomplish X?" involving the students. Why not ask the students? I'm pretty sure that students would prefer to have laptops and help than new marketing. Parking that was accessible and that they didn't have to pay for rather than performative events. Actual structural issues fixed rather than a new, branded, coat of paint put over them.

If you ask students what they need, or want, they'll often tell you, although sadly I've noticed in my check in surveys a lot don't believe there is help to be had. They've had "rigor" and "grit" pounded into them for so long that they answer "nothing" to offers of help or say "it's my fault" or "I should be able to do this." They internalize institutional failures. And we should push against these answers and point out the structural issues AND offer ways to help.

As an English teacher I WANT to spend my time talking about what we read- poems, essays, novels, plays, articles. I want to hear what students have to say and guide discussions and ask questions. I used to get so frustrated when I'd plan a whole class around discussion and then no one did the reading and I didn't know what to do. I did punitive reading quizzes. I canceled class, sent folks home. But at some point I asked myself why they WEREN'T doing the reading. And that changed everything. Because they had really good reasons. Some had no time. Some didn't have time management skills and the every other day schedule confused them. Some got lost. Some couldn't concentrate. Some had never been taught to read critically.

One of the consequences of Covid has been a lack of concentration, brain fog, memory issues, all of which compound all the reasons above that affect students being able to read for class. 

So now in my classes we read shorter pieces to start, I read stuff out loud, we talk about how to annotate and why. We talk about active reading and reading for different purposes. We talk about interacting with the text. As we move through the semester we read longer texts and I set aside classtime for them to do it, doing reading math in my head. If they don't finish they finish for homework. We have discussions first about what questions they have. I define words, they Google stuff, I answer things about "real" names and what is fiction.

In my upper level English classes I use a lot of the scaffolding skills when we start out, but I run all these classes as one night 3 hour seminars that are totally dependent on the students leading the conversation so they learn quickly.

In general, if I have not taught a student something, I don't assume they know it. I ask. And if they don't we go over it.

Systematic Issues

• "Mired in campus bureaucracy"
• Customer service, transactional relationship model where professors work for student and therefore must do what the student wants. The "I'm paying to pass, earn credit, graduate" expectation/perspective.
• "holding colleges accountable for students' rentention, graduation, and future earnings"

Bureaucracy should never be a barrier for students. If they need housing give it to them. If they're hungry feed them. Everybody knows the struggles students face and everybody knows what the answers are. Places choose not to implement them. The FAST Fund is a great example of what is possible. A student comes to you and needs gas to get to campus, so you walk to the ATM and you give it to them. Or they need to pay their cell phone bill or daycare or textbooks. You just trust them and give them what they need so that they can continue to be students.

There are some "rock star" educators who have advocated that students build the class syllabus, set the learning outcomes, design it all.As much as student choice is important to my classes, that approach has always bothered me, in much the same way content dump teaching does. Teaching is not me dumping information into students' heads but it's also not being absent from the teaching. I, as a teacher, am valuable because I can bake certain things into the design of the class, scaffold skills, schedule mini-lessons and opportunities for students to practice. I am valuable because of the feedback I give and how I support students and suggest ideas, readings, improvements. Students can choose topics and how they demonstrate knowledge and progress on those topics, but they don't have my education or experience. That doesn't mean their knowledge is not valuable, or that they have nothing to teach me. It just means that in the classroom while I'm not the dictator, I am the expert in teaching and learning. I do know best about some things. I change my classes every semester based on what I've learned from students, how better to serve them, to reflect new scholarship and approaches. I strive always to do what is best. A lot of that includes listening to student feedback. But learning is not and should not be transactional. Going back to the "make better humans" bit, we read and write and create art because it is what makes us human and connects us. THAT is what we get out of it, and enriches us, and that cannot be transactional.

If a professor, a major, a university, is not consistently passing students, graduating them, that is symptomatic of larger issues that I argue have more to do with care and all the other things I mention above than anything else. Give students a good foundation, support them with what they need, and they tend to do well.

But to hold individual programs, usually humanities, responsible for what comes after graduation is madness in this lived reality. Whole fields can disappear in the blink of the shelf-life of a new technology. New ones are created. The skills used in earning one degree may prove useful for a totally different field. Students may choose to not use their degree but take a 9-5 day job to prioritize family or community. Students may get ill, become disabled, move somewhere else with a lower cost of living. To expect universities to be responsible for all the elements that affect lives after graduation is ridiculous. As ridiculous as expecting schools to somehow fill the gaps created by poverty, lack of healthcare, support, food and housing insecurity, yet not actually address any of those issues.

Most of what I write about here are based on my experiences, what works in my laboratory of a classroom on a daily basis. But I think part of the answer here, to the issue of repetiveness specifically lies in larger changes. In k-12 education for decades now, the premise of pre-assessments to see where students are, what they know, what can be skipped, what needs focus, have been implemented one way or another. But these are not wholesale accepted in college. For certain GE classes, why aren't pre-assessments conducted? They would help students and faculty. There also needs to be a fairly radical redesign of GE. Most students need statistics and financial literacy more than algebra. Sustainability studies is a better science choice than upper level physics. More classes in global studies, geography, current events, ethics. Health and PE should be more about creating healthy adult habits that will serve them all their lives.

For majors that require upper level science, math, languages, pre-assessments can see where students should be put. Maybe these classes run on quarters so students can be moved up or down based on what they need to succeed. That the demonstration of knowledge maybe isn't a "C" or above in chemistry but a demonstration of specific skills on an assessment.

Coursework, especially at the GE level, might seem more relevant, less repetitive, be of more use, if it actually WAS the foundation for larger studies.

In my experience, all of these things has made my work infinitely easier. I spend less time on nonsense and policing and compliance and this freed up time allows me to walk around all of class and listen to students and offer feedback, have conversations. It allows me to email feedback to lots of student work.

The last few years I've been gathering supplies in my office in the hopes of us being back in our assigned building and me being able to teach in my own room. Now, I know in higher education this is not a thing. However, we are a small school and we have lots of classroom space. But also, I think some of what I'll describe below COULD scale up and be useful.

My classroom is set up in pods. I've done this for a very long time. One, I do it because it's a physical signal to students how class will be. The focus is not on me lecturing. It is on them, working and talking together. Especially with Covid, and students struggling with social interactions, this set up plus structured conversations, starters, ways to begin, and having students first answer what do you think about X and sharing before diving into content is really helpful.

Students learn in a print rich environment. This is true whether you're in middle school or college. Especially with the brain fog, trouble concentrating, and memory loss associated with Covid, this is helpful. The top of my boards have action verbs, I have giant Post-Its with anchor charts of steps to common acitivities. 

I think these are all things that could be scaled up. Reference charts and maps on walls. Famous mathematician, scientists, historians that represent queer, women, BIPOC scholars?

After I start class and have outline verbally what we're doing I write it on the board so they have it for reference. More and more students take a picture of it, not only so they can zoom in and reference it as they work, but once they're out of the classroom as well. I also hyperlink resources and instructions on the syllabus for students to reference again or if they're absent.

My greatest joy this semester is the classroom library. I've been hoarding these books in my office for years waiting to be able to do this, and spent a lot of money filling these shelves. I've also had friends send me books off my classroom library wishlist!

This semester I've piloted independent reading in my Tuesday, Thursday classes once a week. The first week I chose a bunch of books and spread them around the room on the desk pods. I had students do "book speed dating" where they walk around, look at the covers, read backs, pick a book, then sit down and read. Now once a week we start class with 20-30 minutes of reading. I read my own book during this time. 

Next semester I'm going to have all my composition classes do it.

We don't "do" anything with this reading. It's just for sheer pleasure. Some students have asked to take books home. I've recommended other books by same authors. I've also told them if they want a book and we don't have it let me know and I'll try and get it.

Twitter has been a blessing with this. A lot of the books in the library first appeared on my feed. 

I tried to have a mix. Some books I tried to get 4-5 copies of so if friends/groups wanted to read together they could. I try to have a variety of genres- so poetry and comics and fantasy and horror and fiction and non-fiction.

I try to have more Black authors.

I'm trying to build up the LGBTQIA+ authors.

While some students do ask to take books home for the most part these stay in the room so students put their names on Post-Its and use as bookmarsk to keep track or write down the page number their on in their notes.

They are totally riveted. Locked in. This more than anything belies the idea that students aren't reading for some rebellious reasons.

I talk to my students a lot about how writing is a process, thinking takes time, reading and research takes time, yet so rarely do college classes GIVE students that time. Or even acknowledge it. The assignment is just due. No recognition of the time and work that has to come before.

This is one of those things I think would work great scaled up. Maybe not the independent reading but what if classrooms all had classrom libraries? Copies of the textbook but also reference and pleasure books for that content? Books on famous queer, women, BIPOC scientists? Or copies of their notebooks? Or books about different aspects? Where students could SEE the context, the connections?

On our first check in survey some students put distractions and their phones as barriers to their learning so I made this basket. I also do "no tech" days where it all goes off and put away. I always tell them WHY we're doing this, as a break, to help notice how constant the tech is, but if someone uses to take notes or wants it, I don't police it. Almost all enjoy the no tech days.

I also show students how to turn off notifications, reorganize icons on phone screen, set timers, not check or respond to school email on phones, all as ways to help them time manage but also be less stressed. There is a lot about tech, its constant presence, and use and knowledge that I think gets assumed because they're all a "tech" generation. But I show them how to use the snipping tool. What shortcut keys are. How to read the WYSIWYG toolbar.

When I taught high school I remember so many humiliating stories teachers would, sadly, proudly tell of forcing students to trade in shoes to borrow a pencil or paper.

This shelf has wipes and notecards and travel Kleenex and paper and notebooks. The first coupld of weeks I had stacks of notebooks on the pods. I ordered 56 smaller kraft paper notebooks and this was one of those things I was not sure would work or be needed. But a lot of the students grabbed them and are using them.

This semester I also bough chargers. These have been a HUGE hit and so useful. I've thought about laptop chargers too as so many students forget them or the laptop battery runs down during class but there are so many different ones I'm not sure how.

I'm also on the board putting weekly tips and one of them definitely is- if you charge your laptop at night you're less likely to have it run out of juice during class.

Each pod has these bins, bowls, cups. There are pens, pencils, highlighters, markers, scissors, rulers, staplers. No student ever has to feel bad because they don't have something, or feel bad asking for something. It's there. If an assignment in class requires it I supply it.

Other classes require a ruler or markers or something and students ask me to borrow because they know they can.

There are also Dollar Tree squishy toys good for fidgeters. The ducks live in a bin and the other day students took them all out and chose ones to keep them company as they worked.

There are also coasters because it's hot and water and bottles and such sweat and get on the desks and that's a mess.

My classroom does not have clock. My students have told me they can't read analog clocks. Once a student told me quarter after was 25 minutes. I bought this because it was rainbow colored but I also like it because it's specifically a teaching clock.

Students have already commented on that they like it.

My classroom has an air filter that adminstration put in most rooms and some common spaces early in the pandemic. I bought an air filter/dehumidifier. The CO2 is mid 1200s after back to back full classes. I also keep the doors open. Our windows don't open.

I think a lot of these environmental things could be done in other places. I would specifically argue for them in GE classes. I think they help students bridge the gap especially that first semester. I had a student tell me that as soon as they walked in and looked around they stopped being so nervous and scared because the room felt good. 

Like care, "vibe" as the article mentioned can be used against faculty who are usually marginalized. 

It can be weaponized and it shouldn't be. But I also understand the frustration of students who wonder why X professor can't support or accommodate them. I think one solution would be to expect administration, the institution, the system, to create and support these environments. Then it's not an individual professor bearing the burden financially or mentally or emotionally.

I can honestly say that I think these types of moves, decisions, would do more to support students, make sure they stay in school, and finish that a fancy rec space or random technology.

And I wish the same systems that tell faculty they need to do more, retain students, meet goals, realized that the best way to do all of this is to support their faculty so that they can support their students. A lot of this is economic but easy to implement. Some is about teaching faculty the research behind why all this works. A lot is about creating an environment where you ask students, listen to the answers, and make changes accordingly.

Everything is hard and the pressures and weights we're all under seem to keep growing. But letting go of things, baking some things into structure serve to make it all a little easier for everyone. And grace costs me nothing.

Horror That Haunts Us: Nostalgia, Revisionism, and Trauma in Contemporary American Horror Film and Television: Editor Interview

 I am happt that the edited collection is now out and available!

We, and all the contributors, worked really hard the last four years on this. I'm so proud of all the work everyone did!

I always loved those movie press interviews where stars asked each other questions, so that's what Wickham and I did for the book! It was a lot of fun, so I hope you enjoy:

https://liverpooluniversitypress.blog/2024/06/14/horror-that-haunts-us-a-conversation-with-karra-shimabukuro-and-wickham-clayton/

Below, please see the table of contents below, great work here!

If anyone is interested in adopting this book for their classes, and would be interested, I'm happy to Zoom into classes to talk!