The quarter has ended and I’ve had a chance to reflect on what happened since I last reported on teaching AI in my classroom. It got weird at the end of the quarter. Some teachers would be alarmed. I’m actually encouraged and comforted. As I reported before, I taught lessons in which my students explicitlyContinue reading “Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 3: Coda”
Category Archives: Pedagogy
Framing Matters: Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 2
In my last post, I talked about how I explored what ChatGPT could and could not do with the assignments I give my students. Now I want to talk about another little “experiment” I did with my students themselves that showed so much about how we receive AI and what we perceive as good writing.Continue reading “Framing Matters: Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 2”
Limits on AI: Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 1
I recently did a sort of impromptu experiment with my three sections of English 101 that revealed quite a bit about how framing—not to mention knowing authorship—affects how our students perceive a text. It may, in fact, illustrate why it matters if AI-generated text is labeled as AI-generated. In any case, it was a reallyContinue reading “Limits on AI: Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 1”
One Lesson Plan, Two Results
Stay tuned for the end-of-term life update below the main content! Conflicting Lesson Results One of the most frustrating things about teaching is just how unpredictable a lesson plan can be. If you’ve been teaching the same content to different groups of students for any length of time, you’ve probably had this experience: You carefullyContinue reading “One Lesson Plan, Two Results”
Punctuation and Visual Rhythm
Recently I was proofreading a novel draft of mine, and I came across this sentence: Anne advanced; he retreated; she cornered him against a wall and pounded his shoulders. Now, I love me some semicolons, so it’s no surprise that I would somehow manage to get two into a single sentence in the first fiveContinue reading “Punctuation and Visual Rhythm”
Reading for Saturation
When we teach college writing, we’re generally asking students to write in genres that they may have never read. Why, then, do we expect them to be able to write these successfully? Genres are, as I have often observed, slippery things and can’t really be completely understood through explicit instruction. Sure, scholars can and oftenContinue reading “Reading for Saturation”
Overdue Update and End of Semester Reflection
I’m back! Updates I know it’s been literal months since I updated this blog. As glancingly indicated in my last post, the new year brought a lot of changes, and this blog is a little lower in priority than other things going on. Since then, I’ve resigned from my job, moved to the west coast,Continue reading “Overdue Update and End of Semester Reflection”
Perceiving Academic Journals
I started college in 2005, just at the cusp of learning management systems; things like Blackboard were in use, but most courses still had physical syllabi passed out on day one, and most assignments were still printed out on paper and handed in physically. In the same way, online journals were increasingly popular at theContinue reading “Perceiving Academic Journals”
Flexible Deadlines Are Awesome
Since I started experimenting with penalty-free flexible deadlines, which was shortly before the pandemic (good timing on that one!), the regular question I’ve gotten was how to avoid the work piling up when students inevitably turn in lots of late work. The answer is actually that the flexible deadlines prevent grading from piling up ratherContinue reading “Flexible Deadlines Are Awesome”
Rethinking How We Teach Paraphrasing
When you teach a course on writing research, of course you do a lot of work with source handling. I suspect that most of us were taught summary, paraphrase, and quotation as a set, and many of us were given exercises that drilled us to do each of these things with a source on command.Continue reading “Rethinking How We Teach Paraphrasing”
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