Tag: teaching

Next Semester’s Seminar Notes for Future Experts in a Dying Field*

These instructions are for people enrolled in my spring graduate seminar, “The University in Fiction & Theory,” for next semester, in which you’ll be reading academic novels, which are different from campus novels in that they’re mainly about professors, not students, to make sure they’re not too interesting. You’ll also read work in Critical University Studies. The critical in Critical University Studies, BTW, isn’t critical in the sense of negative, but it also is. It’s like the criticism in literary criticism or even more it’s like the critical in critical theory, which is to say it’s critiquing, which is a fancy way of being negative without saying you’re being negative except you really are. (it’s also not critical in the medical condition sense, although it’s not not that either.)

You will read a book over break so we can have something to talk about on the first day of class and not have to just go around introducing ourselves to each other in great detail, not that I have anything against learning about your novel in progress or your cats or that I have anything against telling you all about my thirty-year-old MA fiction thesis full of solid Raymond Carver stories that he had unfortunately already written and about how suddenly it seemed attractive to be a literary critic (again, not critical, exactly).

The book is The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men by Thorsten Veblen. It’s from 1918 but it makes just as much fun of football and fraternities as I will all semester. Also business men.

So read that jawn over break and come in ready to discuss. Also be ready to talk about how many members of the incoming presidential administration will talk shit about higher education while being alumni of institutions of higher education and about how the supermajority in your state legislature likes to criticize (in the original sense) its state university because some people seem to really like that, including the people who run the universities. Also be ready to talk about how nothing has changed in a hundred years and also how everything has changed and there’s probably a theory the guy with the cool eyeglasses at the end of the table could explain to the class that would account for this, or maybe not.

Oh and also on the first day I will give my standard spiel about how we’re all grownups and we can all talk about politics without indoctrinating each other and that includes me and please don’t record me, there’s a state law about how you can’t record me unless I say you can and I don’t say that.

Also be ready to read novels about how being a professor isn’t what it used to be or never was and to read books and articles and listicles and cartoons and tweets or is it skeets now about how higher education is under attack slash falling apart slash in crisis slash underfunded slash teetering on the edge of the demographic cliff. Be ready to laugh at the word teetering after you say it a few times, because it really is kind of funny after a while.

You will give presentations, hand in daily questions, and write book reviews and papers on the course topic; in all of these, you are free to disagree that everything in your chosen profession is going to hell, if that’s really what you want to do. You will discuss the academic job market, which is what we still insist on calling it even though there are no jobs. You will try not to suddenly yell out in the middle of class that you’re not in graduate school to kill seven or eight years and why am I making you all feel so bad about it. I will say encouraging things I don’t believe.

We will end the semester talking about the big conference I will be going to over break where we give papers and nod at each other giving papers and in between in the hallway talk about how bad we feel for you.

See you in January!

*To my real students in my real seminar next semester: none of the opinions expressed above should be taken as representing those of the institution that employs me or even of me, exactly; see Juvenalian satire, Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” and the novels of Philip Roth

Driving Meaningful Engagements: On AI, ET, and TU

Ever feel like you’re being sold a bill of goods?

Excerpts from two emails that landed in my inbox yesterday:

The first is from an email helpfully sent to me by McGraw Hill GO, which as the name shouts, is raring to GO to sell me a product that will help me teach, ostensibly. I mean look!

It’s an eBook+! It lives within my LMS! It makes it easier to keep up with student progress and direct attention where it matters most, which is apparently somewhere other than whether my students are learning! I guess I should be grateful for that assurance of knowing my students are completing the reading, but instead I’m checking to see if I still have my wallet. Can I drive this eBook+ off the lot right now?

It’s the AI that I should apparently be most grateful for, though. The embedded generative AI learning tool, I am told, will create a more flexible learning environment! And that environment will drive meaningful engagements! It will also drive a deeper conceptual understanding, as opposed to some other kind of understanding, of my course content! So much driving! So much cause and effect! Instead of the hard and messy work of trying to help my students understand the things they read, the world around them, and themselves and their place in it, all I have to do is sit back and let GO drive. Whew. What a relief.

The second email comes from the Teaching for Learning (?) Center at my employer, This University in Canada, You’ve Never Heard of It. A featured speaker at an upcoming event will be the AI expert whose identity I have tried to disguise for some reason. This person will be coming to This University (TU, go fight win) to share with us the Good News of AI, sharing the εὐαγγέλιον, the gospel, that artificial intelligence has risen and will be our salvation. Do you believe in the Good News? It believes in you!

It’s the end of a long and cranky week, so forgive me the sarcasm. I’m not here to impugn motives of publishers, staff, or administrators or to criticize fellow instructors for wanting a break from the difficult work of teaching. I’m sensitive to the privilege I am lucky to enjoy of working at a research-intensive university, where, if I want, on a Friday afternoon during under-attended office hours, I can take a half hour and blog my thoughts into the abyss, and I’m sensitive to the four-four or more load of many instructors, for whom in my textbooks I have selected readings (and written apparatus supporting them) in order to lessen that load.

My first ever AI generated images
(prompt: “teacher being buried by papers”)

What I’m doing here with this spare half hour is saying that these claims of AI’s salvific power makes me feel like I’m being sold a bill of goods. The educational publishing company is in the business of selling things to help educators, and can hardly be faulted. It’s what it does. It has to keep swimming or it dies, or something. The whole world of ed tech (ET, by decree and henceforth) is in the same business. TU and by extension higher education are most emphatically not in the same business as EdTechpreneurs, and should not be the gullible rubes who snap up its latest products. Universities have been busy establishing a sorry track record of diving headfirst into the latest ET innovations–remember MOOCs?–and moving on from them once their promise went unrealized, leaving behind a trail littered with spent money and damaged morale.

I don’t want to overstate. I wouldn’t be so rash as to condemn everything about LMSes (how do you pluralize an acronym that ends in S? Why are my office hours today so quiet? Does it have anything to do with it being homecoming weekend?). As we learned during the pandemic, they make some things easier. But they can’t be used to replace us.

Thanks, Google™

There is considerable pressure on higher ed administrators to cut costs, and as anybody who’s looked at university finances knows, one of the only places they can cut is instructor pay and benefits. It’s why you see departments shrinking as retired tenured faculty go unreplaced; it’s why you see whole departments razed if administrators can’t wait patiently for faculty to die off or at least go away. Contingent laborers cost less. ET promises lower costs. Humanities instruction, at least, what I do, is labor intensive. Human labor intensive. Humanities departments are forever being berated for the high costs of small classes (discussions which seem never to touch on the rarely mentioned high overhead incurred by the research grants given the big-lecture-teaching faculty in other disciplines, but that’s another discussion). The value of what we do lies in helping students learn to think, creatively and critically. We want to help them learn to be able to process large amounts of complicated information, to grapple with sophisticated concepts, to know when they’re being sold a bill of goods.

Thanks, Canva™

I don’t want resource-gobbling AI to transform the images in my head. I want to do it myself because part of the reward of creative thought and expression lies in the doing of it. I want my students to learn this. I don’t want TU or any other institution of higher learning to try to save money by outsourcing the work of education; in the end it will waste both the money it spends and the opportunity for students to learn to want to come up with interpretations, solutions, expressions. I got my first AI generated assignment this week. I read it. I knew instantly where it came from, and it was confirmed by an abashed student, and it sucked. It didn’t know anything, and it didn’t think anything, and it didn’t express anything.

My office hours are over. Monday morning I’ll come back to campus. At noon, my students and I will discuss the upsetting ending of Toni Morrison’s upsetting and beautiful novel The Bluest Eye, and we will talk about the history of it being banned around the country and in the town some of them come from by people who don’t value the kind of education that involves reading upsetting and beautiful things, and we will probably also talk about homecoming weekend and think about what universities are for, which I am always trying to get them to do because the whole point is to get them to look around and think about where they are, whether “there” is their classroom or university or state or country or planet. (They will also get good paying jobs because they know how to read and think and express their thoughts but can we please not let that be the only reason we do this?) I will try to drive meaningful engagements, if you want to put it that way, and appreciate the opportunity I have been given to do this important work the way I think most effective. Also I use much less water.