bcp99.bsky.social
Professor of religious studies, reluctant department chair, reader, rural Midwesterner
72 posts
54 followers
297 following
Discussion Master
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Just gave a set last week to my online class: 20 minutes each for 20 students. They had to prepare summaries of the primary source documents for each of the first four weeks of class and respond to my questions (and ask a few if they wanted). Worked really well.
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Jeb Bush said this in a 2014 interview: "Jeb Bush said the debate over immigration reform needs to move past derisive rhetoric describing illegal immigrants. “Yes, they broke the law, but it’s not a felony. It’s an act of love, it’s an act of commitment to your family.” (wapo.st/4aSiITv)
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If only there were an academic field of study that looked at these questions based on history, culture, religion, economics, and other topics.
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I agree, and not just because of AI but because of phone distraction. I have really enjoyed sitting in a classroom where students are taking an open book exam, answering multiple choice questions and writing essays, phones put away, for an hour straight. The energy is good.
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They could write, "Why asked to explain in what ways the win was historic, the campaign did not identify any examples."
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The Times should stop printing responses from the communications director that are not really responses. "That's such a dumb question... you are obviously wrong and biased but I won't explain why because the main purpose of my response is to get 'the Times is dumb and biased' into their story."
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The problem is that an ad based on the real problem - a wife who actually fears her husband, who might beat her up, who might take it out on their children - would have been too depressing to run.
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I use the capitalized Protestant as an adjective, and don't recall ever seeing it as lowercase. Its meaning is always connected to the Reformation and the churches that developed out of it. At least that's the way I've always thought of it.
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I put up a flag with my Harris/Walz sign, next to my "no matter where you're from you're our neighbor" sign in Eng/Span/Arabic. Someone should take pix of all of the Harris/Walz houses with flags and put an ad together.
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she reports to me and to another chair (since she splits her time between 2 depts)
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I agree but depending on the school, admin, and community, faculty may need to be extra cautious, or at least lay some groundwork. I keep seeing online discussions of extra credit voting-related work, and think a lot of people aren't aware of even the basic AFT guidelines.
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I'm going with a requirement to pull up Ballotpedia, identify the different choices they have, and then present on an issue related to one of them. See also this article from the ATF; though I've heard they may be overcautious. aftguild.org/hot-topics/e...
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I'm requiring students to go on Ballotpedia and print out their blank sample ballot, and then they're doing some research to turn in on candidate positions, but I am being very explicit that there's no credit for voting.
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According to the American Federation of Teachers, it's illegal to do this in federal elections: aftguild.org/hot-topics/e...
(I haven't verified that this is the official AFT website but I have heard this in previous elections.)
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You can say no to rec letters for students you don't know (or who are just bad students!), but if the very idea that you could know an online student well enough to write a rec is *mockable*, that's a problem with the course design or implementation and not the student.
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I'm able to write recs for asynch students (mostly nontraditional ones, with job/family responsibilities) because I interact with them on the discussion threads every week, and work with them on paper proposals, drafts, and other assignments. Why teach an asynch if you can't do this?
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My advice is to NOT learn this term but instead say:
"He's trying to get other people to be terrorists, but pretending he's not."
"He wants immigrants to get hurt, but he's not saying it out loud."
There's a time and place for technical academic terms but this isn't it.
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Not that I don't have students who can do much more, but just a basic ability to understand and restate ideas is a good thing - and something many people can't do. If we can't assess their ability to do this, we've really lost something.
(Sorry to go on and on. It's been a week.)
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The more I read about this problem, the more I see a division between the elite/flagships who see a Chat-GPT level essay as a "failure" (gasp! a C!) and my world, where we love to see students get to the point where they can process information themselves, and grab onto even one big idea.
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If a student writes, really writes, a C/D/F paper, my response is never "next."
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This assumes no student is satisfied with a C or a pass. Or if they are, it's okay to give them a C if they just feed in a prompt. Also that profs don't put any effort into grading student-written C/D/F papers (which would be terrible!) and can know for sure if the bad paper is AI or not.
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This is not just a problem for profs using 25-year old pedagogy with a single long research paper as their assessment. And it's not a "moral panic" - there are serious questions of how to get students to read things they don't want to read, and to engage with each other and the reading.
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Yep, I've been doing that in online classes for years. And then they are supposed to respond to each other's questions. Last semester some used AI to generate their answers! (and I suspect if you check, you can get AI to generate the questions.)
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Also: I will absolutely knock myself out to grade a badly-written paper a student has produced by reading and thinking. Lots of comments on D papers. But I should not spend time on badly-written AI papers.
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Assume a business/law enforcement/etc. major is taking a multicultural or humanities gen ed, online so they can spend as little time as possible. If I can get someone to read something, anything, maybe I have a shot at getting them to value the class/subject. That's where we start.
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I don't teach at a school with enough rich kids to worry about this.
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We're trying all of these types of things - one colleague has Zoom oral exams for her online courses. But it is a huge time commitment, as is watching/listening to recorded reflections rather than reading written ones. This matters more for people teaching 4-4s as opposed to 2-2s.
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They may not be great at it but they can do it and they're getting better and better. I love the weekly reading reflections but a handful of students were already using AI for them last year; and a colleague says she's been trying to AI-proof her assignments with little success.
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Those speeches were so good I finally went back and listened to Fight Song: the 2016 DNC convention version.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ytts...
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An evil product (formerly used mostly for checking mechanics) actually advertises by suggesting that they can help with "brainstorming." I tell my students that if it's not going on in your own actual brain, it's not brainstorming.
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They've twice used the phrase "the principle of subsidiary" when I'm pretty sure they mean "subsidiarity" - something that has been studied (in interesting ways) by Catholic ethicists for a long time (see www.usccb.org/resources/Su...).
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Religious ethicists who work on war and pacifism have dealt with a similar problem related to a prominent scholar. This statement from his seminary is helpful. www.ambs.edu/ambs-respons...
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I don't want to be glib about the privilege of the tenured - I feel very lucky - but the worlds are very different. Also, I really miss a couple of the people who left the field. They are still my friends but I miss them as colleagues.
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Less important, but also striking, is difference in status. 20 years out, my cohort from a top-3 program is;
1) full, top Ivy
2) 1 full, 1 stalled at assoc., top private
3) full. good SLAC/seminary (x2)
4) full, lower-tier state (me)
5) private hs teacher (x2)
6) ministry/nonprofit/new field (x6)
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Weird. I teach at a poorly funded state regional and we are required to take a course before teaching online, and there are workshops every semester on how to use the gradebook, set up quizzes, etc. Do rich universities not do that?
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Good concept, but I would change to:
My Very Own Version of Mainstream Prot
<Big Gap>
Mainstream Prot
<Big Gap>
Someone I know who is Evangelical
<Huge Gap>
Everything else
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$400k to be safe. Hire the director and a staff/budget person first, so maybe spend $250k the first year, and then let the director figure out whether to hire grad students or another faculty. (Assuming no expense to build an extra building.) Also: make sure to lock down that donor's intent!
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The SCE has a Global Scholars Program focused on bringing ethicists to our annual conference, some of whom may be historians as well. I don't see a list on sce.org of the ones who have come, but it might be worth checking. I think there have been senior people from Africa and Latin America.
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I suspect that the Praeger University unit on this topic is the only reason anyone critiques this take. (I haven't watched much of it but caught a bit when a conservative poli sci prof was screening it for his class.)
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The highly-paid consultant who came to our university and 80 other schools this year made projections about how many 15-19 year olds there would be in the year 2100. (16 million, compared to about 21-22m now.)
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For comparison: Our regional state university's entire annual operating budget is around $200 million. We have a deficit of about $12 million that will probably lead to some layoffs.
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We had this conversation too; I said, ok, I won't buy any for my own office, but what about the classroom? They said no and suggested we contact the custodial staff about accessing their paper towel supply.
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We are not allowed to purchase kleenex for the classroom because it is considered a personal non-essential item.
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Illinois has this: capitolfax.com. It's not a gossip site but you can pick up gossip from the comments sometimes.
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I'm at a state regional 4yr; we have many nontrads in online programs and recruit them. (At an event yesterday I pitched a student's mom with an associates' to come here!) But as a regional your purpose is to serve students in that region so you can't rule out 18-22s.
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Also: online or F2F open-book quizzes that force them to learn something just by taking it, and perhaps get them to open the book; format is: 1) page number where the answer is; 2) Two sentences about something they need to know; 3) question that uses almost the exact same wording as the book.
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In-class work where they annotate short texts - on paper - take positions on something (on a scale of 1-10, how much do you agree with....), and write out explanations of these positions. Willingham's Outsmart Your Brain has some good sections (I'm hoping it comes out in paperback soon).
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This is true, and it's manageable if you assign just a few essays a semester. If you have students write in preparation for every class - assignments which are purposely low-expectation - it's a huge pain. Because Gr---ly (expletive deleted) tells them entering prompts is "brainstorming."
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Good for them for figuring out what they had to say, but "They weren’t steadfastly holding on to the totem of having to be ‘The Religious Studies Department'" is Peak Dumb Administrator talk. (Did this actually save money? Or just make the provost feel good about "streamlining" or whatever?)
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Another way to do collaboration is to require students to critique other students' work, and then require that those critiques be considered when revising. Students present over the course of three weeks, and on the weeks you're not presenting you do 3 critiques.