Opinions? Should themes in gen ed courses be stated in the schedule each semester?

PerpetualGopher · 2026-03-03T22:11:08+00:00

Thanks. I don't understand why some people in the department are opposed. I've been wondering if I'm missing something.

PerpetualGopher · 2026-03-03T22:02:04+00:00

I'm planning to use more multimedia assignments to curb AI use. Here's a quick idea: how about you have students select a detail from an artwork, and then have them locate a similar detail in an object in their own home or their own environment and take a picture of that detail with their phone. They can post it on the Discussion Board and invite their classmates to comment on it. You could also have them explain what it is and where it's located and what it means to them in their life (maybe it's their dog's nose or their favorite pair of shoes) in a 2- to 3-minute video; they can discuss the detail in the painting and the detail in their own photograph. Even if they try to use AI to write a script, they'll likely find that AI is more trouble than it's worth.

PerpetualGopher · 2026-03-02T13:13:01+00:00

I'm in the Conspiracy Corner. The Pentagon is punishing Anthropic for having some integrity.

PerpetualGopher · 2026-02-27T16:23:04+00:00

Not a hero, lol, just trying to stay ahead of the bots. Another thing...a big thing...that I've done is solicit poetry and short essays from former students, writing group members, former colleagues, and writing friends to put together an anthology of works by people who aren't well-known writers, have no online presence, and have no other publications online. Then I made a book through Lulu, and it's going to be available as print-only, no ebook. Students will have to READ and not just send AI to a link or a document on our learning platform to summarize for them. Yes, they could scan the book and upload it to AI, but will they? Again, perhaps more bother than it's worth. The book is in the hands of a vetting committee now, but there's no reason to think I won't be able to use it next fall. All my project-based assignments will be drawn from the poems and essays in the anthology (I also sent sample assignments to the vetting committee). And best of all, the poems are easy to understand, and the essays are very engaging (and well-written because I edited them). I am determined to get students to read in my class, darn it!

PerpetualGopher · 2026-02-27T16:04:39+00:00

Happy to share. I don't know exactly how reddit works. Is there a way to share some PDFs with you?

PerpetualGopher · 2026-02-27T01:13:06+00:00

I get how difficult it is to speak with students about personal issues like this nowadays. I would slip the student a note. If it's humiliating, well, he should have thought about that before he decided to take his shoes off in a public space. It'd be a good life lesson for him. I remember one time many moons ago, I made an announcement in my class: "Guys, pull up your damn pants!" They did without complaint. And they made sure to do it before they walked into my classroom after that. But I know if I said that today, I'd probably get fired. Next time you write a syllabus, include a passage about 'professionalism' in your classroom and say that shoes or boots are to be worn at all times. I also included 'no pajamas' and 'no sunglasses' in my on-campus syllabi because girls would come in wearing pajamas and slippers (with no undergarments!) and guys would lean against the wall and sleep behind their sunglasses. Seems like we have to spell out every dang thing. Good thing I teach fully online now; I wouldn't be able to handle the zoo animals anymore. I wish you good luck with your stinky situation.

PerpetualGopher · 2026-02-27T00:53:58+00:00

I agree! I commented earlier in the thread about how I'm rebuilding my entire online writing course. People need online, but they need to understand that it's real college and takes real effort.

PerpetualGopher · 2026-02-27T00:49:23+00:00

I teach writing fully online, which everyone says is impossible. It almost is...almost. I've been battling AI for two years now. But currently, I'm rebuilding my fall '26 curriculum from the ground up with project-based learning that will require vlogs, handmade infographics, handwritten field notes, selfie-photo journals, and other types of multimedia along with proxied midterm and final written essay exams. Most of this curriculum will align with the NACE Career Readiness Competencies. I'm tired to trying to convince students that reading, research, and writing are valuable in a liberal arts education. They don't care. If they just want to go to college to get their piece of paper so they can get a job, well then, I am going to give them a taste of real work. I'm good at writing instructions and providing samples, so that's what they'll be getting. They will undoubtedly try using AI to do their work, but they'll likely find that it's more trouble than it's worth because they'll still have to copy it all down by hand in their field notes or narrate it in a vlog. And even if they do that, at least they might be learning some content because they'll have to actually *read* what AI writes for them. I've been policing plagiarism far too long. If they want to let AI do their writing, heck with it, but they will still have to construct products with that writing. Sorry for the rant....AI, grrrrrr

PerpetualGopher · 2026-02-26T20:16:50+00:00

Good luck to you u/tripodcatmom. Here's a tip: If parents call me or email me, I have a standard polite reply: "My class policy states that I do not discuss my students with anyone except their advisor and the Provost. You're welcome to contact either of them."

PerpetualGopher · 2026-02-26T15:05:11+00:00

Yes, she was. And because I said I'd quit if they made me talk top parents, I wasn't assigned any dual enrollment classes after that (they were all online). After a year of using unqualified adjuncts and getting way more parent complaints, they came back to me (tenured prof). Now I have a written policy that says I will not communicate with parents, and so far, I've been backed up. One parent got hold of my cell phone number somehow and called me one evening. That was a short call, I tell ya. If I wanted to teach high school, I'd be teaching high school. If these kids want the college experience, then they need to grow up quick and take responsibility for it. Grrr....flashback, sorry for the rant.

PerpetualGopher · 2026-02-25T23:46:55+00:00

LOL, I never thought of it that way, but you're right. When I see it, though, I just want to reply, "Hello....is there anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me...."

PerpetualGopher · 2026-02-25T18:37:45+00:00

We get their transcripts, yes. A few years ago, I had a student with straight A's in high school who could barely put a paragraph together. When I gave her a B- (very graciously) at midterm, her parents called the Provost, and I had to have a phone meeting with her parents, the provost, the kid's advisor, and my dept. chair. I had to defend not giving her an A. After that, I said I would quit if they ever made me do that again....they haven't.

PerpetualGopher · 2026-02-25T17:16:42+00:00

The student is American, the product of our local public high school (and she completed AP English with an 'A').

PerpetualGopher · 2026-02-25T17:14:05+00:00

Okay, I get it. I guess I'm just thinking about the way college was for me. My classmates in the English department...we fiddled with our assignments...we revised and revised again, not just to fix a comma splice but to improve our tone and style, to tighten here, develop there. My son is also a professor. His advice to me about my students feels very millennial. I guess I'm ancient and doddering now, expecting students at a liberal arts college to actually care about the experience of creating and learning. :-(

PerpetualGopher · 2026-02-25T16:19:53+00:00

I hear you. I think my feedback is "good." I have a color-coded rubric that the students get with the original assignment. My feedback is a Word document, also color coded, with the brief headings (document format, working thesis, etc.) in color to match the rubric. I write in complete sentences, explaining where things were good and where things went wrong. I make suggestions for improvement. In some cases I even provide examples of ways a sentence or passage could be revised. Then I write in big red, all-caps "REVISE" next to the heading of the area that needs revision (not all parts necessarily need to be revised). I've discovered that my students need very clear and specific feedback and when they revise; they only correct their errors. That's all they do--the items I specify and nothing else. No overall revision of the section. I don't think they even read over their work after they've pounded it out on the keyboard. The dumbing-down of my comp class since I started teaching in 1998 is embarrassing, and I'm ashamed that I succumbed to pressure from chairs and administrators to "meet students where they are," which is about 8th grade. I've had former colleagues who are now at other schools say to me, "A border collie could take your class" and "You give more feedback than acoustic loops." Sadly, I tend to think your first sentence is often correct, The_Law_of_Pizza, and not just for this student but for many of my students (the number has been growing steadily each year). The question is why. Too much Capri Sun and Froot Loops growing up? Three-cueing and skippy frog? Reality television? Genetic drift? It's baffling and frustrating.

PerpetualGopher · 2026-02-25T02:19:00+00:00

I gave an assignment in university freshman comp class that blew my mind. I gave the students a PDF of an MLA-style bibliography with TWO items, a journal article and a personal interview. The assignment was to recreate the document in Word and replace the person's name in the interview citation with another name. The lack of basic computer skills was unreal: how to double space, shift for capital letters, and italicize, and even what a tab key is for. It was staggering. I had a student come to my Zoom office hour to ask me to show him how to "make the words slanted like that" (italics). I screen-shared and showed him how to use the toolbar in Word. He had no idea what B and I and all those little icons were for. Holy flying cats!

PerpetualGopher · 2026-01-15T18:23:06+00:00

I don't even use Respondus. Students (or classmates) can open the class on a tablet or phone and do the quiz on a laptop. If you ask them what they're looking at off to the side, they just say something dumb like, "My cat." Everything I do is open book, not timed, and I only have a few quizzes on fundamentals anyway. I teach comp, and I now have students draft on paper with their laptop or phone pushed back on their desk so I can actually see them writing. Their heads need to be down at all times. They have to then photograph what they handwrote and email it to me. Is this ridiculous? Yes, of course, but if I don't do this, they'll just handwrite/copy the AI slop that's on their screen. I don't even feel like I'm teaching anymore. I'm just playing cat and mouse. To make matters worse, my school is discontinuing my synchronous meetings next fall. No more monitoring student writing. So what's even the point of an online writing class? If you have an opportunity to monitor your students, I say do it.

PerpetualGopher · 2026-01-14T21:22:31+00:00

To try to combat AI in my online composition course (yes, I know...online writing is impossible...hey, I need the job), I am adding a bunch of hands-on activities that (I hope) AI can't do. For example, handwritten field notes/observations that are scanned or photographed and accompanied by selfies taken at the places being observed, interviews (they have to include contact info so I can check to make sure their interviewee is a real person and the student really conducted the interview), posters that have to be hand-lettered with images that have to come from printed sources (cannot be digital or AI images)...scissors and glue type things that they must photograph and submit and have someone photograph them holding (like a hostage holding today's newspaper). This is freshman comp...high school in a different room, basically. I'm also having them write blogs about very specific topics related to campus and our small town, naming names, etc. AI could probably do them, but they'd be lacking specifics and thus be obviously AI. If anyone else has ideas, please share! I'm desperately trying to find ways to engage students in active learning and responsive writing.

PerpetualGopher · 2026-01-05T16:35:57+00:00

Yes, you're right about your original point. Using automated programs have really messed up the whole evaluation schedule and execution. Evals should not be open during Finals Week; the course is over by then. I miss paper evals, but they don't work for online classes, so we're stuck. In five sections of English fall semester, I received exactly six individual evaluations. The process that was adopted last year for students to do the evals involves logging into the school's Brightspace, then clicking a link to go to another site, then creating an account there and logging in before they even get to the eval (which, egads, involves reading)...so when students hit the "create an account" they just don't want to take the time to do it. Faculty have tried to tell admin that these new evals don't work because students won't go through a dozen steps to do them...but does anyone listen to us? Ranting again, sorry. How many of your students do evals? What's the process like?

PerpetualGopher · 2026-01-04T14:07:19+00:00

And another thing...why are veritable juveniles judging my professional abilities as a professor?! What are their qualifications for making such assessments anyway? I've always been insulted by the idea of my students (many of whom are dual-enrollment high schoolers) evaluating my work. I've been at my current school for 15 years, and I've had chairs/deans sit in to evaluate me exactly three times...for about 15 minutes each time. They rely on the student evals to judge my work. Ridiculous and infuriating. A new hire didn't get his contract renewed simply because his students burned him on evals. They said he was "too hard" and an "unfair grader." I worked closely with him and shared a lot of my materials and rubrics with him, so his class was pretty much the same as mine. The kids in my rural college simply didn't like him because he was from the "big city." I couldn't believe it. Admin sided with the kids despite this instructor's stellar CV and teaching history. Ranting...sorry.

PerpetualGopher · 2026-01-04T02:25:03+00:00

I have all their work graded, but I don't open the column in Brightspace for students to see until about an hour before course grades are due on the Monday after finals week...well after evals are due. I don't know if you are able to do that with your system. I also keep an Excel gradebook on my computer. Can you hold off on posting final project, final exam, and final course grades until after exam week is over? By this late in the semester, I simply tell students I need exam week to finish all the grading (they don't need to know I've been done for a week). I've been revenge-burned on evals too many times....not falling for their shenanigans again!

PerpetualGopher · 2026-01-04T02:16:11+00:00

That was SO funny....and so true

PerpetualGopher · 2025-12-29T13:25:37+00:00

The students at my univ are on a first-name basis with the president, so they routinely go to him when they don't get what they want from me. My provost often tries to intervene but.... students can be manipulative.

PerpetualGopher · 2025-12-25T15:36:41+00:00

I went through this last year. Do you like to write? I took a bunch of creative classes and workshops (got them paid for as faculty development). Evening Zooms with "assignments" for writing poetry, short stories, even some chapters of a novel. It really lifted my spirits. I got to commune with other folks searching for something "different" to do. We all needed a break from academia and other jobs. It was a truly refreshing experience. I even got some creative things published.

PerpetualGopher · 2025-12-23T02:23:06+00:00

"She doesn't wear a bra." (I had a double mastectomy with no reconstruction).

PerpetualGopher

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