Author: admin
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Alternative assessment strategies and how they make teaching more fun
(this is the handout/notes page for a peer workshop session on alternative assessments) Examples of course-level structures that include alternative grading:
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A schedule is a net for catching December
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both…
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Deciding whether to do academic writing right now
(this post was initially written in 2020) It is always a good exercise to think through why we write, though we pause to reflect on this question relatively rarely. In normal academic times, we might say things like: ◦ I need to finish this paper for my class because I’m trying to get through my…
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Grounding in why we write – internal and external motivations
In my thesis writing class this term we discussed Joe Kadi’s brilliant piece “Stupidity ‘Deconstructed’,” which looks at the experience of working-class people in the university. I teach this piece alongside Eli Clare’s book Exile and Pride pretty much as often as I can, because I find them both incredibly nuanced, beautifully done, and useful…
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On not writing about what we love
Several years ago now, I read a post on Aesthetics for Birds, which made an argument for Peter Schjeldahl as a significant critic in part because of a pedagogical mode in his critical writing. The piece argued that he enacted for the reader the possibility of careful attention through the way he wrote about experiencing…
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Impossible Task Exercise
Many times when we think about writing a huge, looming task that is clearly impossible plants itself in our way. M Molley Backes tweeted about this as a general but undertheorized feature of depression. As she says, it’s often something that looks easy from outside, or that you used to be able to do quite…
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Not letting a quote hang in space
We often hear, or tell our students, not to just let quotes hang out in space. Sometimes we say that they should not end a paragraph with a quote, or that it’s important to explain why the quote is there, in the chapter or paper or whatever. This exercise is to warm up how to…
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One Hundred Words, Three Sentences
This is an editing exercise, using the power of constraint to liberate some creativity but also as a diagnostic to see what long sentences might be trying to tell us. Start by finding a long sentence in something you’ve written – usually longer than 60 or 70 words. Break that sentence into exactly three sentences…
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Getting traction as writers
This exercise is interested in the difference between what we academic writers need to get traction in order to write and what our readers need to have traction in their reading of our writing. The joke about all undergrad papers starting with the phrase “Since the beginning of time, humans have…” is about the disjuncture…
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Sure/unsure writing exercise
Often in our academic writing we’re expected to be sure of ourselves – to sound or be authoritative about something, or to know that we’re correct in what we’re arguing. At a final-product level, this is of course really important. But when we’re just starting out on a project, only writing about something we already…