Goddamitalltohell 😡
I HATE THESE ASSHOLES
09.02.2026 20:52
👍 10
🔁 3
💬 0
📌 0
Goddamitalltohell 😡
I HATE THESE ASSHOLES
"If' is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that last sentence! :-)
I really enjoyed _Information: A Reader_ ( edited by @ehayot.bsky.social , Lea Pao, & Anatoly Detwyler ).
Particularly for those of us in library / information work, it offers an insightful set of perspectives into how information has been approached in humanistic ways, not just info "science".
"Banned Books," "Novels That Changed the World," "How to Tell a Story, and Why." ... (Some of these I'm making up as I go along; others are taught at Penn State.)
First category (topics) has been around a while; 2nd and 3rd are newer, in my experience, and have more room for growth/experiments.
All the above are almost certainly interdisciplinary, but could be lit-exclusive if needed. Perhaps more interesting b/c more directly literary are courses that frame the usual work of literature in compelling terms: "One Book Slowly," "10 Poems That Will Change Your Life" (that's Lea Pao's)...
More interesting and uncommon are courses that frame big questions: "What is the Human?" / "Who are Americans?" / "What is the Good Life?" / "How to Fight Fascism and Influence People" / "Can There Be Justice?" / "Is Poverty Necessary? / "Why Do We Hate?" ... and so on.
The obvious answers for lit are: (1) topics: sex, drugs, murder, vampires, etc. (2) pop genres: romance novel, sci; (3) media, e.g. film, tv, video games. All of this do better than period or genre courses.
"Anthropology of Alcohol" (a great course! super historically and geographically diverse!) one of the largest/most popular courses at my institution.
Soylent Green is ... horses?
The vast majority of college students aren’t attending Ivy League schools, they’re grinding away at night classes in community colleges across the country. Distance and online learning has been an enormous boon for those students. “If there’s no credibility to that, then you’ve just ruined the investment and the learning goals and the access to meaningful learning that that they can then also use for employment of students who are underprivileged, who can’t come to the classroom, who are working full time and raising families and trying to get an education,” Mills said.
This is really important (via @annamillsoer.bsky.social ): the effect of AI/LLM cheating on online teaching will have real effects on the opportunity that many working-class people have to study college material. If these degrees become worthless b/c of rampant cheating we lose a real resource.
The Price Lab’s Critical Approaches to AI Working Group has released a white paper in which we advocate for AI-free instruction in reading, writing, & research. These are fundamental skills in the humanities (& in general), & with decisive action we can keep teaching them well in the age of AI!
It's more about connecting how and what we do with reading (and writing) to a history (contextualized of course in relation to AI but also to the "decline in literacy" moment), so that students learn the value of what we do not only for our sakes but for their own.
...to a set of techniques and forms of mastery (and could be described, if you wanted to, as "skills" or "learning objectives") whose value is demonstrable (in the course) and practice-able (by the students) such that they can also use these techinques/forms to create value for themselves.
To be clear, I don't think every class should be taught this way--I once taught a (grad) class called "Prose Fiction" with 700+ pp each week! But I think today a historian cd teach a class with much more reading and STILL ask students to connect what, how, and why they're reading--the method--...
Oh, how interesting! Thanks for teaching me something!
"upon information and belief" is an amazing piece of writing.
Oh, and a further thing: colleague already developing a "One Film Slowly" class... Basically the course title is also designed to open the door to students scared of too much reading. It's also about saying: if they can't read, then let's teach them how to read (in all its complexity/wonder).
hopefully you can see my other replies in this thread--let me know if you can't...
(Also did I say anywhere that the book is Madame Bovary? It is, and it teaches like a dream. But almost anything could work.)
If you want the syllabus, send me an email, ehayot at psu dot the usual educational suffix.
...to the history of writing, to think of attention as a mediated encounter b/t the mind (hence evolution, on this planet), a social situation, a technological/mediatic situation, and so on--and to see the value of the 5,000-year history of this particular confluence for them now + in their futures.
Ungrading, so final grade is simply # of "good effort" pp in commonplace books (I collect 3x/semester). Most of it is about ATTENTION--trying to teach them how it works, why it has value, what it lets you see/think, how it increases sensitivity to beauty, to thought, etc. And then connecting that...
We have done some reading out loud in class (and have committed to collectively memorizing and reciting a single chapter, a few sentences per person). But mostly they read at home and we come in and discuss/close read the day's work. Strict "no spoilers" rule; 2x weekly handwritten responses.
It's like 10,000 monkeys, but with more monkeys.
Somehow this made me think of the way Megan Massino used to say "that's sooo good" about something ridiculous and delightful, with this very particular look on her face.
...all this to put the idea of writing as technique (for "passive" remembering as well as "active" thinking) in a historical and mediatic/concrete context. So... if this econ professor is doing something like that, more power to him. But of course he is also teaching economics, which I don't do.
...of which the commonplace book is one example. But I also teach free-writing, re-copying, dialogic writing, memorization, and several other things in this context -- and we visit Special Collections to look at diaries, recipe books, commonplace books, travelogues, and encyclopedias...
only 11pp/class is designed to give them the time and attention space to think of reading as a *practice* and *technique*, as part of what the course is about (and not just a method to discovering the course's "content"). This is then contextualized inside a longer history of writing technique...
For context: in my course this semester -- ONE BOOK SLOWLY -- I am using the fact of reading slowly (11pp/class session, plus 2x/week commonplace book handwritten assignments) to emphasize the idea of pre-digital deep literacy as a technique and collection of techniques. I explain that reading...
As you say, if it's in one class, and done with meta-instruction and conversation about why to do it, how to do it, its strengths/limitations, how it might impede or improve learning, now the course fits in with a larger uni-wide commitment to teaching... then fine. I doubt that's the case here.
Regardless of Scott's amazing reading abilities, for me what resonates is the professor deliberately increasing reading loads beyond what he thinks is possible in order to force using AI summaries. Same with coding. But all available evidence shows studnets will learn less in this situation!