Cate Denial

In 2019, I launched a new course at my institution called History Pedagogy. The course was designed to give students headed to graduate school some training in teaching before they left Knox, but was also a space that welcomed students headed to K-12 educational settings. The course was a mix of philosophy and hands-on, practical learning—wherever possible, by design, I had students create the infrastructure of the course to pull back the curtain on the bells, whistles, and levers that…

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Those of you who’ve been following me for a while will recall that Once Upon A Time I included checklists at the end of my assignment sheets, telling students (in exacting detail) all the things I wanted them to consider before they turned in a paper. Those particular checklists communicated my distrust – they were entirely about me thinking everyone would get everything wrong without them, and trying to head that off at the pass. I eventually did away with…

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This trimester, I’m teaching an upper-level research seminar on Reproductive Justice in the U.S. Since 1973. It’s required me to engage in some creative thinking on the fly – something I did not anticipate ahead of time. But I quickly realized that a chronological dive into reproductive justice issues wasn’t going to work for my students given that many of them were taking the class as a cross-listed Gender and Women’s Studies elective, and hadn’t taken a History methods course…

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It’s been almost five years since I wrote “[Making the Grade],” a blog post about my first venture into ungrading. What felt, at the time, like a truly momentous change turned out to be just the first step in reconceptualizing the role of grading in my courses. After I started ungrading I tweaked things. I rewrote my suggested grading rubric. I finessed the self-evaluation questions. I began to allow all late work to be turned in whenever it was done….

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What to say about this academic year? This was, for me, the hardest year, and this past spring term the most difficult of the pandemic. In many ways it should have been one of the easiest: I taught in a physical classroom, sharing space with my students—the modality in which I have taught the longest and am most comfortable. For most of the term, Covid numbers on campus and in my county were low, and everyone in my classes was…

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Have you ever asked your students exactly what historians do? I’m teaching my department’s historiography and research methods course this term, and ‘what do historians do?’ is one of my favorite questions.  No one ever asked me to think about this when I was an undergrad.  Historians were quasi-mythic creatures who lived Somewhere Else, Doing History Things, and Writing Lots of Books. I knew some of my professors were historians (I was an American Studies undergrad) but other than show…

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I’ve been pondering for days now how to sum up the experience of teaching his trimester. While messages speed toward us from all over higher ed about things being “back to normal” they’re anything but. Yet how do we quantify the shifting physical, emotional and mental landscape of our teaching life? What are the things we point to when we try to give definition to the shape our fatigue and unease? As best I can describe it, I feel displaced,…

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In April, 2021, after I was fully vaccinated and more than two weeks past my second shot, I had a friend come to visit for the weekend. She was my first guest since 2019, and I anticipated that after months of isolation the visit would feel strange—that I would find it hard to be around someone else for a prolonged period of time and I’d likely feel overwhelmed.  I was glad to discover the very opposite.  The weekend was tremendous…

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We’re coming to the end of an academic year spent wrestling with the pandemic, which followed a summer spent wrestling with the pandemic, which followed a spring semester spent wrestling with the pandemic.  Most of us are exhausted and burned out, and many of us feel demoralized. We have screwed up every ounce of energy we’ve had to make it to this end point, and now comes a dizzying array of emotions: relief, grief, the ability to breathe again, panic,…

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For many of us, this week marks the one-year anniversary of lockdown, and the shift to lifeboat learning for much (or all) of spring 2020.  In revisiting that moment in tweets, FB memories, and things that I wrote, I’m struck by how wholly unprepared I was for that challenge. I’m also struck by how late our places of work made the decision to go online, and how short an on-ramp many of us had to provide instruction in an entirely…

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