Cate Denial

We’re headed into the fall semester, and I thought it might be helpful to round up some resources—some by me, some not—that provide things to think about as we craft our syllabi and plan our first days. Syllabus resources Here’s an older piece I wrote that gives students some advice about how to interact with their instructors: [How to Build Relationships with Your Teachers: Advice from College Professors] Thinking about the language we use in our syllabi is really crucial…

Read More Read More

The arc of my dream is always the same, no matter what: I am late to teach a class, and when I arrive there is chaos. Students are shouting, throwing balled-up pieces of paper at one another, laughing, and generally doing whatever they wish. I cannot get their attention. I try to raise my voice above theirs, but can’t make myself heard. I try to raise a hand to suggest I want to speak, but I am ignored. I feel…

Read More Read More

Like most things to do with teaching, the way I ungrade is always evolving. When I started my practice, some seven years ago now, I still awarded grades on major assignments, but I introduced student self-evaluations of each piece, and met with students to collaboratively decide on what their grade would be. Gradually, I moved to more and more feedback, and fewer and fewer letter grades, and for a good couple of years now, I’ve had students assign themselves their…

Read More Read More

Last week, I listened to [an Ezra Klein interview with Gloria Mark], a psychology professor at UC-Irvine, on the topic of attention. It was a thought-provoking conversation, perhaps as much for what it didn’t say as what it did (nary a peep about neurodivergence, for example). But it got me thinking about attention – about my own struggles to marshal it since the pandemic began, about the many distractions in my own life, and about my students’ ability to focus,…

Read More Read More

One of my favorite courses to teach is my department’s class on historical methods. For a final assignment in the course, students have to create a bibliography of sources that could support the writing of an upper-level seminar paper, and annotate several of the entries. My students often ask how many primary sources is enough, and they’re never very satisfied by my honest answer of “it depends.” I started thinking about this from their perspective. Surely there’s a threshold historians…

Read More Read More

Since the pandemic began, I’ve struggled to read. Part of the root of that has been my fractured focus and concentration, my brain so cognitively overloaded by processing the pandemic and all its attendant inequities that I’ve struggled to pay attention to one thing at a time. Some of the problem has also been time. Like almost everyone I know, my workload increased at the beginning of the pandemic and has not decreased in the intervening years. (Which is not…

Read More Read More

Winter term began on January 3 at Knox – coincidentally, the day I tested positive with my first Covid infection. My students have been diligently working asynchronously on a number of fronts since then, including reading several articles about generative A.I. After each article, students have filled out reflections in Google forms, reflections I had hoped would become the basis of a discussion once I returned to campus. But since I haven’t yet been able to do that, I wrote…

Read More Read More

Spring 2023 was an unbelievably difficult trimester. I fell ill; I couldn’t keep up with the day-to-day demands of teaching; I had the most pervasive brain fog I’ve ever had and couldn’t see a way through the difficulties I was facing because of it. Gracious colleagues made it possible for me to crawl to the end of the term, but it was not a good term for me or for my students. I have never been so relieved to finish…

Read More Read More

I’m not teaching this fall, which means I have the luxury of being able to take my time to think about how I want to frame tools like ChatGPT in the classroom. This is new territory for almost all of us, and what seems reasonable to us in our particular teaching circumstance is going to vary widely. Most of my classes average at about twenty-five students, which is very different from tussling with this issue in a lecture class of…

Read More Read More

I read with interest [this article] from Vox on the efficacy of homework in K-12 settings. It’s a great piece, offering no easy answers as to whether homework is a boon or a bust as a pedagogical strategy. But it made me reflect on some changes in my own teaching of late. Last fall, the students in my upper-level seminar (15 students; a Tu/Th class; a 105-minute period) quickly showed signs of struggling to find time for research necessary to…

Read More Read More