Cate Denial

It’s not news that many students are showing up at college or university underprepared for the kind of reading their professors expect of them. There are myriad causes — loosing out on reading instruction during Covid, for example, and changes to high school curricula that have students read short excerpts from texts instead of full-length books. (Such changes are generally imposed from the outside, and not the choice of high school teachers.) It is easy, and thoroughly understandable, to throw…

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Warning!  This is a long one. We’ve been living with GenAI for some time now, and there are as many ways to approach its use (or not) in the classroom as there are instructors grappling with its existence. In this blog post, I sketch out how I’ve chosen to work with my students on issues surrounding GenAI:  by focusing on their AI literacy, and on having them reach a real liberal arts understanding of the issues surrounding this tech. Some…

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I’ve been saving links about the problems with, and flaws within, generative AI for some time. Here’s a selection of links (necessarily incomplete!) to which I’ll keep adding as new work appears.  (You may find an item linked in more than one category; this means it applies to more than one of the themes I’ve outlined below.) To lead off, a thought-provoking quote from Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic: “What if the real doomer scenario is that we pollute the…

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A therapist once told me that our lives follow a path that we think we can see stretching out before us, as far as the eye can see. When something changes—when the path takes a sharp left turn because of events we couldn’t or didn’t predict—we begin traveling in a new direction, but we can still see the other path we thought we were on. Grief is the space between the two paths, she said. It’s the gap between reality…

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I’ve seen several thoughtful posts of late about why students might be turning to generative AI to do the work educators want them to do themselves. Time is number one – whether it’s being over-committed in the number of credit hours they’re taking, involved in an overabundance of co-curricular activities, working long hours, or care-taking their kin, students have long been pressed to find space enough for academic work. Students don’t always see the connection between writing and thinking.  They…

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When ChatGPT and other generative AI models arrived on the scene, I cautioned myself to think things through. It’s rare that leaping to judgment has proven a good practice for me; indeed, I’ve learned over time to acknowledge my first reaction to something provoking and then wait for my second and third. I didn’t ban generative AI in my classes, preferring to enter into conversation with my students about the pros, cons, and in-betweens of the whole situation. I don’t…

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Higher ed was abuzz last week after UCLA professor Zrinka Stahuljak announced her intention to teach with an A.I. generated textbook in the next iteration of her medieval literature class. While much of the response to this announcement focused on the ethical complexities of using generative A.I., Stahuljak’s comments raised another issue that has received less attention. The textbook, she argued, would mean students would receive “a more standard, a more coherent, and a more even training” in her classes,…

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For many people, semesters and trimesters and quarters are winding down. Some are deep into grading, others crafting finals, a few still teaching this week. It has been a rollercoaster of a year, with global suffering threaded through our wrangling with local and national challenges. There is more ahead. Change will come with the new year, and while I am committed to not letting anyone steal my joy ahead of time, I’m aware of everything that hangs in tenuous balance…

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It’s common for students to come into my history classes believing that arguments are things you come up with before you do the research for a paper.  For full-time historians, this is often baffling. Students come by this honestly—it’s usually something they were taught in high school. And high school teachers come by it honestly, too—it’s often something they have to teach for students to do well on AP exams and in other forms of testing done under tight time…

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I, like most everyone else teaching in higher ed, have had to grapple with the shifting engagement patterns of our students over the last few years. To be clear – it’s not that I think students are disengaged; it’s simply that they’re often engaged in things other than schoolwork. They need money; they’re caregivers; they are worried about the environment; they are acutely aware of international and domestic politics, and all of these things are pressing and immediate, as opposed…

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