AI Blues

 Grading, slowly making my way through a digital pile of script analysis papers. 

One newish twist is AI. It seems, more and more, I find a paper whose paragraphs are beautifully crafted but whose prose is superficial. My mode of script analysis focuses exclusively on structure. GPT and its ilk tend to prefer lofty reflections on theme and character, making (and repeating) basic links between those or that scene and this or that theme. 

Most students just don't recognize that a writer has a voice, that we can tell when they shift from their own (often error-riddled but honest) voice into the cottony vagaries of AI.

Encountering one of these depletes me. Usually I catch on about halfway through, as nonspecifics pile up. By that point I've spent time and energy crafting some encouraging intervention ("can you be more specific? Give me a 'for instance' from the text?"). 

And then I cut and paste something into gptzero or another detector, and BAM--likely AI generated. Such detectors are themselves error prone. I wouldn't use them as a first-line test. But they can sometimes tell me if and how someone has run into trouble.

I have to remind myself, as I always do when encountering academic dishonesty, that it's not personal. Dishonesty happens, as Truth Default Theory avers, when the truth becomes inconvenient. Students cheat out of desperation, not out of some desire to hurt teachers. I'm sure some may feel a certain contempt for the class or for me, but the same could be said of those who don't cheat.

Mostly there's just a mass of students who aren't (or who feel) unprepared to do the kind of reading and writing we do in class. I'm continually trying to revise my teaching to reach such students, to clarify what it is they need to make this task seem doable. 

And AI makes it harder. It feels like work to them--they look it up, they teach it about this play they may have read part of, and they have it spit out what they think I want to hear. I think some of them convince themselves it's like what they might have written. But then, how would they know? That's one of the awful things about LLMs (large language models); they prevent students from learning their own voice. They never know what they "sound" like without the filter of AI-ification. 

And it's exhausting to go through the rigmarole of reporting them to student advocacy and accountability. Each time, I'm like is it worth it? Am I doing this out of pique, or am I doing it to teach the student something? At this point, it's more a matter of consistency. I did it for this one student; I have to do it for everyone similarly positioned. And sometimes it really is a good wake-up call. My institution at this moment is pretty good about making these teachable moments. 

But. It's still rough. 

"I use GPT for lots of things," say some friends outside of academia.

I don't.

Curtailing Instructor Speech

 So my friend and colleague texted me this morning at 8. I was asleep, having successfully fended off my cat from nudging me awake at my usual 6:30 time. 

Bad news.

My university's board of supervisors decided, last night, to restrict the rights of instructors in classrooms. They clarified that classrooms are not spaces where first amendment protections apply. Thus did they seek to prevent instructors from "imposing" their political views on students. The statement declined to define what "imposing" might constitute. 

More bad news: the University of Pittsburgh is pausing all PhD recruitment efforts in light of uncertainty about federal funding. Worse, the University of Pennsylvania appears to have done that and more, actually rescinding some assistantship offers. To call that shocking understates its seriousness. It's akin to hiring someone in a competitive field, having them accept the offer (and presumably turn down competing offers)--and then take it back. How horrible for the students affected. How embarrassing for the universities.

No one would accuse me of optimism, but I doubt that Trump's executive order on NIH funding will survive judicial review. I think one court has already put it on hold. Either Trump has doubled down on cutting funding despite court orders, or the universities have decided to take preemptive action. 

I worry this might spark a more widespread panic-wave of grad program admission freezes. I've already made four offers to prospective students. Thinking about the awkward "well, actually..." conversation I'd have to have with them should my university join that wave makes me queasy. 

Regarding the Board of Supervisors' decision . . . well, that doesn't upset my stomach in quite the same way yet. Oh, it angers me.  Similar to the post-the-Ten-Commandments-in-every-classroom thing, this decision seems transparently unconstitutional. I expect it to be restrained by a judge in the next week. From there, it will wind its way up layers of judicial review until it lands somewhere consequential and nudges the Overton Window a bit closer to tyranny--or not! So--infuriating? Definitely. I'll join whatever hell gets raised about it. 

But in terms of immediate threat, I worry more about PhD recruitment than I do about being fired for something I say in class--at least right now.

Perhaps naivete clouds my vision. Unconstitutional or not, this maneuver (instigated by our utterly anti-higher-ed governor) highlights the conservative movement's war on tenure, if not on university education itself. I recognize that we all have targets painted on our backs. Rumors suggest that most of our upper-administrative personnel have plotted (or been shown) escape routes from my institution in the next few weeks. Who knows how long we have before colleagues start following them?

And what do I tell students, prospective and current, without someone thinking that I have "imposed" my views on them?

Lecturing Guidelines

I watched a junior instructor today as part of our school's promotion and tenure (PT) process. Everyone in the tenure-stream gets observed once or twice a semester. The observer writes a report, and that report goes into the PT Committee's annual assessment of the tenure-stream faculty member's teaching, service, and creative/research output. 

It's nerve-wracking to be watched and evaluated. I didn't like being on the receiving end of that when I was untenured. As a watcher now, I try to make the experience as non-nerve-wracking as I can. My person today was nervous and felt off. They seemed mostly fine to me, just inexperienced. 

As I was watching, taking notes for a future conversation with the person about how they might up their teaching game (as we all can), I thought about composing a bit of a guide for creating theatre lessons in lecture-style classes. 

I know the L-word causes some pedagogy folk to recoil. Paulo Freire talked about the "banking model" of education: the teacher has a store of knowledge, which they deposit into the empty, passive minds of students. Students then return (vomit back out) that knowledge on a test. It's a thin view of what knowledge is, and it renders students relatively powerless to do anything to or about the knowledge they absorb and return. 

I get that, and my discipline is better than most about embodied learning. My history classes generally have some kind of performance project attached. I try to get students to synthesize and innovate instead of simply regurgitate knowledge. I want them to be creative, not just accurate. 

Still, though, such embodied learning requires a degree of common, basic knowledge. Lectures are one way of imparting that knowledge. I like to think I'm a better-than-average lecturer. Here's some basics to my philosophy of lecturing:

Communicate what you're covering and why. I start every semester with a "why are we here" conversation. "Why are you taking this class?" Inevitably, students answer with some variation of "It's required." "OK," I return, "but why is it required? Why do we make every theatre major take a history class?" That usually spurs some better answers. What I'm trying to get them to isn't just reasons but stakes. I want them to see how the class I'm teaching contributes something vital to their craft. 

Clarify how you teach. I also try to have some meta-pedagogical moments in my teaching. Here's how I've set up this class. Here's how I handle lectures. Here's what I expect you to pick up from lectures. Here's how I test these expectations in various assignments. Here's how those lectures and assignments connect to the stakes/goals we started with.

Clarify your philosophy of lecturing and listening. This may seem like an odd instruction. You lecture to give some information. Yeah, that's so. But I don't take it for granted that my students all know how to engage a lecture and get useful information. So I identify and explain (usually as I go) some of the features of how I lecture.

I have a "no screens" policy in class. I expect students to take notes, and (absent some accessibility issue) I expect them to take notes by hand. I point to the research that shows that, while tying notes on a computer can often result in an accurate transcription of what the professor has displayed on the screen or the board, transcription isn't the point. The point is to record the knowledge I'm conveying in a way that means something to the student. Typing doesn't do that as well as handwriting does.

I pare down the notes I show. I do words or phrases when possible instead of full sentences. I explain that I want students to write down not the exact words I'm saying but their own way of putting what I'm saying. I'll talk a lot more than the words I put on screen, in other words. I want them to take notes on what I'm saying, not (only) what I'm showing.

I slow down, presenting notes one bullet point at a time. Writing takes time. I try not to move on until everyone's finished writing. I do not present an entire screen of words, talk over it, and then flip to the next screen. 

I highlight terms or ideas I especially want them to see. Sometimes I'll even say "This part is just background; you don't need to worry about getting it down" and then transition to "and here's where I'd start to take notes more exactly if I were you." 

I don't just read the notes I have. I mean, most of the time, that'd be a list of truncated phrases. My lecture creates connective tissue between points. Where possible, I try to involve students in this flow. OK, so we have idea 1 here. What might you have to think about as a result of 1? That's right! Idea 2 (reveal next bullet point). As much as is possible, I try to have students help guide themselves through the lecture. Hiding and then revealing bullet points one by one lets me use some dramaturgical tricks (or rhetorical tricks, if you prefer): building, tension/release, surprise, twists, etc. 

I also pause to walk around and just talk. Especially after I present some surprising or significant point. I'll pause, ask for some student reflection, and walk around to try to get some feedback. If I have a fun anecdote or illustration, I can deliver it here. I try to break up the monotony of professor-behind-lecturn when I can. It also lets me reach some of the back-row Baptists who may otherwise be drifting. I can move to the back, sit down, have a chat with the class (as most other people turn in their seats to look at me). And ideally, my conversation leads me to the next point to talk about.

 Pictures and brief videos are also good interrupters of monotonous lecturing. I try to be careful (when I'm on my game) to set up videos--telling students what to watch out for and then asking them about it afterward, reinforcing those points I've covered already.

This is a personal one: I avoid powerpoint where possible. My preferred mode of note-giving is with an opaque projector. I manually cover up and reveal the next bullet point. And sometimes--if a student gives an especially creative answer--i can simply write or draw right onto the paper a new term or idea. I can skip around, not stuck to just the flow I've pre-programmed.  

More recently, I've adopted a check-out question format. I set my alarm for 3 minutes before the end of class. It goes off, I ask students to write down something about what we discussed. Sometimes it's as simple as "What's something from today that stuck out to you?" Sometimes it's a question directly related to the terms we've gone over "What's an example of a nonlinear plot from some movie, TV show, or play you're familiar with?" When I can, I take time at the top of the next class to revisit some of these. It takes more prep time, but I've found it generally a rewarding feedback loop for me and the students. I get to clarify a few issues, and students enjoy learning that what they write matters to me.

I'm still improving. I try to note when I get bored by something in my own class. That's usually a sign that I need to spice things up a bit. 

Grade Gradey Grade Grade

 Long day of long grading first drafts. Most of these fell into one of three boxes:

• Completed effort
• Mostly completed effort with a few gaps
• Not a countable effort

There were more of the final variety than I'm comfortable with. I'll need to clarify to folk that if their major revision plan is "finish the analysis," then they don't really have a first draft and cannot therefore participate in peer review.

Someone seems also to have used AI to crash-write something at the last minute. I had to make the "this is the worst option to choose" lecture happen. 

I'm impressed that I buzzed through all the papers so quickly. I'm curious whether I can do a similarly quick buzz-through for the final drafts. At the very least, my old version of intensive commenting will simply have to fall away. I don't have it in me to do that 40+ times.

Another problem I flagged: I suspect many students just aren't reading the play for the day, waiting to read it until they decide to write about it. They can get through a multiple-choice quiz fine with faking. But when it comes time for peer review, lots just freely admit they never read play X. 

This relates to a larger problem of unequal commitment from students. Group work--directing scenes particularly--becomes next to impossible since one or two students in a group simply do not do anything. 

 I think I'll pitch this problem directly to the classes, get their thoughts. 

Truthfully, I'm kinda low and tired right now. I think I need some sleep before I can delve into or vent about all the things.

Teaching Notes: Trying Peer Review

 So--I attempted my first peer reviews in my script analysis class today. I've taught the course for years, but this is the first time I've carved out time (by cutting out lots of assignments) for peer responses.

I'd love to claim I was acting in Best Pedagogical Interests, but really I instituted this as a response to losing TA support for the classes this semester. It's all me, facing a digital pile of 50 analyses that historically have taken 20 minutes per paper to do. I don't have that time or energy now, so I wanted to farm out some of the low-level responding to students.

Of course, I do want the process also to make students think more carefully about their writing and the plays themselves. 

How'd it go? Well, I haven't graded their response sheets yet, but I saw some good and some meh. 

The meh: lots of people didn't show up. There's always a deficit between enrollment in the class and those who turn in an analysis assignment. But today I saw also a deficit between those who turned in an assignment and those who showed up for the peer review.

The good: I successfully impressed on them the requirement to have brought in a printed-out copy of the assignment. I even got them to agree last Friday that anyone not having a printout copy could not participate in the peer review. Sure enough, everyone showed up with a printed out copy.

The meh: There was a good bit of blowing off. Lots of people finished so quickly that I gather they didn't do much actual reading and responding. This is apparently a common reaction in peer reviews: "great work!" and nothing else. One student asked if she could get some additional peer review, as her peer had not (by their own admission) read the play she had written about. 

The fix: I think I'm going to borrow a bit of ungrading tactics here and let people choose which grade level they want to do for the peer review. Perhaps I'll do something like the following:

0/25--You choose to skip the review process altogether

C (15/25)--You do a self-review based on a Q&A checklist I provide.

A (25/25)--You commit to reading all plays people have written about, and you commit to being in class to do a more in-depth response to their paper.

The fix, part II: I need to scaffold peer responding a bit more. I think a lot of the finish-quickly-say-it's-good factor has to do with the fact that people don't know how to respond. 

The fix, part III: perhaps I'll anonymize peer responding? It could be that some folk are just very nervous about responding to another person in person. It might be easier for them to respond to someone anonymously. I'm not exactly sure how to make that happen?

We'll see on Friday (with the revised analysis drafts) how yay or meh the process is at nipping in the bud some common pitfalls.

Clearing Out the Crap

 Whew! This is the second night in a row that I've nearly forgotten to blog here. Usually this means that I've been writing in some other venue. 

I read somewhere once that every writer has about a million words of crap in them that they have to get through before they start writing good stuff. I write this blog in part to clear out my own backlog of crap-words. 

Most days this blog helps get the gears of writing and thinking going. On some days--like yesterday and today--my work in other areas of my life has obliged me to write already. I wrote a sermon yesterday. I wrote several backgrounder bits for my PhD seminar today. My writing brain thus tells me I've done my exercises for the day.

But no--discipline demands that I write here as well.

I find myself reclaiming and re-preaching the gospel I once evangelized about constantly: writing is a mode of thinking. My students come to me mainly with the misconception that writing consists of the one-time report you make about what's already in your head. So much of the writing they've been expected to do has them regurgitate information they've been taught. Writing really does function as a report in those cases. Do you know the respiration cycle? Explain it to me in a paragraph. Such writing has its place.

But I find students run into a wall when they attempt that kind of writing for classes like mine that require them to create, structure, and communicate an argument or an analysis. They sit down to write what they assume already exists in their head--another report--and find instead they don't know what they think about it. The mental report they want simply to copy onto the Google Doc or Word Doc? It doesn't exist. 

These students (and, to be fair, many students already know or sort-of know this already) miss the idea that writing functions as a way of finding out what we think. It's a tool for thinking, not reporting. 

I had drifted away from this truth in my teaching. Sure, I would tell students they need to take lots of notes, do a lot of pre-writing, before attempting an analysis. But few of them actually seemed to take that advice. Students lead busy lives. They don't necessarily see the benefits of doing writing as thinking. After all, writing takes energy and time. It's exhausting, like calisthenics. And, as in calisthenics, writing seems so much harder for students who have avoided it. Their writerly muscles lack the strength and stamina for long runs of productive writing. 

I recognize that, in my classes now, I'm asking them to start doing pushups when they really dislike pushups. 

Nevertheless, I persist. Why? Generative AI. Among my many gripes--some curmudgeonly, some more well founded, I fixate currently on the fact that Generative AI/LLMs sell themselves as an end-run around the hard work of writing. Why do all those pushups, lift all those weights, train in all those HIIT cardio rounds, when you can just ask Gemini or Claude to produce the report you'd eventually have gotten to? But the end-run around the work of writing also misses the benefits of thinking. As sci-fi author Ted Chiang argues, having AI write for you is like bringing a forklift to the gym. Sure, the weights get lifted, and--hurrah--you feel no aches, but your muscles don't develop. You miss the point of a gym in the first place. 

I've explained this to students. Some get it. Some nod and seem to at least consider it. And others, I know, will simply decide that they would prefer not to do that exercise, thank you very much. 

Anyway. No great writing or thinking tonight, I fear. But at least there's some crap cleared out for future thinking.

Moments of Relief and Types of Fun

The ending of the first week of school, especially heading into a three-day weekend, feels like the completing an especially arduous workout. It's the same high feeling I get after finishing a long paper or article revision. A task that gobbles up time and energy and worry, a job that becomes the overriding focus for a week or more, suddenly gets done! The syllabus is done because it has to be done. The course happens, ready or not. And lo, it's fine! Hurrah!

I'm in the honeymoon moment between completing the syllabus/first week and the first load of real work and grading. Vacation time! 

The illusion this moment cast dissipates once I start thinking of next week's workload. Oh, yeah. I have to do this all again next week! New priorities emerge--I'm preaching at my church on the 26th, so I need a sermon!--that form their own stress-times and energy drains. Hopefully these too will result in some sweet if illusionary release. 

I use a trick sometimes when I run a long distance (for me "long" means, like, 4 miles): I keep imagining crossing my finish line. How good it will feel to get to stop running! Similarly, How good it will feel to finish this [syllabus, paper, class, etc.]. 

I suspect the trick only works because the activity itself stimulates or feeds my soul even as it demands psychic and physical energy. If I hated running, actually despised every second of it, then the eventually the ending would lose its motivating power. If class planning or writing provoked nothing but stress, I would (I hope) eventually recognize that the relief doesn't justify all that suffering.

I read once about a taxonomy of different kinds of fun, a typology that circulates in some extreme recreation circles (e.g., ultra-marathons, tough mudder events). Type 1 fun means that you enjoy an activity during and after the activity. Event and memory equally give pleasure. Type 2 fun consists of activities that feel miserable in the moment but acquire a glow of "glad I did that" afterward. The 5Ks I have run (and the 4-miles I run sometimes) feel bad and often require me to do the imagine-the-end trick. But I cheer that I did them and would willingly do them again. Solid type-2 experience. 

Type 3 fun--well, I've read different accounts. The link I gave insists that type 3 has no fun at all, in memory or afterward. Yet other sources have suggested that type 3 does qualify as fun, that it doesn't equate to "bad experience." 

Perhaps the difference between type 3 fun and "awful" involves regret. We all have experiences that we would never repeat and never even wish on others: a serious injury or illness, the death of a family member or friend, the consequences of a poor decision, or a destructive calamity. I don't think these fall into even a type-3 fun box. We already have boxes like "tragedy" or "disaster" to cover that type of experience.

Yet I can imagine ordeals or seasons of life that, while tough to endure and even painful to remember, nevertheless end up in the realm of "worthwhile" and "not regretful." I mean, something that causes you to say, "I don't want to experience that ever again, but I don't regret doing it that one time." 

Truthfully, I struggle to think of something quite like that for me... Grade school, maybe? I hated it. I would hate to be transported into my younger self to re-experience it. But neither would I want that experience excised from my memory.

The learning curve of gaining a skill sometimes feels like a type-3 experience--or several of them in succession. You suck at something, sometimes for a long time, before you gain competence and expertise. The learning often contains very little fun, and the memory of those early attempts makes you wince. In Elden Ring, you die a thousand times before you "git gud"--and then you die 1,000 more times. You make peace with dying, adopting a zenlike attitude that turns type 3 slogs into type 2 journeys with relief (defeating a hard boss, for instance). I stopped playing Elden Ring long before I got good at anything except riding the mount (Torrent) around and enjoying the scenery. I respect my best friend, who burned his way through the type 3/type 2 phases of countless bosses before cheering at his well-earned victory. What I would experience as type-3 or even regretful instances he sees as just another mile on the marathon.

I suspect we all have different boundaries about when an experience works as Type 3 or just regretful. 

More tomorrow.

Course Shenanigans

 There's shenanigans afoot at my university. We noticed this semester that our gen-ed offering, our freshman-level intro class, is having trouble attracting students. Usually this class is one of our most reliable engines for student contact hours. Most degree programs require students to take an arts credit. Theatre has historically been a fun option for them. I have gripes about our standard 100:1 student:instructor ratio, but I have faith in the basic integrity of the course. My colleague handles the super-large section; her superpower is crafting a high-quality course even at that scale.

But this semester? Low, low enrollment. Nothing about the course has changed. We poked into sites like ratemyprofessor to see if there was some groundswell of resentment at the course. Nope.

The only big factor we can detect is a different arts credit, an intro course offered in a different department unrelated to my college. This course is 100% online and asynchronous. It has over 1,500 students with a single instructor. The scuttlebutt (which I can't confirm) is that the whole course has only one TA assigned to it.

There's no practical way to assess students' performance in this course except through a massive use of automated and easily cheated exams. 

A student familiar with the class raved about it. It's apparently on several "best class at LSU" lists--not because the class teaches good things but because it's easy. It's as close to a zero-effort way to get through three credits of required coursework as you can find. 

I feel so tired and outraged and tired and disappointed . . . and tired . . . thinking about this class. 

On the one hand, I have to wonder what the professor in charge--whom I do not know--must think or feel about this. Surely they can't be under any illusions about the quality of this course or its reputation. But the alternative is that the course was specifically designed to be a high-enrollment easy A. I hate classes like that. They cheapen every other class--especially other gen ed courses, especially arts gen ed courses. They reinforce the already strong sense among students and populace that higher ed (and especially higher ed in the arts) is basically a scam, a series of meaningless, frustrating hoops to jump through in order to get the degree (which is in turn seen and assessed purely in terms of a key to a well-paying career). Universities are just money-hungry, goes this line of thinking. Look at increasing tuition! Student loan debt! The cost of textbooks! And why? Just so graduates can feel superior for having endured this expensive battery of meaningless busywork.

It angers me that there's a class that, intentionally or not, seems perfectly designed to reinforce that narrative. I don't know the professor's story. I don't know their mindset here. But from the outside it's hard for me not to imagine they (and their department) have kind of sold their soul.

And on another level, I'm disappointed that students for the most part see this as a good thing. Why not take this easy course? I'm busy and stressed out with my real classes (or my real life). I don't want to have to look at some pictures or listen to some music or go to some long-ass boring play just to declare myself more educated. If I can get this hoop out of the way easily (and with a little cheating), why not? 

Now--reality check--when I was an undergrad, yeah, I'll admit there were a few times I bypassed a harder course to take, for instance, the non-honors option of a gen ed. But I never cheated, nor would I have been OK with a course in which cheating was widely seen as the legitimate path through the class. I do think I did invest time and effort and curiosity even in courses that I didn't think of as integral to my main studies. I don't think--perhaps I'm rose-coloring things--that I looked at any class as an utter waste of time. I took them, in other words, in some degree of good faith.

It's disappointing to me on a deep level that so many students--inspired, I know, by an overwhelming flood of pressures and perverse incentives--are just willing to take classes basically in bad faith. And it's worse when those classes seemed designed in accordance with these bad-faith expectations. 

Why has no one stopped this clearly broken course? I asked. The answer, it seems, is that no one really cares. Enrollment is enrollment. The scam continues. 

Surely I'm being ungenerous here. Certainly there's a lot I don't know. But, well, it's depressing times.  

More tomorrow.

Class Prep Week: finished. nearly finished. I must be nearly finished.

 A short post this evening. I've finished my contemporary theatre grad syllabus!

I'm not super-happy about everything, but at this point it's like we say with dissertations: a good syllabus is a done syllabus. 

We'll see how it goes tomorrow.

Now on to the other two classes...

Class Prep: Mushbrain--but a plan!

 OK. I think I have a possible plan for the grad class. It's gonna be a combination reading/discussion group with a pedagogical focus. 

It meets twice a week--Mondays and Wednesdays. Most Mondays, I'll have them read a play paired with a critical piece (usually an article focusing on teaching that play and/or contextualizing/problematizing it). I have many, many more such pairings that could work than I have room for. I gotta cut down.

Most Wednesdays, there will be two presentations by students. Students will sign up for two of these presentations at the start of the semester. One will be a "keystone" presentation where they teach us a lesson on some especially influential or significant play, artist, movement, and/or event. Ideally, this will be one we've all heard of, perhaps from prior to 2000 (or at least prior to 2010). I'll have a suggested list, but they're welcome to do something different if they'd like. The other presentation for each Wednesday will be something else--a "hidden treasure" (I'll think of something else to call it). Here is where they can either suggest and have us all read a relatively recent play (last 20 years or so) that they think will become important--or argue for the recovery/recuperation of some artist/group/event that we (and most canon/class formations) overlook.

Additionally, each week, students will post a "sitrep" (Situation Report) on a blog they'll create just reflecting on their thoughts from the prior week.

The two big projects at midterm and finals will be some kind of annotated syllabus that they'll create--perhaps one for a general ed "contemporary dramatic lit" class and one for a special topics course of their own devising that generally deals with theatre/performance of the last seventy-five years.

The hard--hard hard hard--thing right now is, as always, what do I leave out? I have so much extra that i'm thinking of cutting down student reports in favor of just having more that I provide. I'm trying to take Jill Dolan's advice: assign less. I want the class to be rewarding, not a slog.

Perhaps I should do only one or the other rather than both on the Wednesdays?

Aaaand there's also the undergrad script analysis to get ready before Monday. But not right now. My brain=mush.

G'night!

Class Prep: Lots of Article Reading

 All day long has been me downloading scholarly articles onto my hard drive and into my brain in preparation for deciding what goes into my contemporary theatre seminar.

I've taught this seminar several times before, and I've never been exactly satisfied with it. It's technically a history seminar, but there's just no way to do justice to the last seventy-five years of global theatre history in fifteen weeks (fourteen, really, with holidays and whatnot). I looked over all my past attempts today. They stretch back to the aughts. I see I started with a doggedly chronological march through key eras. Then I shifted to a thematic focus. I shunted the march-through-history back to a "crash course" that took up the first few weeks. Students would absorb all that the standard theatre history texts had to say about the eras we studied. I'd give them a week or two to do that and then threaten them with some kind of test. The real test, of course, was me looking at their notes, seeing if they'd taken care to learn what they needed to.

I dislike that activity. It always felt necessary--Well, I can't have a history class without them knowing the basic history, right? You have to have a starting point to trouble, don't you?--but it caused such stress and tension for students. It's like their comp exams in miniature, even as it was supposed to help them prepare for said exams.

I'm trying to do away with that exercise this semester.

As I've mentioned previously, we're formally stepping back from the expectation of an encyclopedic knowledge of theatre history. This seminar--like all our era-based history seminars--is transitioning to a more modular, special-topics course. I've been approaching this course's planning as if it simply were one of those special topics courses. "What if you get a job at a college/university," I pitched, "and got assigned a course along the lines of 'modern drama' or 'contemporary theatre' or 'today's plays'? What do you teach?"

My aim was to attract students beyond just our PhD program. Currently there aren't enough PhD Theatre students in coursework to make a course work. (There's a general lull in applications to PhD programs in Theatre, but that's another topic.) I wanted to appeal to folk in English, Comp Lit, Womens/Gender/Queer studies and the like. As it happens, my class is half theatre grads (PhDs and--unexpected--MFAs) with a few outsiders thrown in. There's even an especially precocious undergrad there.

So: having promised a special topics course, how shall I deliver? I think I have a sufficient number of articles and plays to choose from. How do I arrange the course? What will their main assignments be? What do I want them to take from this course?

In my mind, I'm thinking that the main big deliverables from students in the semester will be teaching materials: perhaps an annotated syllabi--two or three, I haven't decided on; perhaps a portfolio of syllabus, teaching philosophy, and sample lesson; or perhaps a conference-length presentation/manifesto. I'll also try to do a lot of low-stakes writing throughout, perhaps via a weekly blog. The course is two days a week. I'd ideally like to do one day of case study--a play or playwright (or perhaps an event or topic) paired with an article (preferably about teaching said playwright/play/event/topic). The other day, after the first week or two, would involve students signing up to share (1) a keystone play/playwright/event--a play/playwright/event that influenced other work/artists; or (2) a hidden treasure item--an event/site/play/artist that they think could or should become a keystone. Maybe I should include an option of a hands-on lesson?

The other assignment will be weekly status reports (blogs) where they reflect on the topics given.

Different students are taking this class at different levels; some are pass/fail while others are fully enrolled. I'll have tiered expectations for each level.

Now: how do I structure the weeks? I have two days to decide!

Class Prep: Lots of Low-Stakes Writing

 So, after finally letting go of the need to absorb any more play scripts--it really is just procrastination at this stage--I sat down and reformatted my script analysis course (both sections). I've made the class both shorter and longer. I took out some of the play readings; there are now 11 instead of the usual 13. And I took out one of the four analysis papers. With this additional breathing room, I inserted at least a day between each play I assign. My thinking is that we'll discuss the play one day and then, on the following day, we'll use that script to unpack/explore some facet of script analysis. 

I've also both cut down and vastly expanded the amount of writing students do. A class I taught this last semester turned out to be one of my favorite courses I've ever taught. I structured the class around lots of low-stakes writing and responses. Students brought in "sparks" for the day's material. A spark could be a quote that stood out, a substantive reaction, a question--just about anything so long as it demonstrated a real engagement with the material. Occasionally, students were required to go beyond a spark and bring in a "rabbit hole report"--a bit of research about something the material for the day inspired them to look into. A few students (those contracting for an A) had to do at least one "lagniappe report"--essentially a longer, deeper rabbit hole report on some bit of extra material not formally assigned. 

What made all this work so well, I think, was the work I put in compiling each class day a list of some of the standout sparks comments/questions. I'd begin each next class by sharing these. I could see students light up when they recognized that I was reading their contribution. I think this practice gave students a sense that their reactions mattered, that the sparks weren't mere busywork. 

It was, of course, a lot of work on my part.

What I was doing, in the lingo of writing instruction, was creating a lot of low-stakes writing assignments. Students would get either "Satisfactory" or "Unsatisfactory" on these assignments. If they were Unsatisfactory, I'd let them know what the problem was and give them the chance to revise. They had to be in class to turn them in, and I accepted handwritten ones provided I could understand the handwriting. Nearly all of them were handwritten, which frankly cut down on any suspicions on my part that they were AI-generated. I also gave students a few minutes at the top of class to do these exercises. If the didn't read the material, they'd get a U and the chance to revise. (Revisions were more work, though, so as to dissuade them from just backlogging U's.)

What if, I thought to myself, I made my script analysis class more like that class? Every day would have some kind of low-stakes writing--some they could bring to class prewritten, some they'd write in class. And I could--would have to--again do the hard work of grading every day and compiling responses to share the next day. I'd also need to get students into the habit of bringing something to write with and write on every day. 

I'm still thinking through exactly how to realize this in a script analysis class. A lot of this class is going to be experimental--on my part particularly. And it's going to be a lot of work--though I may be able to grade again mostly on S/U status. 

But: I'm also thinking I may need to let go of contract/ungrading in favor of the simpler (less pedagogically responsible) numerical grading system...

And then, aside from that, I really need to get my grad class sorted! Lots of article-reading hours tomorrow. 

Class Planning: Lowering Expectations, Reading More Plays

 So--I'm  a little fried. Over the past few hours, I have skim-read a lot of one-act plays (how many? two dozen? thirty?), searching for pieces to complement the standard, old-fashioned one-acts I use to start my script analysis class with.

My standard starts are Trifles by Susan Glaspell (classic, naturalistic, fun), Overtones by Alice Gerstenberg (on-the-nose, but expressionistic fun), and Florence by Alice Childress (typically Childressian excellence regarding white representations of Black people in art).

The problem: this class I've taught for over a decade has historically involved four to five big analysis papers. I've been able to handle grading these largely thanks to the help of a graduate teaching assistant (TA). The class is generally well regarded--hard but good. In the last few years, though--COVID is the convenient watershed--my experience of the class has degraded a bit. Students are finding reading and writing much harder. I've dialed back my expectations on assignments, dropped from five to four analyses, and focused more on helping students revise work. 

I've also adopted an "ungrading" policy. Students contract for the grade they want (A, B, or C, with options for plusses and minuses in each). Assignments are basically "satisfactory" or "needs revision." Every assignment can be revised. In theory I like this arrangement better. In practice it's a lot more work for me and my TA. Add to this mix the pernicious influence of generative AI (LLMs like ChatGPT), and assessing writing in class just becomes orders of magnitude more difficult. 

On top of this, enrollment in the course has, semester after semester, grown, blowing out enrollment caps. I had over forty students last semester in a single class. That was a lot for my TA and to keep up with. This semester, I proposed two smaller sections. Both are full at 26 apiece. But for a number of reasons, there's no TA to spare this semester.

So: I screwed myself over. I now have 52 (at least) students and no TA help. There's just no way I can do the same amount of work I've been doing. I have to revise the class completely, which has made me no end of grumpy. 

In truth, though, the class needed a refresh anyway. I'd prefer to have done this refresh over the summer, but [shrug emoji]. And I hate that my refreshing/revisioning is going to be driven less by what is best for the students and as much/more by what is doable for me by myself.

My inkling at the moment: I'm going to slow way down. We'll take our time with individual plays, and perhaps read more of them. They'll do less outside work on them and do more work in class on them (lots of worksheets). I'll have only two or three big writing assignments, all with elaborate scaffolds/steps. I'm thinking of calling these steps "table read" (initial ideas/prewriting) "blocking" (prewriting/outlining), "dress rehearsal" (first draft), and "opening night" (final draft). 

I don't know if I can keep the ungrading component. I may need to retreat to the safer (though less pedagogically justifiable) waters of numerical grades. 

In a way, my reading more plays at this point is just putting off the inevitable, avoiding rethinking the class from top to bottom. 

But after tonight: no more lollygagging.

Class Prep: Looking for Scripts that Ring Bells

The week before school starts every semester involves heavy research. I read as many plays as I can, as many articles as I can find. It's like I'm cramming for a test, as I tell my students not to do. I like to use new and little-known plays for class, mostly because the chances of my students finding online summaries or essays on them is so low. I've discovered quite a few ones I adore thanks to New Play Exchange. Sometimes you have to go through several before finding one that works. 

"Works" means I feel an inner resonance, like a bell rung, at the end. It means I love the play. Admittedly it's easier to feel that when reading published and produced plays. Such works have generally already gone through several layers of workshopping and refinement. I remember feeling it the first time I read Gidion's Knot by Johnna Addams, Skeleton Crew and Pipeline by Dominique Morisseau, The Ghosts of Lote Bravo by Hilary Bettis, Cambodian Rock Band by Lauren Yee, and most recently Primary Trust by Eboni Booth. (What a lovely gem of a play Primary Trust is!)

But I feel especially proud when I find a ringer script in NPX. Often it's a play that's long, so long I wonder if I want to read it at all. But then it turns into Marianas Trench by Scott Sickles or Even Flowers Bloom in Hell, Sometimes by Franky D. Gonzales or Crying on Television by R. Eric Thomas or House of Joy by Madhuri Shekar. These become some of my favorite plays, at least for a time. And I put them into my course and see how they fly.

For any number of reasons, some scripts that I really enjoy just fall flat with students. I continue loving them but take them out of rotation for use with undergrads. I love The Nether by Jennifer Haley, for example, but her Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom--which I also love--just poses fewer mental roadblocks for students. Others prove pretty durable. Students never tire of Diana Son's Stop Kiss, and 'night,Mother by Marsha Norman--for all its iffy representation of epilepsy--keeps their attention. 

Some scripts I have to take out of rotation because students (or at least a few students) like them so much they propose them for our season. This happened with Jen Silverman's The Moors as well as Gullem Clua's Marburg--and now with Haley's Neighborhood 3. I hate to lose these (at least for a four- or five-year stretch), but I'm also pleased that they sparked someone's interest.

And then there are plays I keep in rotation even if they aren't the students' favorite. I use Eugene Scribe's The Glass of Water every semester (I took this cue from Shelly Orr) because (1) I like it, and (2) it so neatly encapsulates the well-made play format so many of the other scripts I choose alter or reject. Few students enjoy that one, exactly, but many come at least to appreciate it. Susan Glaspell's Trifles is ubiquitous and dated but rock-solid as a starter script for the semester (I put that alongside Alice Gersternberg's Overtones and Alice Childress's one-act Florence). Jackie Sibblies Drury's Really doesn't enjoy the popularity of her better-known (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) works, and it confounds students. But the way she plays with time and ambiguity is so rewarding.

Some plays I put in precisely because they'll confound students, usually by refusing to resolve ambiguities or explain themselves. Caryl Churchill's Far Away is a favorite of mine (just about any Churchill would work). A little-known play called D Deb Debbie Deborah by Jerry Lieblich is so, so delightfully complicated. 

Not every script I use is one that resonates with me immediately. My perspective as a white cis US guy (a minority with outsized power) is limited, my bell (like everyone's) is tuned better to certain frequencies than to others. I try to remember that most plays aren't made for me, in other words. I wasn't immediately bell-rung with Jaja's African Hair Braiding by Jocelyn Bioh, for example, but I appreciated Bioh's craft and noted how the script checked several of my preferred boxes at once (interesting structure, centers African diasporic voices, centers women, recently popular). I put it in last semester. And as students engaged it, it grew on me. It'll likely be in my rotation for a while. 

I write this having just read another one tonight that rang a bell: Juan Ramirez, Jr.'s Calling Puerto Rico. An agoraphobic man uses ham radio to reach out to both a friend on the International Space Station and his estranged grandfather on Puerto Rico just as Hurricane Maria hits. I'll need to give it a night or two to reality check myself, making sure I'm not just reacting out of personal resonance. My father was a ham radio operator, learning that hobby while serving in the air force on a base in Puerto Rico. I've been through a number of bad hurricanes here in the South myself. I'll need to do some thinking to see if this script is just one I liked or one I liked that would also be useful in class.

More tomorrow.

Careful Work and Stormy Skies

I didn't get much more work done on classes today. My best friend contacted me about a Lego half-day to finish up our prior projects before the semester started. I took him up on that.

I got a bit done--mostly errands and some minor administrative tasks. There's almost always tasks that need to be done but don't really matter much, at least not as much as finishing a syllabus. But when you're stuck on syllabus-writing, as I am, you welcome distracting tasks. They keep you busy and give you some vague feeling of productivity even though they are at heart distractions.

I also recognize I'm in a bit of a depression season. I have really, really low-grade depression most of the time. "Dysthymia," my therapist tells me, "if you need a label." Most of the time it's just a low mood and a ramping up of my usual Eeyore outlook on things. Occasionally it blossoms into something a bit more nihilistic, marked by some really awful internal monologues.

I've adopted a metaphor (simile, I suppose) I heard from Stephen Fry. Depression, he says (I paraphrase--see here for the original), is like the weather, a rain shower or thunderstorm. On the one hand, you don't want to deny that it's storming when there's a storm. You wouldn't stroll outside and defiantly talk about how sunny things are as the downpour soaks you. You have to accept that, yes, it's raining. You take steps to adapt: staying indoors, bringing an umbrella, driving carefully with wipers and lights on, and even monitoring reports for anything worse.

But on the other hand, he continues, depression is like a storm in that it passes eventually. (He's talking about his depression;mileage varies, of course.) You don't assume that even a bad storm is just here forever. "Well, I guess it's raining from now on." (Imagine Eeyore voice.) It won't. It'll pass. It's out of your control when it'll pass, just like it's out of control that it rains or storms at all. But pass it will.

Usually, when I'm in a depression shower, I try to let myself off the hook of having to make any big decisions. My perspective when depressed isn't great. It's hard to see in a torrential rain. I'm prone to catastrophize, to make decisions not in my best interests, to gum up my own works in ways I rue later. So usually I try to wait out the storm before deciding things.

But time is short. I gotta make some big decisions about my script analysis class--a big cloud in my depressive stormy skies right now. Having two packed sections with no TA means I need to cut back on grading. How will I record attendance? Can I even teach writing (with planning and revision phases) as I'd planned to do? How do I keep the class rigorous and rewarding for students? Can I keep my ungrading practice? How do I make it through the semester without burning out?

I don't know. I have to determine how to do this, but my stormy weather is giving me some unhelpful suggestions. 

Perhaps my storm will pass in the next few days, giving me enough time to adapt. B

But I suspect I'll just need to do some careful work in the rain.

Class Prep: Canon Questions, Continued

 An anthology I'm most of the way through now that's helping me envision my seminar on contemporary dramatic canonicity is Troubling Traditions: Canonicity, Theatre, and Performance in the US, edited by Lindsay Mantoan, Matthew Moore, and Angela Schiller (Routledge, 2022). I think this book might form the backbone of my course. The contributors are diverse, thoughtful folk. Their contributions are intentionally conversational, mainly edited exchanges and interviews (with some bibliographic tags). 

It's the kind of book ripe for use in a seminar; instructors can pick and choose which essays most resonate with their course. Everything is pretty self-contained, like a streaming series that consists of bottle episodes. As with many such series, some themes and academic tropes recur. Several entries revisit the etymology of canon (from the Greek term for a measuring reed or stick). Multiple authors  nod to the term's Christian-Biblical connotations, and a few (such as Kuftinec and Rauch) even indulge in some dad-joke punning with the military homophone. (I adore dad jokes.)

Audre Lorde crops up many chapters. Well, what crops up is a piece of one quote from one essay by Lorde, that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" (from the essay titled by that clause). Usually the quote gets used as a way to dismiss works within a traditional (i.e, white, male, cis-het, Euro/US-centric, non-disabled, well-off) canon--or canons altogether. That's not exactly what Lorde is talking about in that essay, but it's not not what she's talking about, either. 

Most of the contributors seem to be writing in the wake of the "We See You, White American Theatre" manifesto/statement of 2020, which calls out professional and university theatres (and theatre-makers) for their failure to walk the walk of antiracist (and anti/decolonial) talk in terms of their seasons, audience outreach, and production practices. Says Bill Rauch (white cis artistic director of first Cornerstone, then Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and now the Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center): "I took every single sentence of that letter personally. As I should have. That is the point."

For several contributors, the weariness with playing nice with/kowtowing to mainstream (white) expectations manifests as well-earned fed-up-ness with the canon(s) handed down to them. "The American Musical Theatre Canon," argues Brandon Webster in a chapter about the canon of musicals, "fails every non-white student who comes in contact with it, in spite of the fact that it's used as the primary took for training and education, both as musical history and pedagogy." Other authors dispute the need for the idea of a canon at all, pointing out that canons are by nature exclusionary, that their intended function is to distinguish the worthy/sainted from those who aren't. As such, they are necessarily operations of power. Not everyone can be canonized. Canons ensure most folk are left out.

Some contributors take a nuanced approach, asking (as Webster does) what a new canon might look like. A few scholars (like Carrie Sandahl) cop to liking parts of the canon they were taught in undergrad and grad school even as they now recognize its exclusionary functions. Finn Lefevre, writing about queer canons, echoes this sentiment, rejecting the notion of simply eradicating 

And some selectivity is necessary given constraints of time/energy/resources. Lefevre references Umberto Eco's notion that we have to have some way to "make infinity comprehensible." It really isn't possible to include everything in a season (or a semester). We produce and teach some things rather than everything. Nor can we simply pretend that we can simply swap some other, non-white identity as the core of a new or better canon. Replacing a white canon with, say, a Black trans disabled canon might provide a valuable respite (especially but not exclusively for Black trans disabled folk), but the master's tools keep their potency. Adopting such tools, as Lorde says, "may allow us temporarily to beat [the master] at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change." 

Sukanya Chakrabarti moves deftly through such considerations, arriving at an idea drawn from Robert Dale Parker, who argues that any selection system (like a canon) should "not only represent what it systemizes but also advertise the limits of its own systematicity." "Any stable canonizing projects for queer theatre," writes Lefevre, "necessarily mark themselves in one specific moment of queerness. What was transgressive at that moment will someday, and possibly even through canonization itself, become naturalized. A queer canon today will be queer theatre history tomorrow, and a new canon--or several--will emerge." 

We might have to earn to hold canons loosely, as we are learning to do with so many other linguistic and conceptual tools that help to make infinity (and ourselves) comprehensible.

I think I'm going to assign the whole anthology. It's a winner.

Class Prep: Big Questions

 The other class I'm prepping for aside from two sections of script analysis is a grad seminar in contemporary theatre history and lit. I've taught the course several times before. It's one of several classes scheduled to be reformatted in a revision of the PhD curriculum currently in process. Lord willing, this is the last time this course will be taught.

There's nothing wrong with studying theatre history and lit from a particular era. Our current curriculum requires many such classes. PhD students have to travel through about six semesters' worth of history from ancient times (Egypt, India, Greece, etc.) to the present. That's the model we instructors were all trained in. But we've decided to move away from "encyclopedic survey of theatre/performance history." That goal was based in a prior vision of what a PhD in Theatre was for--a generalized expert who knew a bit of everything even if they specialized in one particular thing. All of us trained in this model felt prepared to teach seminars and classes on any era of theatre or performance.

Yet years of actually trying to fulfill that Renaissance person role taught us the gaps between expectation and reality. The version of "theatre history" we were taught--the history we supposedly became experts in--turns out to be pretty limited, restricted mainly to Europe and North America. To be sure, there's plenty of theatre and performance in those locations. But they're hardly the whole world. 

You can see the field of theatre history slowly rousing itself from a Euro/American (specifically Euro/USA-nian) stupor over the last three decades. Successive editions of theatre history texts and drama lit anthologies have grown larger and longer, the authors discovering whole new continents and hemispheres equally full of performance practices and traditions. Every year, those of us trained in theatre and performance have become more and more aware of and uncomfortable with the holes in our picture of "world theatre history." Each semester we tried to fit more and more material into the same already overcrowded syllabi and semesters. The classic syllabus question--What do I leave out?--takes on a new poignancy when you recognize how much has always been left out of our traditional historical narratives.

Thus, our program--like many of our peer programs--decided to relinquish the notion of encyclopedic knowledge, a core of facts or canon of texts that every graduate of a PhD Theatre program should know. We're shifting away from a seminar-by-seminar march through theatre history; there's no realistic way to do justice to such a history. Instead we're adopting an openly piecemeal approach, a curriculum composed of modular special-topics courses from different eras and focused on different themes. 

Assigned a seminar whose catalog title is "Theatre from World War II to the Millennium," then, I'm trying already to wrest the class away from its place in the old order. I'm instead shaping the seminar around the question of what a dramatic literature class can or should do. I've advertised the course especially to folk in sibling disciplines like English, Comparative Lit, and History. "Suppose you're assigned the 'Modern Drama' class," I wrote in the blurb I passed around to other grad programs in my university. "What do you teach?"

Underpinning this question are a host of others. What is theatre for? Why study dramatic literature? What plays or playwrights should we study? Do we include practices that aren't so text-centric? Are those practices even literature? What criteria might guide us as we design classes and reading lists? What role if any should the canon play? Is that idea even useful anymore? Do we lose anything by jettisoning the values canons purported to champion--universality, quality, timelessness--or are those concepts irredeemably contaminated with hegemonic and oppressive systems? On the other hand, given human limits on time and attention, is there any way not to have some kind of functional canon, a focus on some plays and not others? What then might an ethical practice of canonicity look like?

Hopefully I can harness the energy of such big questions to create a coherent, interesting, and rewarding seminar.

Class Prep: Curiosity and Boredom

 I'm in that fretful phase of class prep where, a little more than a week out from Day 1 of the spring semester, I have zero syllabi complete. 

I'm teaching two sections of script analysis and a PhD seminar in contemporary performance (i.e., post-World War II). I teach script analysis every semester to undergrads and every other fall to our masters students. (PhD students will join starting fall 2025.) I inherited the course after several years as "theatre history guy"--handling the complete theatre history sequence for undergrads, which I loved. After a faculty turnover, none of my new colleagues were especially interested in script analysis, which had been taught by one of their predecessors. I took it over.

I grew to love it, focusing the course mainly on structural analysis rather than history or theme or production dramaturgy. My aim, I tell students, is to get them to be able to approach play texts as mechanics approach vehicle engines. They can set aside whether they like the car/engine. They can set aside what the car is for (Sporty show-off? Family transport? Freight?). They focus only on taking apart (analyzing) and putting back together (synthesizing) the engine. How does this play work? I give them a number of tools--questions you can ask of any script--and challenge them to account for how scripts do what they do.

Students have found the class challenging, but mostly in good ways. They come with a wide range of experience levels in producing and reading plays. Some have never read nor seen a play (including some theatre majors!). Some gobble up any script that comes their way. Most are trained to approach literature looking for "theme"--what is this work about? What statement does it make? How can I apply its lessons to my life? How does it make me think about humanity and life etc.? And of course the stronger, truer undercurrent for many theatre majors overrides all: Do I like this? Is there a part for me in it?

One of my first course-corrections for class includes clear notice that this class is not about plays that entertain you. "You're already aware of things that entertain you," I tell them. You all have multiple devices and apps and accounts that pour billions of dollars into catching and holding your attention, curating a taste for what they have on offer. But when something's wrong with my old car (2007 hybrid Camry) and I take it to the mechanic, I couldn't give a hoot about whether the mechanic likes my vehicle. I'd be worried if the mechanic went on and on about how much they enjoy Camrys, or how much hybrid vehicles from the aughts entertain them. I'd be even less impressed, I continue, if the mechanic took a look under the hood, sighed, and said, "This is boring. Your car just isn't interesting me." I'd be looking for another mechanic. Does the mechanic really enjoy my car? Do Camrys bore them? I don't care. Any decent mechanic is professional enough to put such personal reactions aside in favor of just fixing the car.

Similarly, I tell them, you as theatrical artists need to be able to shift into a professional mental gear. I try to assign plays that are fun, I stress, but entertaining you is not my goal. Students nod appreciatively. 

I underscore that point with a quote from Dorothy Parker: "The cure for boredom is curiosity." Curiosity, I tell them, is an act of will. It's a muscle of attention we can develop as professionals. I may not like a particular play, but if I'm hired to design it, I'll find a way to become curious about it. This class, I say, aims to equip you with tools to focus your curiosity about play structures. 

And...some students get it. This class regularly appears on graduating seniors' lists of most rewarding classes--a rarity for non-specialized core curriculum courses. Of course, it also appears on a few lists of least enjoyable courses for some students. And it is hard! I'm asking them to look at play scripts without what Elinor Fuchs calls "the immediate (and crippling) leap to character" (i.e., who the protagonist is, what journey they go on, how "real" they are). I'm also asking them to segregate WHAT a play is about in terms of both plot and theme from HOW the playwright selects, arranges, and expresses that plot/theme. 

The class is also one of most intensive theatre courses in terms of reading and writing. I have them write (and often re-write) four to five analyses over the course of the semester. They read about a dozen plays along with "EF's Visit to a Small Planet." As I mentioned yesterday, the reading and writing requirements have gotten harder and harder for students. We're in an era of atrophied curiosity muscles. I try to introduce students to the notion that boredom and frustration are defense mechanisms against the harder work of change and intellectual exercise. 

I've also in recent years made things harder on myself by switching to a policy of "ungrading." I'll talk through that tomorrow.

The Simulcraprum

 Timothy Burke, one of my favorite scholars to follow, posted a doozy of a Substack today. There he looks ahead at the future of AI in pedagogical settings. It's not a sunny vision:

My worries are many, but one of the most prepossessing concerns I have, perhaps outweighing the dark political clouds on the horizon, are the consequences of the unconstrained, unmediated, unconsidered release of generative AI tools and components into our informational and expressive environment. Whatever happens to our governments and institutions in the episodic to-and-fro of the next decade may turn out to be less consequential by far than the conjuncture of our informational and cultural infrastructures with generative AI.

Burke explains that his concern isn't so much with students' pernicious use of AI to cheat. That problem, he notes, is not new, nor is it entirely the fault of students themselves. "The use of writing as a proof that a student did the reading has always been a baleful mistake," he argues. "The idea that a large quantity of writing would by itself secure mastery of writing expression equally so. At the university level, combine that with introductory courses that have hundreds of students listening to lectures and then meeting with teaching assistants and you have a recipe that has always encouraged cheating, that has always been bedeviled by forms of indetectable dishonesty."

Ouch--but accurate. I assign a lot of writing in my script analysis class, and it bears rethinking why I do so. I try not to have my writing assignments perform did-you-read-this police functions. (That's what short daily quizzes are for--policing reading and policing attendance--a practice I'm uneasily resigned to for now.) I'd hoped to move my script analysis class more fully into the realm of writing as process this next semester. By splitting my one section (with 40 students on average) into two, I hoped to qualify for writing-intensive designation. With that designation and the assistance it brings, I could craft a course in which students write to understand and then revise that writing in order to communicate effectively. I'm currently in a pretty dark place in terms of my optimism regarding those goals this semester. I have fifty-two students in the two classes and--for the first time teaching this class in over a decade--no TAs. I don't see a way for me alone to teach them both right now, not at least without radically reneging on my original plans.

Student reading and student writing seem to have gotten worse--drastically so--in the last few years post COVID. And, pace Burke's arguments, AI really has changed the game. Have some students always cheated and BS'd their way through essays? Sure. But AI does more than just make this halfassery easier to accomplish and harder to detect (though it does both those things). A student copy-and-pasting from some website at least realizes on some level that they're doing something wrong, literally taking someone else's work and presenting it as their own. Most of the plagiarism I see in student papers now is different. Sure, sometimes a student has made use of one of the many, many AI essay-writing products advertising themselves to students as harmless, even essential helps. ("My prof wanted me to write three whole pages!" sales-students in these ads gripe. "Who has time for that? That's why I let [PRODUCT] do it for me...") And sure, "just say you used Grammarly" is a common bit of get-out-of-jail-free advice circulating online for students.

But increasingly, I fear that students really are just using Grammarly or some program like it to check their writing, only to find that the program is AI-helping ("AIding"?) them by replacing words or phrases with "better" ones. The result is often a ship-of-Theseus trick, where the new ship consists of lots of adverbs and pseudo-profound statements about how we humans need to hold onto our dreams or somesuch. Like I heard from a colleague: "I used to get terribly written papers with some good ideas. Now I get perfectly written papers with terrible ideas." When I flag such AI-ded essays as violations of my course policies, I think some students really are honestly confused. They don't know what good writing looks like. They don't know what their own writing feels like. They can't tell why the AI version, while usually grammar-perfect--reads like queasy mush. And from their perspective, they did nothing wrong. They wrote something and, as I (used to) tell them to, checked and proofread their writing with a program that purports to do just that. But AI's version of "improvement" tends to mean "make the essay sound smart [lots of big words and adverbs] and uplifting [unctuous praise for the play/playwright, grand talk about generic, humanistic themes]." Students just learning how to write, just learning what real criticism and analysis are, can't tell the difference between quality and crap. And AI makes it all the less likely they will ever be able to do so.

My concern here echoes Burke's big worries about society at large:

[T]he indiscriminate vomiting of generative AI into everything we read and view, every tool we use, every device in our homes, every technological infrastructure we operate or own, means at best an unproductive estrangement, a new mediating layer that no one, expert or otherwise, can really understand or control. A kind of techno-tinnitus, a buzzing hum of interference or diffusion. When things break, when things don’t quite do what we want them to do, when we don’t get what we’re owed from what we’ve created or done, there won’t be anything to do about it. When we’re described, evaluated, measured, assessed in all the ways that are already balefully mindless when they’re done by actual human beings that we actually can see, we’ll suddenly become even less recognizable, even less true to our realities, and there won’t be anything to be done about it. You’ll complain about the AI processes in the black box to another black box AI and there will be no one anywhere who actually knows why it gave the results that it did, no expert Delphic oracle who can take it apart and get it back on track. At worst, it means that everything that is translocal to our material surrounds will be untrustworthy and unknowable. Not even an interesting fiction, just a kind of informational drift, a noise so pervasive that the entirety of the signal gets lost. 

It'd be one thing if the infonoise (cAIcophony? I'll stop now) were reliable. But LLMs like ChatGPT specialize not in truth but in bullshit--words spewed out with utter confidence and no regard for their truth value. It's like Poe's Law but applied to all digital representations of reality itself: can't tell if true or BS. Students using AI now often, I'm convinced, simply don't know that they're indulging in BS, producing it, absorbing it, starving themselves on a diet of predigested slop.

Increasingly, it looks like infopoop is going to be what we get from AI. Or, as Burke puts it:

Generative AI is being used so heedlessly, so much like a silicon equivalent of the Human Centipede, gulping down its own shit as it hungrily demands more and more and more text for its training models, that it is going to end up spewing informational diarrhea forever all over the entire infrastructure of knowledge production. It is going to pollute all forms of many-to-many communication, all forms of mass media. When we hit that point, it will be impossible to cleanse it all out again. Everything we know will become a Superfund toxic waste site, full of forever hallucinations and distortions.

Now there's an image: AI as (in)Human Centipede. BS recycling BS recycling BS, crowding out other exchanges, eating up available energy and attention. "We’re probably only a few years away from mandatory brown-outs in ordinary homes," predicts Burke, "because the AI needs the power." 

What did Baudrillard say about the ultimate stage of the simulacrum? The representation replaces reality? Only now the eclipsing representation is crap. Welcome to the simulcraprum. 

Sigh.

Catching Up from Thanksgiving

And I'm back. I took a break during, well, the break from school. Said break consisted of me driving up to Oklahoma, spending the holiday with my family, and driving back on Sunday.

Had I been posting regularly, I'd likely have covered the following topics, each of which formed part of my mental blogging:

Bacon-wrapped turkey: we attempted this, lured by our love of bacon. It replaced our standard herb-butter rub. The verdict? Not impressive. Some of the bacon was crispy (as bacon should be); other parts were that kind of sad-floppy ham one gets when bacon is essentially boiled instead of fried or broiled. Some possibly related, possibly unrelated temperature weirdness (the thermometers read underdone, underdone, underdone--and then suddenly waaaaay too done!) combined with the unappetizing bacon to make this a low turkey year. Back to herb rub for Christmas.

Popup shops and local stores in Oklahoma City: OKC never gets enough credit, I think, for being a surprisingly cool town. It has a thriving arts scene, a robust independent food culture, and a lot of neat offerings for folk interested in Okie-made stuff. Yay, Oklahoma.

Knives Out: We saw this mystery movie from Rian Johnson in OKC with my sister and brother-in-law. It's quite fun, with a stellar cast. There's a fascinating racial/colonial subtext: whiteness eating itself. The final shot, with [SPOILER REMOVED] sipping from a coffee mug reading "My House," is the perfect button on that statement.

The Protoevangelium of James: I had to rush back home from OKC Sunday in time to prep a 7 AM Monday morning Advent lesson. We're using Amy-Jill Levine's Light of the World. Levine is a Jewish professor at Vanderbilt Seminary who writes a lot of books for Christians about Christian scriptures. It's an impressive feat of ecumenical empathy, watching her shift into the mindspace of a believing Christian. I'm enjoying it thoroughly and learning a lot.

I was teaching Chapter 2 about the annunciation of Mary and the Mangificat. Among the insights Levine shares is a reference to the Protoevangelium of James (aka The Infancy Gospel of James, The Nativity of Mary, and The Gospel of James), an apocryphal book from the second century. Though the early church by the third and fourth centuries had recognized the work as pseudepigraphic and rejected it from canon, its narrative proved popular enough to infuse Christian thought.

Levine analogies the text to midrash, a practice of (as she puts it) "filling in the blanks" left by scriptural accounts. In my reading (I sought out and read the whole thing--it's pretty short), it seems more like a fan fiction prequel to the Gospels: All About Mary. It's from this work that practically all the non-biblical stuff we hear about Mary (especially in Catholic and Orthodox traditions) comes. The Protoevangelium gives Mary two parents, Joachim and Anna, who after years of infertility, finds herself blessed with an angelic annunciation: she's to have a special child. It's here that we find fully expressed the idea that Joseph must have been elderly, a widower with sons of his own (these become Jesus's brothers mentioned in the canonical gospels).

It's here, also, that we get the idea that Mary was a perpetual virgin--before, during, and after Jesus's birth. The nativity narrative is fascinating. Mary and Joseph find refuge in a cave, not a manger. Joseph goes out to look for a Jewish midwife. All of creation stands still, but he finds a midwife. The midwife witnesses the miraculous birth (kind of a divine C-section: Jesus just appears) and fetches another midwife, Salome, to check whether Mary is still intact.

That's right, folks: the Protoevangelium of James contains the first recorded gynecological examination, described in fairly graphic detail. Salome inserts her digit into Mary only to find that (1) Mary is miraculously still a virgin, and (2) the hand that did the testing burns and whithers (it's later healed).

Wild stuff.  That led me to do a bit of research about the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity. I found to my surprise that, historically, most Christians have affirmed this bit of non-biblical theology (including John Wesley). Only with the Calvinists did this idea fall out of favor with Protestants. It remains important to Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians. I can't quite figure out why it's significant that Mary be imagined as perpetually virginal, but I'm content to remain happily agnostic. (Of course, the virginity of Mary is itself somewhat contested, especially since the Isaiah passage often cited as prophesying Jesus's birth to a virgin represents something of a mistranslation from the Hebrew. Almah in Hebrew just means "young woman of marriageable age," where as the Greek parthenos means "virgin" specifically.)

Anyway--it makes for a fascinating discussion in Advent class.

And that's what I would have been blogging about had it not been for the holiday.