Resources by Anna Lännström

Like so many of us, I’ve spent the past two years in a paralyzed panic over artificial intelligence’s effects on my classroom. I teach undergraduates, mainly gen ed philosophy courses, and writing has been a key component of all my courses. When ChatGPT hit the mainstream, it became a constantly looming presence, threatening to devour every part of teaching that I care about. I didn’t “wrestle” with it. Nothing so active and dignified. I went on an emotional roller coaster of ignoring it, freaking out, wishing it away, catastrophizing, and then ignoring it again.It didn’t work. AI was still there. I tried writing about it, but that just made me feel worse. And my writing was awful, page upon page of “Oh my god, the sky is falling.” Depressing, unhelpful – and bad writing. I trashed every single page.Some of my colleagues argue that we must incorporate this wonderful new tool into our teaching. We should encourage students to use AI for “basic” tasks like summarizing texts and outlining arguments, freeing them up for more advanced work. Others point out that summarizing and outlining are advanced tasks for many of our students since they don’t know how to do either, and that students need to first acquire skills like summarizing in order to later acquire more advanced skills. To make that learning possible, they argue, we need to build protective walls to keep AI out of our classes. Several want our Writing Center to ban Grammarly and its ilk.I agree with the second group that our students usually don’t summarize or outline well. And I agree that allowing students to outsource tasks they haven’t yet mastered to AI will make it harder for them to learn to read, write and, most importantly, to think critically. I’d love to operate in a sheltered space behind protective walls. But I don’t think the walls will hold.Hence my freaking out. But after two years, I have finally managed a few moment of calm thought, aided by James Lang’s wonderful blog post. I’ve come to the following key conclusions:AI-assisted writing isn’t going away. Damn it.We aren’t reliable AI detectors and we don’t have reliable automated AI detectors (although we can catch blatant and unskilled uses).If we continue to assign take-home essays, some of our students will use AI to write them. We won’t know how many or how much they will use it, and we won’t catch many of them.Take-home essays are important pedagogical tools, and I don’t as yet have any promising substitutes.My immediate task is to figure out how to navigate my classroom spaces with all this and my own teaching goals in mind. What do I want to prioritize, and what am I willing to sacrifice?It is tempting to prioritize not being duped. And making not being duped the priority has the clear advantage of producing simple action steps: No more take-home essays. Switch to lockdown browsers or old-school blue book exams.Following James Lang, I am not switching, at least not yet. This is because I think there are more important things at stake than minimizing the risk of cheating.As I listen to colleagues who are switching to in-class exams, I am thinking about why I’ve been avoiding them for my entire teaching career: They do not test what I want to teach.Switching from essay-writing to in-class exams requires moving from messy and open-ended discussion towards lectures. I don’t want to make that move. My students have enough lecture classes. They don’t need another one from me. But they do need what I am good at teaching. My students need a class that focuses on discussion and self-reflection, inviting them to engage each other and the materials and think through their own lives, actions, and values. I want to teach those classes, and then I want my assessments to provide opportunities for students to chew over things we’ve talked about and the views they’ve encountered in class, developing arguments, reflecting on their experience, pursuing thoughts and objections, and seeing where it all takes them. Take home essays do that.But assigning those essays leaves me wide open to cheating. So what do I do in my classes to reduce the risk?I include more low-stakes writing.I make the papers worth less and include plenty of scaffolding and in-class work on them.I grade a little differently, rewarding bland, generic, but correct writing less and messy and creative writing more.I add some quizzes – and I am experimenting with using AI to draft multiple choice questions.I keep an eye out for obvious AI misuse and I use the built-in detection software. But I try not to obsess about it, and I try to be OK with knowing that some students will get away with things they shouldn’t (this part is definitely a work in progress).Most importantly, I try to connect with my students and I try to convince them that I want to hear what they think, and that their opinions matter to me and to the world. I encourage them to draw on class discussions and their own experiences when they write, and I encourage them to say what AI cannot say because AI is not them.I’m also looking around for guidance from others. Reading a Chronicle of Higher Education newsletter, I just came across Kimberly Kirner’s writing assessments. She sets out to help her students develop their own voices, and she grades based on the students’ progress towards goals that they develop together. I plan to learn from Kirner and others like her over the summer and experiment with her assignments next semester.AI is here to stay and our students have access to it. It’s not the situation I would have chosen but it is what is in front of us. It will be on us as educators to guide students so that they can still develop as critical thinkers and writers. That work has many parts, and thankfully we don’t all have to do all of it. Despite the peptalks from the AI-optimists on my campus, I don’t see myself working with students to help them write better AI prompts, and I don’t yet see a good role for AI in my courses. But reading Kirner and Lang reminds me that there is important work here that I am suited for and that I care about: I can help students see that they and their voice matters and I can help them develop their voices and become better informed so that they can speak and write more effectively. Notes & BibliographyKimberly Kirner is Professor of Anthropology at California State University at Northridge.James Lang is Professor of Practice at the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Notre Dame.

Funie Hsu’s “How Mainstream Mindfulness Erases Its Buddhist Roots” hit my classroom like a bombshell. We had studied Hindu and Buddhist teachings in my sophomore-level philosophy class, and we were ending the semester by discussing the mindfulness movement. I had introduced Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and we had watched a video where Jon Kabat-Zinn demonstrated the program in action. The students were deeply moved by how he helped people with severe chronic pain in the video, and they loved his caring and gentle teaching persona.Funie Hsu was less impressed, pointing out that white people like Jon Kabat-Zinn appropriate Buddhism without acknowledging Asian American Buddhists and their contributions. They talk about going to Asia as part of the counter-culture movement, learning meditation and mindfulness from Buddhist teachers in Asia, and then bringing it all back to the United States. But Buddhism didn’t come to America in the 1960s. It was brought to the United States by Chinese and Japanese immigrants in the 1800s.My students already looked nervous, and it got worse. Hsu explained that those immigrants and their religion were met with suspicion, racism, and discrimination. But many of their leaders still opened their temples to curious white visitors, and some became mentors to them. Their work has remained largely invisible in the white community, even though many of the famous white teachers were taught by Asian-American Buddhists. And that seems kind of … racist. Hsu writes,Though Kabat-Zinn has practiced with Buddhist teachers himself … his strategic erasure of Buddhism reinforces racial and religious stereotypes in order to appease a white-dominant social structure. (“How Mainstream Mindfulness Erases Its Buddhist Roots,” The Progressive, February 12, 2022)All this seemed … very bad indeed.My classroom was almost all white (except for a Muslim student from Pakistan), and that was suddenly painfully visible to all of us. The students were in shock. They were also guilt-ridden and defensive. Several argued that Jon Kabat-Zinn was a bad man, and other students nodded. They concluded that Buddhism should be left to Asians and Asian Americans, white people shouldn’t explore Buddhism, and they certainly shouldn’t adopt and modify any of its practices in the ways that Kabat-Zinn had. Two guys in the back of my classroom timidly suggested that Kabat-Zinn should get credit for helping people with severe chronic pain cope without opioids, but they were quickly shamed into silence.I wasn’t quite shamed into silence myself, but I might as well have been since my talking had no effect. It wasn’t my finest hour. I paid for it by reading a lot of preachy and one-sided final papers.So how should non-Asian Americans handle Buddhism and mindfulness in our classrooms and our lives? Were my students right that we should just stay away?No, I don’t think so. I may have been more successful in getting students to reconsider if I had asked them to reread Hsu. She writes,Buddhism belongs to all sentient beings. Even so, Asians and Asian Americans have a rightful, distinct historical claim to Buddhism…. It is because of our physical, emotional, and spiritual labor, our diligent cultivation of the practice through time and through histories of oppression, that Buddhism has persisted to the current time period and can be shared with non-Asian practitioners.In order to alleviate the suffering caused by cultural appropriation, we can refrain from asserting ownership of a free teaching that belongs all. We can refrain from asserting false authority and superiority over those who have diligently maintained the practice to share freely with others. And we can actively work to give dana [generosity] by expressing gratitude for the Asian and Asian American Buddhists who have shared their indigenous ways of being as integral expressions of their practice. (“We’ve Been Here All Along,” Lion’s Roar)Buddhism does belong to all sentient beings. But with that ownership comes responsibility. We need to learn the history. We need to seek out and listen carefully to Asian American voices whenever we can. We need to learn from those whose connections to the tradition are deeper than our own, and we need to acknowledge our debts to them.So how might I teach a class that would do all that better?Here’s what I’m trying this semester.We start with mindfulness and MBSR, reading Thich Nhat Hanh and Jon Kabat-Zinn.We then critically examine the mindfulness movement. We read Funie Hsu, learning how Buddhism was brought to the United States by Asians and how it has been received. We read narratives of young Asian American Buddhists (courtesy of Chenxing Han’s work) and notice the wide variety of practices and views. We read Donald Lopez, learning that the mindfulness movement adapts Buddhism in a selective and limited way. We think through the thorny issues of cultural appropriation, and we discuss ways in which we may be able to engage Buddhist people, ideas, and practices in a more respectful way.Only after all that, several weeks into the semester, do we turn to Buddhist teachings.I like how the class is going so far (we’re starting Buddhist teachings), and I just won a big victory. A student from the first class I discussed is also in this one. She was loudly unflinching in her condemnation of Jon Kabat-Zinn last time. I was not happy about having her in this class: I worried that she would make it impossible for the other students to think through the issues. But she is two years older now, and she’s better at nuance. In her midterm paper, she is planning on critiquing her final paper on Jon Kabat-Zinn from two years ago. When I spoke with her yesterday, she was still objecting to Kabat-Zinn’s work, but she had just reread her old paper and found it embarrassing – “it is so all or nothing, so very simplistic.”I look forward to reading what she comes up with. Clearly, I’m not the only one who has learned something since last time.Notes & Bibliography Han, Chenxing, Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists (North Atlantic Books, 2021).Hsu, Funie, “How Mainstream Mindfulness Erases Its Buddhist Roots,” The Progressive, February 12, 2022.Hsu, Funie, “We’ve Been Here All Along,” Lion’s Roar.Lopez, Donald, “The Scientific Buddha,” Tricycle, Winter 2012.Moyers, Bill, “Healing and the Mind,” Moyers, February 23, 1993, 1:25:30.

Creating new courses just keeps getting harder. Today I finished drafting the reading list for my new course on Ethics and the Good Life for first year students. It was supposed to be easy because my research and writing is about ethics. And it was supposed to be fun because I have the luxury of teaching whatever I want in this course.But it was awful. Partway through, I understood why Barry Schwartz argues that having too many choices makes us less happy. I found myself envying people who teach a set curriculum with an assigned reading list.I quickly became overwhelmed by the infinite number of possibilities and then I made it worse by going online and looking for a bigger infinity of choices. I bounced back and forth between sample syllabi, texts, videos, and podcasts for hours. I felt guilty because I wasn’t familiar with enough of it. And I got more and more tense.My list of possible materials just kept growing. And it was taking forever. I used up the time I had set aside for this project, and more. A lot more.Part of the challenge is that we no longer agree about what should be in a course like this. When I started teaching at Stonehill College, we had a historically-based philosophy curriculum, and the reading list for an introductory ethics class was a given: Aristotle, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche.It took philosophy much longer than the other humanities, but the boundaries of our discipline are finally expanding. Most of the time, I am glad that we’re bringing in new approaches and formerly excluded voices. I’m one of the people in my department who have been pushing those boundaries (starting once I understood how limiting our approach was – and once I was tenured). But I miss having clarity about what my courses should and could contain. So. Many. Choices.Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus got me out of the spiral. Hari points out that more and more information is pushed at us every day:1986: the equivalent of 40 eighty-five-page newspapers2007: 174 newspapersNow: unknown, but probably more.Hari quotes Sune Lehmann who likens it to drinking from a fire hose.That hit home. We can’t do it. Seriously. I can’t even skim the 1986-era 40 newspapers a day. And here I am, voluntarily seeking out additional information, turning the pressure in that fire hose up beyond today’s 174+ daily newspapers.Of course I can’t do it. I just googled “ethics and the good life syllabus” and there were 30,800,000 results.It can’t be done, and it’s not my fault.The inevitability of failure reassured me.I had no choice. I had to select course materials from a limited subset of possible materials. This gave me permission to take a different approach: Instead of looking around, I’m limiting myself to what I’m already familiar with.I set a timer for two hours and turned the internet off (the Freedom app – the best invention since the mute button). I told myself firmly that I’m an authority on ethics (hey, they let me teach it to college students). And then I asked myself two questions:What is the main goal of the course? Students will reflect on their life, their values, and on the ways they might not be living in a manner that reflects those values. If things go well, the course will help them live a little better.Given that goal, which of the issues that I am familiar with should the class consider? I wrote a list:How smartphones get in the way of our happiness: body image, our ability to pay attention, our relationshipsWhat happiness is, with a deeper dive into the role of money, friendship, and meaningHow (some) adversity benefits usWhat we owe other people, both friends and strangersHow we can better balance caring for ourselves with helping othersWhat makes something right or wrong?How we might relate to people who disagree deeply with us about what mattersSome of the ways in which we are biasedWe won’t do all the units – I’ll give the students some choice.Turns out, I know a lot and I already knew enough to put together a course. More research was unnecessary and unhelpful. It so often is. I wish somebody had reminded me of that while I was trying so hard to drink from the fire hose.

Lurking on social media the other day, I listened to colleagues discussing how to respond to a student paper in a philosophy class. The assignment was about our responsibilities towards (nonhuman) animals. The student argued that we can do whatever we want with animals because God has given us dominion over them. Presumably, he had Genesis 1.26 in mind, but none of the course readings mentioned Genesis—or God.People in the social media group had lots of suggestions on how to respond:Tell him that religion has no place in the classroom.Tell him that there should be no theist or atheist premises in academic writing.Just write “Irrelevant” in the margin!That last comment got a lot of likes, hopefully because people found it funny and not because they considered it good advice.The consensus was clear: Tell the student that appeals to scripture are inappropriate in college papers.I don’t think that’s good advice.My colleagues were ignoring something crucial. In this sort of situation, we can do deep damage to our relationship with our student and to the student’s relationship with higher education if we don’t tread carefully. Presumably the student who wrote this paper believes in God and the Bible. His religion will be part of his ethical decision-making going forward, and the Bible will influence his thinking and his actions.Bearing this in mind, let’s not tell this student that his thinking about right and wrong in class must be utterly divorced from his thinking about it outside the classroom.My advice would be: Before writing any comments, identify your larger goals. Here are mine:I want our class discussions to help inform my students’ thinking and actions about ethical issues, and in particular about whether it’s OK to do “whatever you want” with animals.I want students to listen when I try to teach them more things after this and I want other professors to be able to teach them even more things. If I reinforce a student’s likely skepticism about professors and religion, I make that harder.I don’t want my actions to increase the chances that my students go out in the world thinking of higher education as an enemy to religion and God.These goals suggest a different approach. Start by taking the paper seriously:Do you think that’s what the Bible means by ‘dominion’? Some people think so, but I've always thought it meant something more like ‘stewardship.’ I mean, God is the Father, right? So, I think of it like if your parents go out and put you in charge of the family dogs. If they come home and discover that you haven’t fed them or given them water, they’ll be mad at you.What do you think someone who doesn’t believe in God and the Bible would make of your argument? How would you persuade them? For instance, imagine that you’re talking to the author of our second reading or to the other kids in the class.I would count this encounter as a success if the student feels like I’m treating him and his religion with respect and if he realizes two things:“Dominion” could mean “stewardship” instead of “freedom to treat them any way I want,” and I need to think more about which one the Bible meant.I need to talk about this differently or I won’t be able to persuade people who don’t believe in the Bible.That’s a start. Much more has to happen before this student writes at college level. Later, I and his other professors will teach him more.It’s a very small step. Growth and intellectual development takes time. I probably won’t see the result of the learning process that I was part of. But occasionally I do.My greatest success story in this context is a student who came into my Intro to Philosophy class as a freshman, determined to prove that Christ rose from the dead. It was rough going, but by the end of the semester, his sources weren’t cringeworthy anymore, and he was presenting an actual argument. And he still trusted me. He majored in math but took Philosophy of Religion with me as a senior, and he explained that he wanted to continue developing his proof.I braced myself. But during the semester, the class discussed faith and reason extensively, and I was able to ask him (privately): Given that you think about faith as being the important thing, what makes it so important to you to prove that Christ rose? He thought about it for a long time and finally decided that he didn’t need to prove that Christ rose. Instead, he wrote a strong final paper in which he reflected on the meaning of faith, discussing his own experience and the course readings.I rarely get wins that size. But taking my students’ religious views seriously makes them possible.

I’ve been neglecting my scholarship since March 2020. That, in case you don’t remember, is when the pandemic hit, sending faculty off into a mad scramble of Zoom, hybrid teaching, mental health emergencies, and social distancing. Once vaccines allowed us to stick our heads back out, we began working on tasks we had neglected during that mad scramble. And all the while, wave after wave of terrifying news coverage hit. George Floyd. The invasion of Ukraine. “Don’t say gay” laws. More talk about bathrooms than I would have thought possible. The seeming inevitability of another Trump/Biden election. Ever increasing temperatures, metaphorically and literally. Wildfires in the West, in Canada, and on Maui. Gaza. In the middle of all this, I started my sabbatical. That is an amazing privilege, but it put me face to face with my demons because I hadn’t even looked at my scholarship since March 2020 (except for the frantic days last summer when I wrote my sabbatical application). I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to be working on. And when I reread my application, I realized that I didn’t care. How could my research matter, to me or to others, in a world that increasingly literally is on fire? The state of our profession made it even harder for me to delve into my scholarship. Majors and programs are shrinking, budgets are being cut, departments are closing. Every week seems to bring more bad news. At the same time, most of us need to rethink our teaching and learn new pedagogical techniques because more and more students need more basic instruction than we are trained to provide. And we need to figure out how teach in the era of ChatGPT. So yeah. It’s a lot. Under these circumstances, how should we approach our scholarship? What can we learn, write, and do that will benefit us, our profession, and our students? It depends. Some of us do find meaning by delving deep into traditional scholarship of discovery, examining the arcana of Greek and Hebrew terms, exploring manuscript variations and intricate scholarly debates, even while recognizing that few will read our work. Some are nourished by the intellectual challenges in that work and emerge refreshed and intellectually stimulated. Others don’t, but find themselves constrained by circumstances. They need to do scholarship to earn promotion or tenure or to have a chance of landing a teaching position. These are all good reasons to dig into the obscure references and produce additional journal articles. But what about the rest of us? There seem to be plenty of faculty who, like me, don’t find meaning and purpose in the scholarship of discovery. And some of us, like me, are tenured. If we don’t have to publish another peer-reviewed article, what else might we reflect on and write about? There is an opportunity in this moment of crisis and uncertainty, an opportunity to change course and to engage in scholarship that feels more meaningful. What that means will be different for different people. An increasing number of faculty are doing work in social justice. Some are turning their attention to climate change and the despair it induces in many of us. I am staying closer to home, focusing on some of the challenges in my own profession: I’m thinking about how academics in the humanities can move forward and how we can avoid burnout. How can we learn to live well despite having less stability and more uncertainty than before? Can we find good ways to grieve for the careers we thought we would have and for the fields that we love and then find meaning and joy in teaching new populations of students instead? Philosophers and religious studies scholars have deep resources to draw on here, thousands of years of reflecting on happiness, meaning, and the human desire for stability and permanence in a world of rapid change. I’m diving in, reading about acceptance, grief, and hope in Buddhist and Christian texts, in psychological research, and even in self-help books. And I find inspiration in an unexpected line from a psychology journal article: “Hope can be practiced by locating a deep desire, value, or commitment and taking a step toward it.”[i] For so long, I’ve thought that hope for our profession required believing that the numbers of majors, funding, and programs will increase again. That would be lovely, of course. But this line points towards a different understanding: Hope is the practice of teaching and working in a way that expresses our core values and commitments and continuing to do so even though the situation is changing. It is not all that I wanted, but it makes my work feel meaningful and important again. That may be enough.     Notes [i] The quote is from James L. Griffith’s “Hope Modules.” He is paraphrasing Kaethe Weingarten’s “Hope in a Time of Global Despair.” (I have not yet read Weingarten’s article yet, but it’s next on my list).

Like most of my colleagues, I’ve noticed a sharp drop in my first-year students’ writing and reading skills during the pandemic. And they are unfocused. Forget herding cats—trying to keep a classroom of first years on topic now feels more like herding bumble bees. More of them skip classes or disappear altogether. And of course, they struggle with depression and anxiety. Mental health, focus, and academic performance are interconnected, and the problems feed each other in messy and complicated ways. But I suspect that increased cognitive load plays a key role. The pandemic increased the cognitive load for all of us in three significant ways: It disrupted our routines, forcing us think carefully about tasks that we otherwise do on autopilot. Fear and uncertainty increased our anxiety, and anxiety makes it harder for us to process information effectively. It added a number of new tasks and distractions. Students are dealing with that and more: Their job is learning, and to help them do that, they have several professors. But since their professors also suffer from cognitive overload, students are getting more confusing directions, less clear feedback, and more last-minute changes than they normally would. Since students are academic novices, they are less capable of putting the intellectual skills they are learning on autopilot. They have to think about each step. And let’s not forget the cognitively, socially, and emotionally demanding task of starting college. It’s too much at once. As long as excessive cognitive load operates as a confounding variable, we won’t know what’s causing our students’ problems. We need to help students bring their cognitive load down, both because it causes suffering and because bringing it down will help us identify and address the other significant problems. So how do we do that? Not by dumbing things down. But we often unintentionally create unnecessary cognitive load for our students. They end up working on unimportant things. And so, here’s my big teaching question for this summer: What unimportant things am I making my students think about, and how does that distract them from working on what matters? To address this, I’ll focus on three different areas: Reduce anxiety and uncertainty about my course and about grading. First-year students spend way too much energy trying to guess what we want, and they often guess wrong. And that makes them spend way too much time and energy on unimportant things. I’m going to revise the rules for my classes over the summer, making them as transparent as I can. In the fall, I’m going to explain them more clearly and more frequently. I like my students to get a headache from all the deep thinking they do in my class, not from worrying about how to format their bibliography or about whether a bad paper grade will mean that they fail the class (it won’t). Use lots of routine and repetition to let my students put as many basic tasks on autopilot as possible. I’ve been resisting too much routine and repetition because it seems boring, both for me and for them. But I think it will go a long way towards reducing anxiety and cognitive load, so I’m going to use more of it this fall with my first years: I’ll consider making all reading assignments due on Tuesdays and all writing assignments due on Thursdays. I’ll use a single simple set of instructions for all papers and one for all informal writing. I’ll ask the same three questions about each reading: What is the author saying? What do you think about it? How does it connect to our other readings and discussions? I’ll start each class in the same way: How are you doing, really? Put away electronics (unless you have special permission), you need your book, notebook, and pencil, here’s the plan for today. I’ll end each class the same way: Please write down a takeaway and a question from today; here’s the assignment for next class, come talk if you have questions. Include fewer details. Eliminating course content is painful. We love our disciplines, and we want to include key distinctions and nuances, those beautiful and intricate details. So we keep packing things in. But as much as it pains me to admit this, my first years don’t need to learn the correct way of citing Plato and Aristotle (Stephanus and Bekker pages be damned). They don’t even need to know what a Stephanus page is. They need to understand basic MLA and they need to know why one cites sources. Eliminating details in our instructions is difficult because students mess up in so many ways. It’s tempting to include all the ones we’ve come across so far. But detailed instructions are counterproductive because our students simply cannot process ten unfamiliar and challenging things at once. I’ll include two or three crucial ones. A friend just introduced me to Picasso’s animal drawings. Each captures an animal with a few simple lines. There is no background, no detail, no color, but they are crystal clear and impossible to misunderstand. I want to teach like one of those drawings. [caption id="attachment_251280" align="aligncenter" width="554"] Animal Drawings by Picasso[/caption]   Further resources Jarrett, Christian. 2020. Cognitive Load Theory: Explaining our fight for focus. BBC. (I draw on his analysis above.) Brief overview of the differences between novices and experts here. Picasso animal drawings here. Two of my blogs: How to provide feedback on papers and how to use nudges.

When my first-year students write bad papers, I assume they are bad writers. If they don’t revise, I assume they don’t want to do it. If they don’t pay attention, I assume they don’t care about my course. Again and again, I assume that my students’ actions are based on conscious decisions, that they flow from their characters, and that they express their values. I should know better, given what behavioral science has taught us about human decision making. People often don’t act rationally. We’re easily knocked off course. We fail to sign up for retirement plans even though they are great deals; we take the elevator instead of the stairs even when we’re trying to get in shape; and we eat junk food we don’t like that much just because it is there. Talking to my students gives me the distinct impression that they are typical human beings. They don’t decide to underperform in my class. Stuff gets in the way. Those bad papers were written in a rush at 3 a.m. the night before they were due. My students look uninterested not because they dislike my class but because they are freaking out about their financial accounting exam. Many of their actions aren’t based on conscious decisions, they don’t flow from their characters, and they don’t express their values. Things just sort of happen. So, can we make better things happen instead? Like, better papers? Sometimes. Many of the factors that influence our students’ performance are of course outside our control. I can’t stop COVID-19, I can’t fix my students’ mental health issues, and I can’t make all the scary political stuff go away. I can only be aware of how they affect our students (and me) and find ways to work with and around them. And I can tweak the situation in my class, nudging my students towards doing the right thing. Richard Thaler coined the term “nudge,” and he describes it as an intervention that “gently steers the individual towards the desired behavior.” The classical example is saving for retirement. Informed by behavioral science, many retirement plans now automatically sign people up unless they actively opt out. Nudges abound in our society. To encourage people to take the stairs, make them attractive and well-lit and place the elevator off to the side. To encourage us to watch several episodes of Bridgerton back-to-back, autoplay them. An effective nudge makes it easy for people to do what we want them to do. Nudges work. How can we use them in our classes? So far, I’ve used them mostly around writing. In despair over all those 3 a.m. papers, I have started requiring drafts in all my classes. They are due a few days before the actual paper, they count for almost nothing, and I don’t read them. I tell the students that I assign drafts to force them to start the papers earlier and explain why starting early is useful. They can opt out at minimum cost, but very few do. And the papers turn out better. Once I started requiring drafts, I also noticed that I encountered less plagiarism. I suspect it is because my students really aren’t bad people who think cheating is OK. When they plagiarize, it’s usually a last-minute decision, made in despair at 3 a.m. Eliminate that last minute panic, and students are less likely to plagiarize. I’ve also started using nudges to get weaker students to ask for help. Here’s a recent triumph: This spring, I had a student who kept doing poorly on his papers and didn’t seek out help. I sent him a brief email: Your writing needs work. Would you like some help figuring out how to do it? I’m happy to help; just email me back if you’re interested. I heard back within ten minutes, he got help, and his next paper was a C+ instead of a D. There was nothing magical about the words in my email. I had written the same thing on his graded papers, and I had said it to the whole class. The email was more effective nudge because it made it so easy to reach out for help: Just click reply and write “yes please.” I used to think that this type of approach was paternalistic and enabling. Students should choose to ask for help, they should plan their own time, and they should suffer the consequences when they don’t. And if they are the sort of people who cheat, let them—and then punish them harshly. I keep backsliding into that way of thinking, and I have to remind myself that I know better. People aren’t fully rational, and situations affect behavior. As Thaler points out, we and our students are being nudged all the time -- by advertisers, friends, and social forces. Many of these nudges are in directions that are bad for us. Given that, why not be intentional about using nudges in a way that might help students pass their courses? Using devices like nudges seems especially important since there is an equity issue at play here. Some students don’t need nudges and guidance as much because they feel at home in college. They find it easy to ask for help from the professor; they have been taught good study habits; they have had stellar writing instruction. But others don’t and haven’t. If I avoid nudging my students, I make it harder for those who desperately need guidance in order to succeed. I don’t want to do that. It’s hard enough for them already.     Sources: ·      John M. Burdick and Emily Peeler, “The Value of Effective Nudging During COVID,” Inside Higher Ed, February 23, 2021. ·      Dan Harris, interview with Richard H. Thaler, “How to work around your own irrationality,” 10% Happier podcast, episode 402, December 6, 2021.  ·      Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011). ·      Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: The Final Edition (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2021). ·      Shankar Vedantam, “Think fast with Daniel Kahneman,” Hidden Brain podcast.

Teaching through pandemic brought home two basic lessons to me: What happens in our students’ lives affects their performance in the classroom. Professors are mere human beings who can only do so much before our health suffers. Both seem obvious. Surely, I knew all that even before the pandemic? Perhaps. But I hadn’t internalized it, and I certainly hadn’t acted as though it was true. I see many of my colleagues do the same. The pandemic was the first time I taught in a situation where my students and I were all doing poorly at the same time. We were jittery and frightened. We were trying to carry on as usual, but nothing was normal. It quickly became obvious that the pandemic would affect our students’ ability to work. In March 2020, kids in my class who had been great students the previous week suddenly become incapable of following basic instructions. They kept emailing me with oddly clueless questions. Expectations had to change, and I began settling for my students at least learning something. I assigned easier and shorter readings, more videos, and shorter papers. I gave more extensions, excused more absences, and talked to many more students about their mental health struggles. But my own workload didn’t lighten. I worked much harder than normal. And my life was in upheaval too (along with everybody else’s!). I would have benefited from the same sort of break and support that I was giving the students. My doctor considers me high risk for pandemic-related burnout because I’m a female professor at a small college. She sees me as a member of the helping professions. I initially downplayed her concerns, pointing out that healthcare workers have it much worse. They do of course. But she is right. I see signs of impending burnout in myself and in many of my colleagues—especially younger women and especially those with children. This isn’t sustainable. We’re just like our students. We can only do so much before our performance and our health suffers. Our limitations need more attention and more action than we have been giving them so far. We are, I hope, coming out of the pandemic, but in higher education we’re emerging into an uncertain future. Many of our institutions are deep into discussions of budget cuts; the crisis of the humanities continues, and programs are being eliminated. And mental health issues among our students are at an all-time high. It won’t stop being hard. Going forward, how can we respect our own limitations and set clearer boundaries with our institutions, our students, and our colleagues? How can those of us who are tenured and more experienced help our junior colleagues do this more effectively? And how do we do all this while continuing to be there for our students? Those are big questions, and figuring out how to go forward will take collective action. Institutions need to change, junior faculty need to be protected, and we need to get better at allowing people real time off. I have no idea how to make all that happen. So, I start small. My individual actions, for now: I will do for myself what I did for my students—I will recognize that my expectations of myself have to change. I can’t continue to work at my regular pace. I’m too tired. I and the people around me will have to settle for me doing less. And I will tell them that. Over the summer, I’m going to rest. I won’t try to catch up on my research (neglected for the past two years). I won’t revise my fall courses. They are good enough. I’ll read, following my curiosity and meandering from book to book. And I’ll write if I have something to say. I’ll take a few weeks off, and I’ll stay off email when I do, away message in place. I’ll rest. In the fall, I’ll work with an eye to my limits. If I’m still drained, I’ll accept that and I’ll say “no.” A lot. I’ll think about how to shift the cultures around me in a more sustainable direction so that rest isn’t just a privilege for faculty with tenure. I’ll think about how to help junior colleagues and students to set and maintain boundaries. I’ll remember that my students won’t be back to normal in the fall either and I’ll continue to treat them with compassion and understanding. It’s been a long two years—for all of us.   References and resources: “Burnout and How to Avoid It” from one of my favorite authorities on happiness, Dr. Laurie Santos at Yale. It’s part of her podcast The Happiness Lab. Santos is going on a leave of absence. She’s noticing that she is heading for burnout and thus wisely changing course. Newspaper article about that here. For more on showing compassion to ourselves as well as to our students, see Kristin Neff and Dr. Chris Germer’s work on self-compassion. A massive number of articles in the Chronicle, including the report Burned Out and Overburdened (which I haven’t read it yet).

I’ve been increasingly frustrated with my first-year students’ reluctance to argue with each other. Several years ago, I started asking my classes where these sentences change from being OK to not OK: I agree with Peter. I want to add to what Peter said. I disagree with Peter about this. Peter’s view has some serious problems. Peter is wrong about this. Peter’s view is silly and naïve. Peter is an idiot. Years ago, first-year students here at my small Catholic college in the Northeast usually said it was around 4 or 5. But these days, they generally draw a line between 2 and 3. Expressing disagreement is no longer okay. It’s a significant loss. As an academic, I know that defending our position from challenges helps us hone our own position. It sharpens our wits, and it makes us revise and improve our arguments. My students are no longer getting this practice, and it shows in their papers. They don’t anticipate basic objections and their arguments are weaker. For years, I tried to reverse the trend. I explained the value of academic arguments, and I pushed my students to express disagreement with each other. They resisted. I pushed harder. One day, a student looked at me and said, “We know you want us to fight but we don’t want to!” Of course I didn’t want them to fight. Did I? The comment shook me, and I started thinking. Why did they think that I wanted them to fight? Were there downsides to classroom arguments that I wasn’t seeing? Could I reach my pedagogical goals without having students argue with each other? What might that look like? I kept thinking. I studied Buddhism and thought about the downsides of an adversarial approach: It makes us focus on winning, so we listen for flaws and weaknesses, ignoring the strengths of positions. We risk becoming less open to alternative views and less able to see the flaws in our own thinking. I studied feminism and considered reasons why some won’t enter a combative discussion. Not everybody has the confidence and inclination to speak up if they believe that they’ll be attacked—and they might see what I consider rather mild disagreements as attacks. I wondered how many had not dared enter those lively discussions that I so fondly remembered from my past classes, and I squirmed. I have increasingly come to see my students’ distaste for disagreement and argument as healthy reactions to an overly angry and combative culture. My students years ago could playfight in class and trust that things would be fine. My students today have seen too many discussions turn nasty. Too much is at stake for them socially. They don’t have that luxury. I rethought my approach. I want them to “fight” because I want them to get better at building and examining arguments. Could I treat “fighting” as the means, not the goal, and then reach that goal in a different way? I started shifting the focus away from students arguing with each other towards us together examining and arguing with the text and its author. I let them work together to identify flaws and to devise ways to improve arguments, and we discuss better and worse ways to communicate what we discover to an author. It’s not as effective as arguments with each other for teaching students how to improve their arguments and respond to objections. But they like having a class in which they talk and figure things out together. And I like the care and sensitivity with which they investigate the views of others, finding things to appreciate and ideas to consider—even in arguments that I thought were rather bad. I worry that by letting them avoid “fighting,” I am ignoring something crucial. Students need to learn how to disagree civilly—heck, most of us could use some work in this area! I worry that they only have two modes: polite avoidance of conflicts in person, and then fights, name-calling, and cancel culture online. I’m still figuring out how to get students out of those two modes. I’ve had some success with role-playing, assigning them a position to argue for and sometimes even assigning them a confrontational personality. That makes it safe. If disagreeing and being disagreeable is their assigned job, it’s my fault, not theirs, so their performance in the role won’t harm their relationships. They tend to go at it with some enthusiasm. It still doesn’t have the energy and fire of real arguments where students defend their own position to people who disagree. I worry that I’m babying them, but it seems that they need that safe space. And sometimes, the dissonance between what they are saying in their assigned role and what they believe becomes too much for them. They fess up, stating out loud that they disagree with the position I’m making them argue for and explaining why. It’s a roundabout approach, but it may get the job started.

I avoided teaching our gen ed Catholic intellectual tradition courses for years at my small Catholic college in the Northeast. I’m not a theologian. I’m not Catholic. And teaching these courses sounded challenging because our students’ impressions of the Church are both negative and muddled: “The Church is hypocritical, sexist, and anti-gay.” “It reads the Bible literally and it rejects evolution.” “It thinks that it’s bad to examine your religious beliefs.” “Having faith means having no doubts, and it requires that you don’t question your religion at all.” Many of our students are former Catholics who suspect that these courses are intended to bring them back into the fold. And they resent that. I told myself that this mess is not my problem. Not my fight. I got pushed into it though, and to my surprise, the course I developed has become one of my favorites. I decided that for the course to work, I needed to get the students’ hostility and emotions out on the table from the very beginning. To make that possible, creating the right atmosphere was crucial. Otherwise, students would worry about hurting my feelings and their own grade, and they wouldn’t speak openly. To create a space for honesty, I use my non-priest and non-Catholic credentials for maximum effect. Before I even hand out the syllabus, I explain that I’m not Catholic and that I have no interest in making them more—or less—Catholic. I tell them that I disagree with the Church’s positions on LGBTQ issues and that I have feminist objections to the Church—and to a lot of organized religion. At that point, I have their attention. Then I describe what I admire about Catholicism. The logic and intellectual rigor. The two thousand years of applying reason to religion, of brilliant theologians and philosophers wrestling with difficult questions, arguing, and disagreeing with each other. I explain that they don’t have to believe a single word of any Catholic teachings, but that they do have to know what they are, think them through carefully, be as fair and openminded as possible, and then articulate their criticisms and responses clearly. Our first reading is Jean Twenge’s “Irreligious: Losing My Religion (and Spirituality),” which lays out survey data and discusses possible reasons for why so many Gen Z members are leaving organized religion. I ask if the reading resonates with them and ask them to share some of their own experiences with religion. Then I brace myself and get out of the way. So much anger. So much frustration. So many painful stories. One of my students was an altar boy and his priest handed him a brochure about conversion therapy and told him to try it. Another student was kicked out of his religious education class for asking too many critical questions. A third was asked to leave his church along with his family because he has two moms. I listen, empathize, and learn. I explain that their local priest may not have accurately represented the diversity of views and complexity of theology available in the Church. I tell them that people who teach religious education classes usually don’t know as much theology as I would wish and that they sometimes badly misunderstand Church teachings. We look at the Catechism’s statements on homosexuality, I explain that I know several priests who are gay and that they somehow make it work. I point them to James Martin, S.J.’s work, noting that he is a priest in good standing. This discussion takes up a full week. During this time, I repeat that I’m fine with them being atheist, theist, or agnostic but that I want their position to be based upon good reasons and on a deep understanding of the intellectual possibilities of a theism. I don’t want them to reject religion because they have only been exposed to narrow and simplistic versions. After all that, we’re ready to engage with the “real” course materials. We study the argument from design and the Church’s position on evolution. We clear up misunderstandings about doubt and questioning. We read about Mother Teresa and her dark night of the soul. We tackle classical philosophical problems about suffering, miracles, pluralism, the gap between language and God, and the function and limitations of images. This has become one of my favorite classes to teach because it responds to a real need. My students desperately need an opportunity to explore their spirituality and religiosity (or their absence!) and to reflect on their relation to the religions around them. And they need somebody to correct some of their most cumbersome misunderstandings about religion, showing them that there is space for them to be Catholic if they want—even if they are LGBTQ and even if they like science and reason. Will this bring them back into the fold? I doubt it—but I hope it will help them see possibilities that they didn’t know were there.   Read Race in the classroom: #3: Bringing in race in a Catholic Intellectual tradition course.   Sources Catholic Church. The Catholic Catechism. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1993. Gould, Stephen J. “Nonoverlapping Magisteria.” In Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, edited by Michael Rea and Louis Pojman, 494-502. Stamford, CT: Centage Learning, 2015. Paul II, John, Pope. “Faith and Science: Lessons from the Galileo Case and Message on Evolution.” In Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, edited by Michael Rea and Louis Pojman, 502-507. Stamford, CT: Centage Learning, 2015. Martin, James, S.J. Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity. New York, NY: HarperOne, 2017. Martin, James, S.J. Building a Bridge. Directed by Evan Mascagni and Shannon Post. New York, NY: Tribeca, 2021. Massingale, Bryan N. “The Challenge of Idolatry for LGBTI Ministry.” DignityUSA.org, 2019. Pinter, Brian. “A Fundamental Challenge: Three Ways to Combat Biblical Literalism.” America: The Jesuit Review, Sept. 12, 2011 Sullivan, Meghan. “Uneasy Grace.” First Things, April 2014. Twenge, Jean. “Irreligious: Losing My Religion (and Spirituality).” In iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us. New York, NY: Atria Books, 2017.