Resources

One of the coolest parts of my job at the Wabash Center is curating this blog space with the support of Paul Utterback, our Communications and Digital Media Administrator. Week after week, we have the privilege of sharing reflections from scholars and educators,  helping others navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of teaching and the teaching life. As we wrap up one of our biggest years yet (more than 70 new blog posts), I want to take a moment to highlight the pieces that resonated most with readers. It’s no surprise that artificial intelligence—and how educators are responding to its growing presence in the classroom—captured significant attention. Alongside this, our top posts reveal a deep concern with what it means to teach as one’s most authentic self. Questions of identity, belonging, vulnerability, how we show up for our students in our full personhood, remain central to the work of teaching.Gathered here are the top five blogs of 2025:Plagiarism as Gaslighting in the Time of Artificial IntelligenceCommon Questions 2“I love Dr. Parker, but…"Show Your WorkDifficult, but Fun: Reclaiming Joyful Formation in the Age of AI Happy Reading! See you all in 2026!

Welcome to the Common Questions, an exciting initiative brought to you by the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. In this series, we bring together some of the most esteemed scholars and educators in the field to engage with a central, thought-provoking question. The goal is to challenge and inspire. By exploring these questions, we hope to create a dynamic platform for scholarly dialogue, illuminate complexities in education, and enhance our understanding of the transformative power of teaching and learning in these vital disciplines. Featuring a diverse range of perspectives, this effort is a means of expanding the borders of academic rigor with profound spiritual and philosophical inquiry. This time, we asked… “Where is the most foreign place you have visited? How might this experience with foreignness inform/influence your teaching?”Gathered here are responses from:Eric C. Smith, Iliff School of TheologyKatherine Turpin, Iliff School of TheologySharon Higginbothan, Chatham UniversityShatavia Wynn, Rhodes CollegeYii-Jan Lin, Yale Divinity School If you are interested in sharing you response to this prompt or future Common Questions, please reach out to our blogs editor, Donald E. Quist at quistd@wabash.edu. 

This is one of the nerdiest statements I will ever write: I was recently on a bus traveling from Istanbul to Iznik (ancient Nicaea) with a group of Wesleyan scholars on a tour of ancient Christian sites in Asia Minor for the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. Yes, we visited the ruins of the basilica where the Council of Nicaea was held on the anniversary—to the day—of the start of the council. If you understood even partly why this was exciting, congratulations! You’re a nerd too.Aside from seeing a bunch of old rocks (how my parents described the pictures I sent them), we gave talks during the long bus rides about various aspects of history and theology related to the ecumenical councils. As a participant, I got to observe a kind of wild teaching different from my own. I came home with ideas.People frequently ask about my use of technology if I’m going outside: “How do you show them videos or PowerPoints?!” I don’t. (Honestly, I don’t use them in my indoor classrooms either.) On the tour bus, though, I saw some teachers thinking about analog versions of the technology they would use in the classroom. The tour guide himself wanted to describe some geography of Turkey to us on the first day, and people struggled. In a classroom, he might have pulled up a map on the projector. Or if we’d been in my elementary classroom, he’d have pulled down the correct map from the roll screwed to the wall. Instead, he handed a large map to one of my colleagues and asked him to hold it up at the front of the bus—even walk down the aisle if people needed to see better. Later on the trip, one colleague tried to explain her conception of a Trinitarian doctrine and drew a large diagram on a piece of butcher paper for us, again walking closer to people as they needed.I was also fortunate to tour the necropolis under the Vatican and a set of catacombs in Rome, and there again I watched my guides give excellent presentations with analog visual aids. These two tour guides had a packet of images printed off, each laminated for longevity and bound with metal rings. They flipped through the packet at the proper times in their spiel to help us see what they described—an analog PowerPoint!All of this has me thinking more about one colleague’s thoughtful question: “I need to use the projector for showing some things, or I have maps I like to use. Help me think about making analog versions of digital aids so I can teach outside more.” I’ll bet we can be more creative. All of our digital realities had analog versions to begin with, right? My students don’t know that a “file” was a thing before computers—but it was. What is the digital thing replacing, and can we go back to the original?If we can go back to the original, there is still the question of whether we want to, which is partly a question of ease. Presumably, we’re using the digital version of a thing instead of the analog because it is easier or more efficient. Why would we go back? Well, I’ve been reading some Wendell Berry lately, so I’m wondering if there are situations when doing things the less efficient way is better for reasons other than productivity. Which leads me back to the question of why I take students outside in the first place. Are those reasons worth working through the challenges of this choice? Yes, for me they are. Need to show students a passage in Greek? Have them bring their NT and work through it together. Or make a handout. Yes, it will take a little more time, but perhaps that little more time is enough for some of them to figure it out because they’re holding something in their hands and tactilely working with the thing. Buy a big map if you use a lot of them. Or draw one. My students love when I draw because I am so bad at it.Are there technologies that might be hard to replicate? Yes. A reader recently got in touch to ask about hearing-impaired students—do I use a microphone? No, I don’t. We don’t even have that capability in our classrooms. But on this tour of Turkey, we used whispers—devices with headphones that each of us wore while our guide had the device with a microphone that transmitted to all of us. This is a great technological invention for hearing in spaces full of people or cars. Perhaps we could invest in a set for classroom use outdoors? For non-hearing-impaired students, is it more important to rely on each other to understand what’s happening—even if it’s less efficient—or do I value more the clarity they would gain from hearing me better the first time through?I realize I’ve asked more questions than given answers, but the question of how to teach outside the classroom—or even inside the classroom—is always going to ask us to consider our values. How we teach is an extension of why we teach. And the more aligned our how is with our why, the more our students will receive the formation we hope for them. 

I had planned to use this blog post to grumble about (antiquated, exclusionary, misguided) notions of “rigor” and how many of my colleagues seem to assume that if your students all get good grades, or if the average class GPA is “too high,” you must be too easy of a teacher, there must be grade inflation, you must be giving out easy A’s. I assigned a movie review paper in my upper-level Religion and Film course. I took many steps to help students prepare for writing a successful movie review, which is worth 10 percent of their final grade:Read the movie review assignment I created (which includes a detailed rubric of my criteria for evaluation) in class and ask any questions. Read a chapter on writing about movies for homework, which includes a description of movie reviews; discuss this genre in class.Watch a short YouTube video by a professional movie critic about movie reviews for homework; discuss this video in class.Read Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” essay and discuss in class the importance of drafting and revising – and starting a paper early enough to provide time for that process.Find their own three examples of online movie reviews in class, take notes on what those reviews seem to have in common and what makes a strong movie review; discuss findings in class.Practice writing a short movie review in class; get feedback on it from the instructor.Listen to their peers read examples of those in-class movie reviews and note what they thought was good.Be constantly reminded about the purpose and content of a movie review by their instructor.I was all ready to write about how students did so well on this assignment … and then to wonder how anyone could label the process I put students through as NOT rigorous? There was so much scaffolding! So much prep! So much required just for this one paper – more than I think most people ask of their students, especially for a relatively short paper (2 pages minimum).Except the thing is: students didn’t do all that well on this assignment.The grade average was an 87 percent or B+. Now, this is a far cry, certainly, from averages in some classes that are, even when curved, still in the D-range. A B+ is a solidly respectable individual grade. But I would have expected most of these papers to be A’s, given all of the above. A few were, but not most.The movie reviews contained errors that the above activities should have (I would have assumed) prevented. For instance, many of the papers were more like critical analyses (another genre we discussed) rather than reviews. Their appraisal wasn’t obvious or consistent. They didn’t include details from the films to back up their assertions. They reviewed films that didn’t really relate to religion. They wrote about movies that were too old. They included tracked changes, misspellings, typos, and incomplete sentences.So my anticipated blog post went a bit sideways. What did student performance on this assignment, instead, teach me? I’m considering several possible (definitely not exclusive) lessons:It’s not enough to teach students the importance of, for instance, not turning in their shitty first drafts; I’ve got to actually build it in/require it as a part of the process – or it may not happen.It’s probably a good idea (ok, it is a good idea) to provide students with annotated examples, so they get exposed to a range of quality and the reasons for it.I could spend more time explicitly identifying common mistakes or pitfalls of movie reviews (e.g., too much analysis, not enough review) and either demonstrating or leading students in an activity where we explore how to fix those issues.I could give them class time for peer review and/or revision.I could build in an actual revision process, where they take my feedback and fix the issues for a new deadline (and a potentially better grade).I could assign multiple movie reviews, so they can take what they learned from this assignment and apply it to the next; my guess is that those grades would improve (this has happened in other classes when I gave the same type of assignment multiple times).There will always be a range of effort and performance on any given task?Instructor efforts cannot guarantee student success; there are limits to how much instructors can do to affect positive student outcomes.What else?Mostly, I think I should actually talk to my students to try to find out what went awry. Why or where were they confused? What got lost in translating the rubric to an actual paper? What roadblocks did they encounter? Where was I unclear? What, if anything, could I have done to help them better prepare? Maybe I’ll learn something to make the above prep list even better for next time.

In one of my teaching documents I claim that good professors motivate, prepare, and support their students to produce good work in their courses. I remain deeply committed to this view. But something has been happening over the past several years that has shaken my faith not only in my ability to teach well but in my perception of reality. I’ve started receiving assignments that feel off. I start reading, ready to comment on student work, and run into words, phrases, and ideas that don’t fit. Sometimes it is a peculiar use of language. Other times a paper references information that was not explored in a course and is not common knowledge.Worse, I’ve received uncannily similar assignments from multiple students. Not only is some of the outside information they use wrong in a similar way, the stock phrasing of basic material is identical. I find myself wondering if it’s more likely that multiple students decided to use a word like “tapestry” in their analysis due to some affinity for the term or if something else is afoot.I have begrudgingly accepted that my students are using artificial intelligence (AI) to write their assignments. A Google search for “what percentage of students are using AI?” suggests that at least half of them use it. It is unlikely that my students are an exception.I’ve had several uncomfortable meetings with students about suspected plagiarism using AI. On occasion they admit their work is AI-generated. Other times they acknowledge outside source usage but deny AI. Often they flatly deny anything, even as they struggle to explain the words they claim to have written.What does a good professor do in this situation? Do they give their students the benefit of the doubt? Do they follow the procedures for suspected plagiarism even as these are based on legal principles which often perpetuate social and racial inequality? Is it their fault they were unable to motivate students to do the work themselves? Was their course poorly planned given that it wasn’t AI-proof?Answering these requires addressing two additional questions: (1) Is plagiarizing using generative AI different from the plagiarism of old, where a student might clandestinely copy from an encyclopedia on a typewriter? and (2) Why is this so bad if AI, as administrators and technocrats often remind us, is here to stay?My class, often the only humanities class a student is taking, nurtures skills of reading, writing, and critical thinking that cannot be duplicated by a computer. One can produce passable work with AI. I’ve accepted that. But one cannot create and recognize good work without developing proper skills.I don’t want the sins of some previous students to dictate the way I treat my current and future students. In fact, I don’t want the ways I’ve been mistreated by friends, family, partners, or anyone else to dictate how I interact with new people. But it would be naïve to assume that others won’t ever act similarly. Still, I don’t want to approach student writing suspiciously because students have used AI in the past. I worry that I over-emphasize that AI is unacceptable. Sadly, this has not prevented me from occasionally experiencing the uncanny feeling that something is off in an assignment.Grading has begun to feel like gaslighting. Kate Abramson in On Gaslighting (Princeton University Press, 2024) characterizes gaslighting as a trusted person aiming to make another incapable of reasoning, perceiving, or reacting in ways that would allow them to form appropriate beliefs, perceptions, and emotions. My experience of grading has fundamentally shaken my confidence in my ability to make good judgments about reality – what my students learned, how they write, and if they would have the audacity to submit work that they didn’t write themselves despite my repeated warnings that it was unacceptable.I’ve gone from hoping that my students put effort into their assignments to merely hoping that they wrote it themselves. I now savor the occasional typo, misspelling, sentence fragment, or odd formatting, things that occur in student writing as they develop their skills.Something can be done. All is not lost. I’ve shifted multiple preplanned assignments from short at-home writing exercises to in-class assignments. For text papers, I require students to submit an annotated primary source reading.We are all teaching in a new reality, one that causes discomfort for many. Good teaching may look different going forward even if it falls short of our ideal. Nonetheless, the principles of good teaching remain the same even as the experience of teaching changes.

Welcome to the Common Questions, an exciting initiative brought to you by the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. In this series, we bring together some of the most esteemed scholars and educators in the field to engage with a central, thought-provoking question. The goal is to challenge and inspire. By exploring these questions, we hope to create a dynamic platform for scholarly dialogue, illuminate complexities in education, and enhance our understanding of the transformative power of teaching and learning in these vital disciplines. Featuring a diverse range of perspectives, this effort is a means of expanding the borders of academic rigor with profound spiritual and philosophical inquiry.This time, we asked…“We are all born with medicine inside of us: unique traits and attributes that contribute to healing humanity on this planet. How is your medicine utilized in your teaching?”Gathered here are responses from:Kristina Lizardy-Hajbi, Iliff School of TheologyRebecca Makas, Villanova UniversityCarol B. Duncan, Wilfrid Laurier UniversityHaruka Umetsu Cho, Santa Clara UniversityMolly Greening, Loyola University ChicagoLaura Carlson Hasler, Indiana UniversityFred Glennon, Le Moyne CollegeIf you are interested in sharing you response to this prompt or future Common Questions, please reach out to our blogs editor, Donald E. Quist at quistd@wabash.edu.

In terms of generative AI, I’ve been mostly hanging out in the “don’t feed our inevitable overlords!!” camp, so nobody should be looking to me for tips for ethically and thoughtfully integrating ChatGPT into their teaching this term.But a problem I do have to face head on is that whereas I used to ask my students to do certain tasks and was reasonably confident they would actually do them themselves, I now am not so sure. For instance, watching movies to prepare for a Religion and Film class. Now, Wikipedia and IMDB were available before – and past students may have availed themselves of these resources – but ChatGPT, Co-Pilot, and all their friends feel like a significant new leap in the “shortcutting work” frontier.I still think students should learn some of these skills. Reading a ChatGPT summary of a film isn’t the same as having the experience of watching the film and taking notes on it. I want them to pay attention to film technique, I want them to notice what personally interests or grabs them, I want them to situate their viewing in the context of a course on religion and consider what the movie is (purportedly) conveying about that religion.To solve this little issue, I’ve decided last semester to implement an assignment in my Religion and Film course that’s essentially “show your work.” I borrowed this from K-12, from my daughter’s 4th grade math class, where she’s expected not simply to record an answer that she mysteriously arrived at, but to demonstrate and write out the thinking and the process by which she arrived at that answer. I know instructors, even at the college level, who will give partial credit for answers that are wrong if the student work shown demonstrates the right kind of thinking.So, for every movie my students are supposed to watch for homework (and it’s about a dozen), they need to take their own extensive notes during the viewing. (We read advice about taking notes during movies, discuss note-taking techniques, and practice in class.) They then need to take photos of those notes and upload them on our LMS (Canvas) before class the day we discuss the film.These are the instructions that I give my students for this assignment (they remain the same for every film):To ensure that everyone is watching the films in their entirety, and engaging them with the level of focus/attention that this class requires in order to be successful, you will be asked to do the following for every movie:To earn 4/5 points, please upload photos of your own handwritten notes that you took during the movie. They should:span the entire length/duration of the movie (i.e., not just the beginning/end, a few places, etc.)focus on more than just plot, characters, and dialogue (i.e., you must address visuals and sounds)include particular time-stamped moments that seem significant to youconvey a level of detail that goes beyond a summary found online or that is fabricated by AITo earn the 5th point, and full credit, you will also need to include 1-3 discussion questions that you would like us to address in class about this movie. (Discussion questions are usually open-ended, not fact-based, why/how-focused, etc.)I have been SO pleased with the results. The students are turning in photos capturing pages and pages of amazing, thoughtful, engaged, detailed notes in their own handwriting (which I’ve come to know and love). They are including timestamps, they are noting the movies’ sounds, they are displaying their real-time – often hilarious – reactions (“that dang bell won’t quit,” “I’m 20 minutes in and I still don’t know what this movie is about,” “she’s only 17??”). I can tell they’ve watched thoroughly and thought seriously about the films. Their discussion questions are precisely the questions I would have asked, but I can now frame them as originating with the students – and following their own questions and interests.I’ve also been thinking about drawbacks or limitations to this type of assignment. For instance, one of my students, an athlete, hurt his wrist/hand this semester and so writing by hand is hard for him, in and out of class. What do I do about a student with this kind of injury… or a disability that might require note-taking assistance or the use of a computer to take notes? Allowing the notes to be typed out defeats the purpose, because typed notes can be (more) easily cribbed from elsewhere. I don’t have great classroom-wide answers to these questions yet (besides making exceptions for individual students).Still, based on the success of this experiment, I would like to figure out how to apply it in future courses and assignments. Could I have students turn in the notes that they took on reading assignments, for example? (I have sometimes incorporated “reading responses,” “reading tickets,” or even just questions to answer about the readings into my courses, which seems to be the same idea.) I know some colleagues who have resorted to doing everything in class, on paper, and/or by hand. I’m not sure I want to go this far. I appreciate having my weekly quizzes on Canvas. I don’t want to go back to the paper-wasting days of course packets. I need to be able to assign homework. (I also don’t want to totally revolve my courses around the assumption that all students are cheating all the time. This may be true, but I don’t want to operate in this distrustful, suspicious, surveilling way.)How can you imagine incorporating “show your work” into your own course designs?

I am writing this blog post with my 8-year-old daughter’s voice still ringing in my ears: “Yes—it’s difficult, but it’s fun.” As a student, she said it during a violin lesson after wrestling with a new bow technique. Anyone who has practiced an instrument may know the scene—scales repeated until fingers ache, a teacher correcting the same motion for the tenth time. We often tell our children (and our students as well), “Practice makes perfect,” but the road to perfection is slow, repetitive, and occasionally tedious.My daughter’s shy voice—“difficult, but fun”—captures what philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre calls an internal good: a genuine joy experienced only inside a repetitive practice. External goods certainly loom large in my daughter’s world—a coveted seat in the district orchestra, a résumé line that thrills her parents. For her, slow and repetitive practice is “difficult”: she may desire a “shortcut” to finish practice quickly and play with her friends. And yet, in the middle of that drudgery, she found a deeper joy: the quiet thrill of coaxing one clear note from stubborn strings. Here, (slow) formation, not (fast) efficiency aimed at external validation, is the point.Technologists assure us that artificial intelligence will free us from menial work so we can focus on more meaningful and creative work. When I asked ChatGPT about its educational role, it offered the usual optimism, focusing on efficiency:"AI can be a powerful tool to enhance human productivity and creativity. Rather than replacing us, it can augment our abilities, making work more fulfilling. In this way, AI doesn’t just make life easier—it helps us reimagine what work means and empowers us to spend more time on what truly matters."The pronoun us jumped out at me. AI speaks as though it already shares human aims. But does it grasp what makes learning formative rather than merely efficient?Let us picture a humanities classroom. Reading primary texts—Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, for instance—often feels like violin practice: dense, slow, and sometimes tedious. A student can now upload the text, prompt an AI for a synopsis, and receive an instant outline. Hours saved, concepts clarified, quiz scores boosted—external goods secured.Yet that shortcut bypasses the internal good of reading itself. Lingering over a paragraph is not wasted time; it is the learning. More importantly, as we read, the text also reads us: a paragraph questions an unspoken assumption, an unfamiliar idea enlarges imagination, a story strangely mirrors our own. None of that occurs when we outsource reading to the so-called “efficient” AI.When we reframe reading as a powerful practice of formation, tedium turns into joy. While we move through the words, we are simultaneously moved by them—seen, challenged, and reshaped by voices from centuries ago or a continent away. Out of that slow interaction emerges the joy of reading for its own sake. It becomes an interior reward that resists quick translation into productivity metrics.Such formation extends well beyond the classroom. Someone who once wrestled patiently with Aristotle may later join a neighborhood book club simply for the pleasure of shared discovery. The capacity to be transformed by texts—through a time-consuming, attention-demanding encounter—is a deeply human gift that no algorithm can replicate.On the other hand, from a social ethics perspective, I am concerned about the issue of accessibility to this formative dimension of education. As AI more embeds itself in education, the formative joys of slow learning might risk becoming a privilege. Students juggling multiple jobs or heavy caregiving duties are the ones who would be more tempted to outsource reading to generative AI tools. If engagement is priced in hours only the well-resourced can spare, we reinforce inequities that we, as educators, claim to resist.Although we continue to work on this challenge, it is crucial for us as educators to foreground formation—particularly communal formation—in our pedagogy. Yes, AI can be a powerful tool. And it can help students in many ways. For example, AI may serve as a tutor, offering personalized learning experiences. Nevertheless, we need to re-claim the distinct human gift in the slow, shared process of learning. It is the dimension of education that makes us who we are, as individuals and communities, and that AI simply cannot provide. Yes, it is difficult, but fun!

A former student recently got in touch with me to catch up after a few years of silence. He said I was one of the few people who made him feel truly seen, and that’s what he needed right now. As we chatted, he asked about my Jan term backpacking with students in an Arizona canyon. When I described it to him, he replied, “That should called ‘Being in Awe 101!’ Actually, I think all of your classes should be titled that.” I like it. Being in Awe 101.He picked up on a particular element of my pedagogy that is always a goal but is especially potent in my outdoor courses: wonder. We know that children are great at this. They wander around the world enthralled, wondering at everything. We know as teachers that if we can only get students to wonder about something, then they can learn – that they learn much better if they are curious than when we tell them that they have to memorize this thing they find boring. We know the power of wonder in a classroom.Taking my students outside facilitates more wonder among them than I can generate in the classroom. I hear the question: Does making my students sit in the garden outside the English department building really make them wonder better about the reasons for the Council of Nicaea? Well, yes. When my students sit outside for class, they are generally more open. They feel like they can breathe and even, often, like they’re getting away with something. I’ve said as much before. That sense of freedom and of getting something past the authorities helps them drop their guard, be less armored about what they think is being asked or required of them in class. That openness allows the material to get past the bouncer in their brains. That openness is space for wonder.Sometimes quail run through the outdoor classroom and disrupt us in a way that makes us all laugh but also takes us out of “I’m a student and have to learn this thing my professor is saying” mode. Sometimes their internal bouncer gets wondering about the butterfly that floats near them and then is willing to wonder about the conversation happening in their group work. Even just noticing the colors of the flowers in the garden or the smell of the mulch is enough to cause that disruption. And once they wonder about one thing, they’re in a posture of wonder. Then, perhaps, they wonder about the discussion we’re having about the reading.We know we can inculcate wonder under the fluorescent lights, too. We associate with the Wabash Center because we care about creative ways to induce wonder. I only suggest that taking students outside can be a shortcut. Unless it’s raining. A good hike in the rain on a lengthy backpacking trip can still invoke wonder with the right attitude, but I admit that taking a normal class out in the rain will be more distracting than wonder-ful. Sometime I’ll tell you about the time I lost an entire class because the first day of rain that semester was in November and they didn’t know where our classroom was. Even that was the kind of disruption that calmed the internal bouncers.At one Wabash cohort workshop in Crawfordsville, I was excited that canoeing was an afternoon option because canoeing is maybe my favorite thing in the world. One of my cohort colleagues and I ended up in a canoe together. We had a lovely conversation at one point along the river about being awake to God. About that time a bald eagle soared overhead. We wondered together awhile. I watched my colleague – already a joyful, brilliant, fully alive person – become even more alive in her wonder. Months later she told me how she carried that moment of wonder back to her family and her world and the effects it had.The wilderness surprises us. It disrupts our “normal” with its “normal.” We are less able to pretend we’re in control when this happens, and I think this is why it is a place ripe for wonder. Our eyes are more open. They have to be, or we’ll miss the surprise. Or we’ll be surprised by something that feels more like an attack. We keep our eyes open outside and look closely at what’s around us. We see more clearly. This is the wonder.I suggest that as important as wonder is for learning, wonder is more important for being a decent human being among other human beings. It’s not enough to wonder in order to learn; we must also wonder about others in order to see one another clearly, in order to delight in one another. Wonder is the posture we need for awe to take root, and also delight. As we take our students outside to facilitate their wonder, they are practicing for more than the exam. We give them an experience of seeing deeply and of being deeply seen, and the wonder that produces will generate even more wonder. Perhaps then we’ll stand a chance in this world of wonders.

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.