Teach Out and Touch Faith
Friends,
I do not like our neighborhood cats. I am not against cats in theory, though my allergies mean I am against them in proximity. But our alley has a guy who leaves out food for 3-4 regulars, often sits out there talking to them, and he gives me dirty looks every time I walk too quickly and startle them. Their ears seem notched, which I’m hoping means they’re fixed, but I don’t like the idea of their food sitting out, and I don’t like the idea of how many birds they’re killing.
But hey, at least they make for great photos every now and then. And maybe there’s fewer rats as a result?
The new semester is fast approaching. It’s my 11th or 12th year teaching, depending on how you count, and the beginning of my 4th year at NTU. And, I’ll be honest, I’m looking forward to it less than previous years. There are several reasons, but the biggest is LLMs.
Canadian Humanities Professor Shawna Dolansky has an excellent article about going purely analog in her courses that mirrors my feelings almost exactly. I can’t do this for two reasons: 1) I am not confident nor secure enough in my job to risk bucking the trend and 2) My department (and university as a whole) require us to train students to use these tools “responsibly”.
I don’t know what to say about using them responsibly. The spiel I’ve been giving to my students is that I am very sympathetic to them using it to make their English sound more “native” to get around gatekeepers, but that I’m very unsympathetic to basically any other usage, and believe that it’s going to actively hurt in the long run to rely on them. I also go through the ethical arguments (environmental, intellectual property theft, capitalism). And a lot of students listen! A lot of them think more critically about how they’re using it, and I’ve had really good conversations with students who realize they were overusing them. (I’ve linked most of the sources I use to back this up in previous newsletters, but if you want any of them, let me know.) But the problem remains that I have to teach writing, and I have to give a grade to students based on their writing. That’s always been difficult. My students in both Taiwan and the US come to the class with wildly different levels of English and wildly different goals, while my main hope is just that they are encouraged to keep writing and growing in whatever language. Grades often get in the way of that.
Now, though, grading is not just difficult; it’s depressing. For every student who really cares about being a better writer, there are two who are just trying to get by. Maybe they’re lazy, but much more likely they’re overwhelmed and triaging (my class being less important than those in their major), or they doubt their own language skills and think using an LLM is the only path for them to get a good grade. Not only is this often not true, but now the LLM might actively prevent them from growing in skill and gaining that confidence.
An instructor who wants to both allow for “responsible” LLM usage and penalize students who lean on it too much now has to play detective while grading. Playing detective takes away from time/energy/focus on more important writing improvement. And sometimes a paragraph sounds LLM generated, but after a conversation with the writer, turns out to probably not be. Those conversations are terrible! They break the trust between us and create doubt for both of us.
I’d love to do more oral exams or presentations or go analog to account for this, but my courses are large, and usually only two hours a week, and those things take a lot of time.
My university recently told departments that our classes are too easy. Grade averages are too high, and they recently proposed adjusting the grade ranges but don’t seem to have the gumption to follow through after outcry from students (I think NTU’s grade ranges are too high [90-100% is an A+, a 77% is still a B+], but I’m also not sure how much of a problem that really is). Instead, they’re now warning instructors that overly high averages will result in the instructors themselves being excluded from awards/promotions. Beginning this year they’re also going to start asking students how much time they spend on each class outside of class, and the expectation is that they’re spending two hours for every class hour. This is a joke; there’s no way students are going to be honest about the amount of time they spend, and my students take an average of 20-22 class hours per semester, meaning the school is expecting them to spend 60+ hours a week just on their coursework. I’m a ride or die, “true learning takes place outside the confines of the classroom” kind of person, so of course this makes me bristle.
So I am hesitant to add much to their stress. I’m also hesitant because students are allowed to withdraw from my course all the way up until week 15 of 16, meaning any student who actually does poorly will just drop since most of my courses are electives. Filling seats is the most important thing for my department, and this is unnecessarily difficult because of NTU’s structure. My department, the Academic Writing and Education Center, has courses that overlap in content with the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, the Center for Bilingual Education, the Foreign Language Teaching and Resource Center, and probably more. As I’ve written before, NTU’s departments are much more independent than in the US (where my department would typically be inside the English department), which is good in some ways, but means they compete with each other for resources and students. As a result, our courses have to chase trends, focusing on things like LLMs in order to fill seats, regardless of individual instructor’s feelings.
BUT, even moreso than in the US, I’ve learned that what a job underscores as important is not always actually important. Bureaucracy is hard to interpret! My grade average is pretty high, but my courses are mostly full, and so I’m not really sure what would happen if that wasn’t the case. We spend tons of time talking about pre- and post-class surveys and assessments, but then once they’re complete there’s hardly a word. Until someone tells me otherwise, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing and hoping that the good of focusing on the motivated students outweighs to drudgery of trying to keep the gears moving despite LLMs’ work to the contrary. 加油。
Further reading:
The big news in Taiwan this month is that the large amount of rain caused some prodigious mushrooms to pop up in the middle of a busy road in Kaohsiung. Possibly due to everyone wanting photos, police were summoned to get rid of the offending fungi. THEY WERE IN TRUFFLE WITH THE LAW.
Taiwanese American and the people in its orbit are killing it lately. They posted a call for solidarity from the Taiwanese American community with other migrants. They featured a very thoughtful interview with SCU Comms professor Hsin-I Cheng on “identity, heritage, and belonging.” And editor Leona Chen has a great essay about keeping the diaspora and young people connected to Taiwanese culture.
You should cook some beans.
Wake up babe, Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy made substantive revisions to their page on Holes. Have you ever thought about what a hole is? I hadn’t, but now I have, and I’m a better person for it.
Do you know anyone suddenly trying to sell 10+ swords?
I am ashamed to admit that I knew only the broadest outlines of the “debate” over how to teach students to read. I finally sat down and learned about it, and the best piece of writing I found is this six-year-old report from American Public Media. It’s so well done with clear examples, and it made me think both about how I was taught and how I’m helping my students today.
Liz Shannon Miller watched the Smurfs movie so you don’t have to.
Firewatch is one of my favorite video games in the dubiously dubbed genre of “walking simulators”. It’s the story of a fire lookout named Henry who is running away from his life and odd happenings in the Shoshone National Forest. It’s been more than a decade since I played it, but I loved the essay “Who Firewatches the Firewatchers?” about the game and firewatching and national parks. Highly recommend.
God I’m a sucker for amazing data visualization.
I’ll read Hanif Abdurraqib write about literally anything, but man, this opening paragraph is especially good, even for him: “I sometimes say that I consider myself a junior-varsity Muslim. Whether this comes off as a joke or as an invitation for scolding (spoken or unspoken, loving or otherwise) depends entirely on the other Muslims in the room. But, hey, I say hands up and palms out: I take Ramadan very seriously, more seriously than I take anything. Inside me is still a child of rigorous routine. I don’t drink, or smoke, or use drugs, though I suppose that has less to do with my relationship to Muslimness, and more to do with my former commitment to being a high-level athlete and then, when that failed, to my enjoyment in a dalliance with a straight-edge girl in the punk scene. And then, when that failed, I found myself too anxious about how much stranger my already coruscating idiosyncrasies might become when surrendered to inebriation of any sort—which is to say, I have no faith in my own brain, but I do have faith I place elsewhere.”
Molly Monk’s guest essay in Lyz Lenz’s blog, “I don’t want to leave”, is a beautiful ode to the strength community offers.
Taiwanese-American Catherine Shu wrote about her experience moving back to Taiwan in 2007 for Business Insider. 18 years later, she and her husband are still here, and it’s a nice little look as to why that is.
We’ve been back in Taiwan for almost two weeks. I thought my jetlag was especially bad this time, but then I also realized I was eating a ridiculous amount of caffeine via a box of chocolate covered coffee beans we brought back from the US. I wasn’t thinking!
When we get back from the US, I love walking around my usual haunts to see what’s changed. The huge amount of rain recently has made it where the temperature isn’t too bad to do so! This morning I passed by a restaurant two blocks over that’s been abandoned for half a year: a team of people were looking at it. Something to look forward to? Maybe not, across the street a building that had been torn down right before we left is now a parking lot with about 20 spaces. So far I haven’t seen more than two cars parked at a time. The very mediocre bánh mì place that was confusingly only open for dinner has relented and now opens at 11. Our neighborhood curry shop has new nice printed menus (to reflect previously handwritten new prices and sides) and new cups for water. What was previously a vegetarian buffet is now a “DJ Studio”, which I interpret to mean storage for the owner’s overflowing record collection. One student’s apartment building has replaced the button-based buzzer with a confusing touchscreen. There’s a new laundromat that’s a little closer that I now have to try to compare. An elderly neighbor who runs a little flower and temple paraphernalia shop on the corner and lives out of the back of it now has a caretaker, a wheelchair, and no longer changes out of his pajamas, which is sad. But he still sits in the shop, with what I assume are his wife and brother. I’ve never really liked him - for the past six years his only contribution to my commute has been smoking and spitting and occasionally calling out a sales pitch - but it’s still sad.
There were weevils in the rice we left behind. Mmm, extra protein.
I hope you’re paying attention to what’s new around you, as well.
-g