Cinemorphosis

Tag: teaching

  • Teaching College Writing in the Pre-Canvas Days

    Teaching College Writing in the Pre-Canvas Days

    I’m glad academia has gone digital. No more heavy boxes of printed essays to lug home. No more gradebooks with smeared records.

    I remember we used to have to bring our grade and attendance records to campus during the semester break and get our records approved before we were truly free to enjoy our vacation.

    Like a beleaguered instructor sent on a doomed mission, I had to drag myself to the campus, lugging a mountain of paper that looked like it had survived the apocalypse.

    My stack of grades and attendance records—yellowed, dog-eared, and adorned with enough coffee stains and White-Out smudges to pass as a Jackson Pollock reject—was a bureaucratic nightmare in physical form. I found myself in line with a hundred other sleep-deprived, caffeine-fueled professors, each clutching their own messy masterpieces like they were carrying the Dead Sea Scrolls. The line outside the Office of Records was so long it could have served as an endurance test for Navy SEALs. To stave off starvation and existential dread, I had packed a comically oversized sack of protein bars and apples, as if I were preparing for a month-long siege rather than a simple bureaucratic ritual.

    There I was, supposed to be basking in the sweet, sweet nothingness of semester break, but instead, I was condemned to a gauntlet of waiting that made Dante’s Inferno look like a walk in the park. For what felt like hours, waited for the privilege of sitting at a table and enduring the laser-like glare of humorless bureaucrats who would scrutinize my records as if they were forensic experts analyzing evidence from a high-profile murder case.

    Once I finally managed to wade through the outdoor line, I advanced to the foyer for the second, even more soul-crushing phase of The Great Wait. Inside, rows of desks manned by expressionless drones awaited, each one peering over piles of grading records that seemed to stretch back to the dawn of civilization. Behind the staff of functionaries who examined the professors’ gradebooks were towers of file boxes stacked so precariously that a single sneeze could have transformed them into a cataclysmic eruption of dust and possibly asbestos.

    Eventually, I was summoned to one of the desks where an eagle-eyed Attendance Priestess scrutinized my records with the intensity of a customs officer suspecting I had smuggled contraband. She licked her fingertips with the solemnity of a high priestess preparing for a sacred ritual, only to cast me a look of such disdain you’d think I’d just handed her a wad of toilet paper instead of my gradebook.

    Finally, when the pinch-faced administrator deemed my records sufficiently unblemished and granted me the bureaucratic blessing to leave, it felt like I had just been handed the keys to the Pearly Gates. I didn’t walk to my car. I windsprinted because I feared the Attendance Priestess may have found fault with my records and would call me back to start the whole process all over again.

  • How to Pretend You’re Still Alive at Week Eleven

    How to Pretend You’re Still Alive at Week Eleven

    After ninety minutes of hammering out lesson plans in my academic cave—also known as my college office—I realized my legs had entered that special purgatory between rigor mortis and a blood clot. So I stood up, performed a stretch that felt like a rusty marionette being yanked upright, and took a walk down the hallway.

    Out in our little shared faculty suite, I found my colleague from Foreign Languages hunched behind a desk like a war-weary translator decoding enemy communiqués. She looked up briefly from a pile of student papers, and when I asked how she was holding up, she gave the most honest answer academia ever produces: “Exhausted.” It was 2 p.m., and she still had a five-hour sentence left on her campus shift. I nodded grimly. The semester was two-thirds over, the point in the academic calendar when everything begins to sag—mood, posture, faith in humanity.

    “I get it,” I told her. “The late-semester ennui is baked into the profession.” I’ve been battling it for decades. It seeps into your bones and makes your students shuffle into class like underfed extras from a Civil War hospital drama—late, listless, and visibly haunted by their own poor decisions. Their faces are a collage of sleep deprivation, existential dread, and the dawning realization that the syllabus waits for no one.

    This is when you have to throw them a curveball. You can’t coast on grammar worksheets and MLA citation reviews. The status quo is the problem. I tell them to try yoga, breathing exercises, isometrics. If they’re feeling especially apocalyptic, I might even roll a zombie movie and spin it as a cautionary tale about pandemics and the erosion of civic trust. It’s a reach—but sometimes you need to swing for the fences, even if all you hit is a foul ball.

    Most of these tricks will fail. The semester will end the way all semesters do—in caffeine, chaos, and emotional triage. But at least you went down swinging. At least you reminded yourself, in that bleak final inning, that you’re not just a grading machine—you’re still alive.

  • Against the Grain: My College Students’ Quiet Rebellion Against the Cult of the Self

    Against the Grain: My College Students’ Quiet Rebellion Against the Cult of the Self

    My college students, nineteen on average, stand on the jagged edge of adulthood, peering into a world that looks less like a roadmap and more like a shattered windshield. Right now, we’re writing essays about the way social media—and the exhausting performance of self-curation—has sabotaged authenticity and hijacked the very idea of a real, breathing identity.

    Here’s the surprising part: they already know it.

    Unlike the last crop of dopamine junkies willing to sell their souls for a handful of TikTok likes, these students have developed a healthy, almost contemptuous disdain for “influencers”—those human billboards who spend their days manicuring their online selves like desperate bonsai trees, hoping to monetize the illusion of a perfect lifestyle. My students don’t want to be “brands.” They don’t want to hawk collagen supplements to strangers or play the carnival game of parasocial friendships with people they’ll never meet.

    No, they’re too busy wrestling with reality.

    They’re trying to adapt to a fast-changing, frequently chaotic world where entire industries collapse overnight and finding a career feels like rummaging through a haystack with oven mitts on. They are focused—ruthlessly so—on their careers, their families, and the relationships that breathe life into their days. There’s no time for performative outrage on Twitter. There’s no energy left for airbrushed TikTok dances in rented Airbnbs masquerading as real homes.

    What’s even more heartening?
    They are learning. They’re not Luddites fleeing technology; they’re studying how to use it. They’re exploring tools like ChatGPT without fear or delusion. They’re discussing things like Ozempic, not as magic bullets, but as case studies in how rapidly tech and biotech can transform human lives—for better or for worse.

    Underneath all this practicality hums a deeper current: a hunger for something more than survival. They know life isn’t just paying the bills and uploading sanitized highlight reels. It’s also about spiritual nourishment—found in beauty, art, connection, and the sacred rituals that make the unbearable parts of existence worth slogging through.

    They understand, in a way that seems almost instinctual, that social media platforms—those carnival mirrors of human desire—don’t offer that kind of connection. They see the platforms for what they are: hellscapes of manufactured anxiety, chronic FOMO, and curated loneliness, where everyone smiles and no one feels seen.

    In their quiet rejection of all this, my students aren’t just adapting.
    They’re rebelling—wisely, stubbornly, and maybe, just maybe, showing the rest of us the way back to something real.

  • Becoming Someone Real: Literacy, Transformation, and the College Classroom in the Age of Digital Fakery: A College Essay Prompt

    Becoming Someone Real: Literacy, Transformation, and the College Classroom in the Age of Digital Fakery: A College Essay Prompt

    Below is a full setup with a focused essay prompt, a potent sample thesis, and a detailed 9-paragraph outline. The argument draws a hard line between the hollow self-curation of the digital age and the hard-won, soul-deep transformation through literacy and education, as seen in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

    Essay Prompt:

    In an age when social media promises effortless self-reinvention through curated personas and algorithmic visibility, the genuine, hard-earned transformations of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X—rooted in literacy and the pursuit of knowledge—stand as powerful counterpoints. Write an essay that analyzes how their autobiographies depict education as a vehicle for authentic self-reinvention, moral clarity, and long-term empowerment. In your essay, compare their transformations to the superficial “branding” culture of today, and argue why the college classroom remains one of the last credible spaces for real personal evolution.

    Sample Thesis Statement:

    While today’s digital culture rewards the illusion of instant self-reinvention through filtered images and empty performances, the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X remind us that true transformation comes through literacy, discipline, and critical thinking. Their stories demonstrate that college—when pursued earnestly—can be a rare and radical site of self-reinvention that is empowering, morally clarifying, and enduring in a way that social media reinvention can never be.

    9-Paragraph Outline:

    I. Introduction

    • Hook: In an era obsessed with reinventing oneself through TikTok bios and LinkedIn résumés, real transformation has become a rare currency.
    • Context: The difference between performative self-reinvention (branding) and authentic self-reinvention (education).
    • Introduce Douglass and Malcolm X as icons of transformative literacy.
    • Thesis: Douglass and Malcolm X exemplify how education, not performance, produces lasting moral and personal change—making college one of the most powerful tools for true self-reinvention today.

    II. The Nature of Fake Reinvention in the Digital Age

    • Explore the Instagram/TikTok economy of identity: branding, personas, micro-celebrity culture.
    • Emphasize speed, shallowness, and lack of introspection.
    • Reinvention as escape rather than excavation: it masks who we are, rather than revealing a deeper self.

    III. Frederick Douglass: Literacy as Revolution

    • Douglass’s hunger for books after learning the alphabet.
    • Reading The Columbian Orator shapes his moral framework and awakens political consciousness.
    • His reinvention isn’t cosmetic—it is intellectual and moral, a refusal to remain enslaved in mind or body.

    IV. Malcolm X: Prison and the Page

    • Describe Malcolm’s transformation in prison: copying the dictionary, devouring books, reshaping his worldview.
    • Literacy as a form of liberation: he begins to see systemic oppression and his place within it.
    • This is not rebranding—it is rebirth.

    V. The Moral Weight of Their Reinventions

    • Both men become truth-tellers and justice-seekers, not influencers or entrepreneurs.
    • Their new selves come with responsibility and sacrifice, not followers or monetization.
    • Their transformations lead to social change, not clicks.

    VI. The College Classroom as a Modern Parallel

    • When it works, the college classroom can replicate this kind of rebirth: reading, writing, critical dialogue, moral challenge.
    • Students unlearn propaganda, challenge assumptions, and write their way into adulthood.
    • Education becomes a confrontation with self, not a presentation of self.

    VII. Counterargument: Isn’t College Itself a Branding Game Now?

    • Acknowledge the growing trend of college as a résumé-builder, a branding ritual.
    • Rebuttal: These pressures exist, but they don’t nullify the potential. Professors, books, and real intellectual work still offer space for transformation—if students are willing to engage.

    VIII. Why Authentic Reinvention Matters Now

    • The stakes are higher than ever: misinformation, polarization, and performative wokeness are rampant.
    • We don’t need more self-marketers; we need people who’ve undergone intellectual and moral development.
    • Douglass and Malcolm X remind us that the self is not something you launch—it’s something you build.

    IX. Conclusion

    • Reiterate the contrast: shallow, cosmetic reinvention vs. meaningful transformation through literacy and education.
    • Douglass and Malcolm X stand as enduring proof that education changes lives in ways that last.
    • Final thought: In an age of digital fakery, the classroom remains one of the last sacred spaces for becoming someone real.
  • Confessions of a Muscled Impostor: How Not Knowing How to Teach Made Me a Better Teacher

    Confessions of a Muscled Impostor: How Not Knowing How to Teach Made Me a Better Teacher

    I was twenty-four, had zero pedagogical training, and was entirely unqualified to teach college writing. That, of course, made me the perfect hire for Merritt College’s emergency “bridge” program at Skyline High School, a gig none of the seasoned professors wanted. My only credential? A shiny new Master’s in English and a well-placed friend whose father was a desperate administrator. If nepotism were an Olympic sport, I’d have taken gold.

    Truthfully, I had no intention of ever teaching. I wanted to be a novelist, famous and feared, spinning tales about neurotics and grotesques while charming the world with my lexical brilliance. But the novels weren’t going anywhere except maybe the recycling bin, and I was making peanuts at a snooty Berkeley wine store, where all of us over-educated slackers pretended we were too brilliant for regular jobs.

    So, guilt-tripped by childhood memories of swimming in my friend’s pool, I took the job.

    Lacking any actual teaching chops, I improvised. I gave long, baroque vocabulary lectures, using Nabokovian polysyllables illustrated by grotesque anecdotes. “Sycophant” became the story of a vomit-covered airline lackey too deferential to wipe himself off. “Serendipitous” was illustrated by a teenager fishing a silver dollar out of a toilet during a disco brawl. “Lugubrious”? Richard Lewis, alone on Thanksgiving, eating turkey in a black armband. The kids loved it. And it ate up class time like a champ.

    When vocab stories weren’t enough, I filled the silence with tales from my bodybuilding days and recycled material from my failed novels. My biceps did the rest. I intimidated my way through teaching—jacking iron before class to maintain a physique that made other instructors mistake me for the wrestling coach. They kept their distance. Good. I didn’t want anyone close enough to realize I had no idea what I was doing.

    I became friends with my students, especially the ones who played basketball with me after school. We’d hoop at Merritt College with my boombox blaring The Cocteau Twins. So much for maintaining professional boundaries.

    We were all poor. I saw them at Laundry Land. We shared shameful nods while “Seasons Change” played on loop from the jukebox. I was no role model. Just a dude schlepping a mesh laundry bag and trying not to spill detergent on his Cocteau Twins T-shirt.

    Collaborative learning was a disaster. No one read the handouts. Group projects devolved into gossip-fests. Points meant nothing. I might as well have been offering them coupons for discounted paper towels.

    Yet, somehow, I kept getting hired. I was the adjunct version of a touring rock band, dragging my briefcases from one campus to another, mixing up lectures, and still receiving praise from students for being “brilliant.” I couldn’t believe it either.

    Eventually, I got a full-time lectureship in California’s Central Valley, where rent was cheap and I could finally trade in my Toyota Tercel for an Acura Integra, as any insecure man-child would. I thought I’d made it. I bought pirate shirts from mail-order catalogs and confused this consumer charade for fulfillment. I was, in short, a highly literate buffoon.

    And then—somewhere in that desert—I learned to shut up and listen.

    I met Kong, a pre-med student who told me how his father, a professor in Cambodia, had saved his life by pushing him on a raft into the river, seconds before being executed by the Khmer Rouge. Kong had survived, emigrated, and was now calmly acing my class while radiating a sense of gratitude and grit I couldn’t fake on my best day.

    I met Evelyn, whose South Korean parents had given up wealth and comfort so she and her sister could study in America. They worked a dry-cleaning job in obscurity so Evelyn could ace her papers in my class, all with grace and humility that made my “me me me” inner monologue shrink in shame.

    Then there was Kim, abandoned by her addict parents and raised in chaos, now a young mother herself. She told me something I’ll never forget: by loving her daughter, she became the mother she never had. I left my office that day, fell to my knees, and asked God to forgive me for being a colossal dumbass.

    These students—these warriors of resilience—taught me what no pedagogy seminar ever could. Teaching wasn’t about syllabi or academic jargon. It was about listening. Really listening.

    So yes, I was an impostor. But I was an impostor who learned. And that, I think, made all the difference.

  • HOW DO WE ASSESS STUDENT LEARNING IN THE AGE OF AI?

    HOW DO WE ASSESS STUDENT LEARNING IN THE AGE OF AI?

    One of my colleagues—an expert in technology and education, and thus perpetually stuck in the trenches of this AI circus—must have noticed I’d taken on the role of ChatGPT’s most aggrieved critic. I’d been flooding her inbox with meticulously crafted, panic-laced mini manifestos about how these AI platforms were invading my classroom like a digital plague. But instead of telling me to get a grip or, better yet, stop emailing her altogether, she came up with an ingenious way for me to process my AI anxieties. Her solution? “Why not channel that nervous energy into a Spring Flex Activity on AI in teaching?”

    Naturally, because misery loves company, she signed on to co-present. The date was locked—mid-February 2025. A few months to go, plenty of time to prepare… or so I thought.

    Three months earlier in November, I was already deep into crafting a masterpiece of a Google Slides presentation, proudly titled: “Ten Approaches to Making AI-Resistant Writing Prompts: Resisting the AI Takeover.” It was focused, practical, and dripping with tech-savvy authority. I was convinced I had nailed it. I would be the knight in shining armor, defending academia from an algorithmic apocalypse.

    But a tiny voice in the back of my head kept nagging: “You do realize ChatGPT has a faster upgrade schedule than your iPhone, right?” Every time I’d tested my so-called AI-resistant strategies, the platform would recognize its weaknesses, evolve, and then laugh in my face. Still, I chose to ignore that voice and basked in my fleeting sense of triumph.

    Then came January. I pulled up my Google Slides to rehearse my presentation and felt the full weight of my hubris. My “cutting-edge” strategies were already about as relevant as an AOL dial-up manual. The AI arms race had advanced, and my presentation was now a quaint little relic—a reminder that in the war against AI, obsolescence isn’t just a risk. It’s the default setting.

    Let me walk you through my three brilliant strategies for giving students AI-resistant writing assignments—strategies that crumbled faster than a cookie in a chatbot’s clutches over the course of three short months.

    Strategy One: Have students summarize an essay with signal phrases, in-depth analysis, and in-text citations. Why? Because ChatGPT couldn’t handle that level of academic finesse. Or so I thought. Fast forward three months, and now the bot churns out MLA-perfect citations with smug precision and rhetorical flair, like it’s gunning for a tenure-track position.

    Strategy Two: Ban clichés and stock phrases. Simple, right? Wrong. Students can now binge-watch YouTube tutorials that teach them how to reprogram ChatGPT to “write with originality” and bypass every plagiarism detection tool I can throw at them. It’s like handing them a cheat code labeled: “Creative Nonsense, Now AI-Enhanced!”

    Strategy Three: Require current references. My reasoning? ChatGPT was stuck in a time warp with outdated sources. But wouldn’t you know it? The bot got a data upgrade and now pulls research so fresh it practically smells like new car leather.

    In sum, ChatGPT is a shape-shifting Hydra of academic trickery. Any technique I recommend today will be obsolete by the time you finish your coffee. So, yes—presenting a guide on “AI-resistant” strategies would be like publishing a survival manual for Jurassic Park and then as you’re dashing into the parking lot to get inside your car, you’re eaten by a velociraptor.

    So, what exactly was my Flex Day presentation supposed to be about? Since playing tug-of-war with AI’s ever-evolving powers was a losing battle, I decided it was time to pivot. Instead of chasing after futile strategies to “beat” AI, the real question became: what’s our role as instructors in a world where students—and everyone else—are increasingly outsourcing their cognitive load to machines? More importantly, how do we assess student learning when AI tools are rapidly becoming part of everyday life?

    To stay relevant, we have to confront four key questions:

    1. How do we assess how effective the students are at using AI-writing tools? Are they wielding ChatGPT like a scalpel or a sledgehammer? Are they correctly using ChatGPT as a sidekick to assist their human-generated writing, or have they fallen back on their lazy default setting to produce a “Genie Essay” in which ChatGPT materializes a cheap surface-level essay in “the blink of an eye”?
    2. How do we create a grading rubric that separates “higher-order thinking” from surface-level drivel? The difference between a real argument and a ChatGPT-generated one is both profound and crucial—one is a meaningful persuader, the other a stochastic parrot (imitates language mindlessly and randomly).
    3. How do we create a grading rubric that discourages the dreaded Uncanny Valley Effect in student writing? You know, that eerie sensation you get when an essay seems human at first glance but is just slightly “off,” like a malfunctioning Stepford paper that reeks of academic dishonesty.
    4. What uniquely human tasks can we assign in class (online or face-to-face) to measure real learning? Spoiler: If the answer is a formulaic five-paragraph essay, you’re already in trouble.

    If we can answer these questions, maybe—just maybe—we’ll stop grading assignments that feel like AI-generated fever dreams and start nurturing authentic learning again.

    Questions one through three pertain to how we grade the students’ writing and define our expectations in the form of a grading rubric. When it comes to assessing students’ use of AI machines as collaborative helpers in their writing, we don’t get to see how they work at home. We only see the final product: a portion of their essay that we have assigned, like an introduction and thesis paragraph, or the entire manuscript. 

    Let us assume that every student is using an open-platform AI tool. We need a grading rubric that separates the desirable “AI-sidekick essay” from the “AI-genie essay.” To make this separation, we need an AI-Grading Rubric, which should address the following features of writing quality:

    1. Is the language clear, rhetorically appropriate, and conducive to creating a strong authorial presence or is it mostly AI-signature cliches and stock phrases?
    2. Does the essay explore the messy human side of an issue with higher-order thought, meaning, nuance, and blood, sweat, and tears, or does it smack of an AI-signature facile, glib, surface-level, cookie-cutter Wikipedia-like superficial bot piece? 
    3. Does the essay appear to be an authentic expression of strong authorial presence or does it have that creepy Uncanny Valley Effect? 

    For any kind of grading rubric to be effective, you will have to give your students contrasting essay models, which can be scrutinized in class and posted on Canvas: 

    1. Sidekick Essay Vs. Genie Essay
    2. Strong Authorial Presence Vs. Cringe-Worthy AI Surface-Level Presence
    3. An essay that is so deep in meaning and nuance that it transcends the original topic and speaks to larger human concerns vs. a glib surface-level essay that has somehow managed to take a sophisticated topic and reduce it to a fifth-grade cookie-cutter argument. 

    A crucial thing to acknowledge as you make the rubric is that you’re assuming students are using AI in some way or another. Your purpose isn’t to “catch them in the act of plagiarism.” Rather, your purpose is to focus on the quality of their writing. They may be using AI effectively and ethically. They may be using AI ineffectively and dubiously. Or they may be using it somewhere in between. The final measure of how they used AI will be evident in the quality of their work, which will be measured against your grading rubric. 

    Aside from assessing your students’ work in the AI Age, you want them to engage in coursework that is uniquely human and cannot be replicated by AI. I recommend the following:

    One. Integrate Personal Writing in an Argumentative Essay: Your students can begin an argumentative essay with an attention-getting hook based on their personal experience. For example, I teach Cal Newport’s book So Good They Can’t Ignore You in which he argues that pursuing your career based on passion as your first criteria is a dangerous premise with a large failure rate while pursuing a craftsman mindset renders higher career success and happiness. My students defend, refute, or complicate Newport’s claim. In their opening paragraph, they write about their own career quest, based on passion or something else, or they observe someone else they know who is struggling to choose a career based on passion or another criteria. 

    Two. Have students interview each other and process those interviews into an introduction paragraph. This can be done in the classroom, or if the class is online, the students can interview each other on the Canvas chat app Pronto. For example, I show my students the documentary Becoming Frederick Douglass and the Jordan Peele movie Get Out and the students have to interview each other with the purpose of writing an extended definition of “The Sunken Place,” as a condition of hellish confinement, and “The North Star,” as a condition of freedom and enlightenment. These definitions will be present in their essays as they compare the themes of Frederick Douglass’s journey to the journey in Get Out.  

    Three. Use multimodal composition assignments. What this means is that in addition to your students submitting an essay, they also submit other media expressions of the assignment. For example, if they are writing an essay about “The Sunken Place” in the movie Get Out, their essay would be accompanied by a YouTube video in which they give an oral presentation of their essay. Another example of multimodal composition is to pair students who are debating an argument. Each student takes an opposing side and they hash it out on either a YouTube video or a homemade podcast. 

    If I had to guess, multimodal composition is going to scale over the next decade. Not only does it measure student achievement in uniquely human ways, it gives students the opportunity to use a variety of media tools that they will probably have to master in their career. 

    Four. Before the completed essay is due, have students write a one-page meta-analysis of the assignment in which they describe the ways the assignment made them anxious, frustrated, and confused; and other ways the assignment made them feel curious and changed their understanding of a topic they may or may not have thought about before. The purpose of this assignment is to make students look at the assignment from a radically different way and engage in the creative process, rumination, baking ideas over time, and realizing that ideas don’t crystallize into absolutes. Rather, ideas are open to change and the more they change and mature, the more deep and valuable they become. 

    I got this idea from reading Questlove’s Creative Quest. In the book, he recalls a nightly ritual with his parents: After dinner, they would spend two hours immersed in his father’s colossal record collection—every genre imaginable. His dad, a doo-wop musician from the 1950s, didn’t treat those records like sacred relics. Oh no, they were living, breathing works-in-progress. To Questlove, they were the analog version of Google Docs—always open for revision and reinvention. “The thing about records,” he writes, “was that they didn’t feel like closed ideas. They were ideas you could open and ideas you could use.”

    As I reflected on this elegant creative tradition, I was hit by a wave of melancholy. Why? Because this ritual was steeped in abundance—abundance of love, of time, and of joy in creativity for creativity’s sake, without the specter of deadlines or profit lurking around every corner. Questlove’s parents gave him space to explore art as a lifelong conversation, not a product.

    Now cut to me, the college instructor, trying to preach that same gospel of creative abundance to my students—students who shuffle into class like zombies after working double shifts and raising kids. They’re sleep-deprived, haven’t eaten since yesterday’s granola bar, and are already bracing for another round of minimum-wage survival. And here I am, waxing poetic about how they should “let their ideas germinate over time” like artisanal sourdough. Worse yet, I’m promoting multimodal composition—assignments so elaborate, they’re one drone shot away from being a Netflix mini-series. Yeah, that’s gonna land well.

    The truth is, creativity—real, human creativity—requires time. And time is a privilege most of my students just don’t have. So, as I build my course content, I have to factor this reality in. Otherwise, I’m just another academic blowhard asking students to perform miracles on the fumes of a 20-minute nap and half a bag of stale pretzels.

  • Teaching College Writing in the Age of AI

    Teaching College Writing in the Age of AI

    Recently, the English Department had one of those “brown bag” sessions—an optional gathering where instructors actually show up because the topic is like a flashing red light on the education highway. This particular crisis-in-the-making? AI. Would writing tools that millions were embracing at exponential speed render our job obsolete? The room was packed with nervous, coffee-chugging professors, myself included, all bracing for a Pandora’s box of AI-fueled dilemmas. They tossed scenario after scenario at us, and the existential angst was palpable.

    First up: What do you do when a foreign language student submits an essay written in their native tongue, then let’s play translator? Is it cheating? Does the term “English Department” even make sense anymore when our Los Angeles campus sounds like a United Nations general assembly? Are we teaching “English,” or are we, more accurately, teaching “the writing process” to people of many languages with AI now tagging along as a co-author?

    Next came the AI Tsunami, a term we all seemed to embrace with a mix of dread and resignation. What do we do when we’ve reached the point that 90% of the essays we receive are peppered with AI speak so robotic it sounds like Siri decided to write a term paper? We were all skeptical about AI detectors—about as reliable as a fortune teller reading tea leaves. I shared my go-to strategy: Instead of accusing a student of cheating (because who has time for that drama?), I simply leave a comment, dripping with professional distaste: “Your essay reeks of AI-generated nonsense. I’m giving it a D because I cannot, in good conscience, grade this higher. If you’d like to rewrite it with actual human effort, be my guest.” The room nodded in approval.

    But here’s the thing: The real existential crisis hit when we realized that the hardworking, honest students are busting their butts for B’s, while the tech-savvy slackers are gaming the system, walking away with A’s by running their bland prose through the AI carwash. The room buzzed with a strange mixture of outrage and surrender—because let’s be honest, at least the grammar and spelling errors are nearly extinct.

    As I walked out of that meeting, I had a new writing prompt simmering in my head for my students: “Write an argumentative essay exploring how AI platforms like ChatGPT will reshape education. Project how these technologies might be used in the future and consider the ethical lines that AI use blurs. Should we embrace AI as a tool, or do we need hard rules to curb its misuse? Address academic integrity, critical thinking, and whether AI widens or narrows the education gap.”

    When I got home later that day, in a fit of efficiency, I stuffed my car with a mountain of e-waste—ancient laptops, decrepit tablets, and cell phones that could double as paperweights—and headed to the City of Torrance E-Waste Drive. The line of cars stretched for what seemed like miles, all of us dutifully purging our electronic skeletons to make room for the latest AI-compatible toys. As I waited, I tuned into a podcast with Mark Cuban chatting with Bill Maher, and Cuban was adamant: AI will never be regulated because it’s America’s golden goose for global dominance. And there I was, sitting in a snaking line of vehicles, all of us unwitting soldiers in the tech wars, dumping our outdated gadgets like a 21st-century arms race.

    As I edged closer to the dumpster, I imagined ripping open my shirt to reveal a Captain America emblem beneath, fully embracing the ridiculousness of it all. This wasn’t just teaching anymore—it was a revolution. And if I was going to lead it, I’d need to be like Moses descending from Mt. Sinai, armed with the Tablets of AI Laws. Without these laws, I’d be as helpless as a fish flopping on a dry riverbank. To face the coming storm unprepared wasn’t just unwise; it was professional malpractice. My survival depended on it.

  • When We Had to Get Approval from the Attendance Priestess

    When We Had to Get Approval from the Attendance Priestess

    I don’t miss the pre-digital education era when the semester was over but I still wasn’t finished. I had to drag myself to the campus during the semester break, lugging a mountain of paper that looked like it had survived the apocalypse.

    My stack of grades and attendance records—yellowed, dog-eared, and adorned with enough coffee stains and White-Out smudges to pass as a Jackson Pollock reject—was a bureaucratic nightmare in physical form. I found myself in line with a hundred other sleep-deprived, caffeine-fueled professors, each clutching their own messy masterpieces like they were carrying the Dead Sea Scrolls. The line outside the Office of Records was so long it could have served as an endurance test for Navy SEALs. To stave off starvation and existential dread, I had packed a comically oversized sack of protein bars and apples, as if I were preparing for a month-long siege rather than a simple bureaucratic ritual.

    There I was, supposed to be basking in the sweet, sweet nothingness of semester break, but instead, I was condemned to a gauntlet of waiting that made Dante’s Inferno look like a walk in the park. For what felt like hours, waited for the privilege of sitting at a table and enduring the laser-like glare of humorless bureaucrats who would scrutinize my records as if they were forensic experts analyzing evidence from a high-profile murder case.

    Once I finally managed to wade through the outdoor line, I advanced to the foyer for the second, even more soul-crushing phase of The Great Wait. Inside, rows of desks manned by expressionless drones awaited, each one peering over piles of grading records that seemed to stretch back to the dawn of civilization. Behind the staff of functionaries who examined the professors’ gradebooks were towers of file boxes stacked so precariously that a single sneeze could have transformed them into a cataclysmic eruption of dust and possibly asbestos.

    Eventually, I was summoned to one of the desks where an eagle-eyed Attendance Priestess scrutinized my records with the intensity of a customs officer suspecting I had smuggled contraband. She licked her fingertips with the solemnity of a high priestess preparing for a sacred ritual, only to cast me a look of such disdain you’d think I’d just handed her a wad of toilet paper instead of my gradebook.

    Finally, when the pinch-faced administrator deemed my records sufficiently unblemished and granted me the bureaucratic blessing to leave, it felt like I had just been handed the keys to the Pearly Gates. I then sprinted to my car unless she changed her mind and needed me to edit this or that. I never fully trusted her.