Quick Disclaimer: For everyone who saw the blog post about me pirating articles, no you didn’t.

And if you really insist that you saw it—

it was AI—

not me confusing my blogs.

Now go on about your business.

I actually wanted to start with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story.” When I first started teaching, in the heat of the 2024 election race, I actually used to play this video for my students. I did a few things with this video:

1. First off I used it as an introduction to our narrative unit. My students were expected to write college essays. I used this video in an attempt to shift the impression the students had of college applications. While the resume and transcript tell one story, they have an entire life of stories that affected those two documents. I tried stressing the importance of the college essay to counter any obstacles their transcript or resume might create. “Oh, you failed a class, well you lost a loved one the month prior.” “Oh, you’ve never had a job, well you had to take care of your siblings.” “Oh, you never participated in a club, well you had to work to support yourself because your parents kicked you out.” I think this video did a good job segueing into these conversations.
2. I also juxtaposed this video with twitter posts, and a video of a certain P*dophile, claiming that immigrants were eating dogs and cats. Using the context of “The Danger of a Single Story,” students were able to see the real world implications of what Ngozi Adichie was saying.

All this to say, I have a history with this video.

It was pretty refreshing to watch it again and I liked the side-by-side of it and the “Queer Theory in the Writing Classroom” article by Jonathan Alexander & Michelle Gibson.

While I try to be a very inclusive teacher, I never considered the difference between inclusion and criticality. While I do try to pull diverse text, like All Boys Aren’t Blue; however, I didn’t think about acknowledging how the excerpts are impacted by the unique perspective of the author.

It’s the same thing with the way the students are learning to write. Some students have certain mannerisms, or use certain vocabulary, that are frowned upon by Engfish (Callback ftw.)

I think, going forward, I’m going to have to reanalyze the way that I include LGBTQIA+ literature in the curriculum, especially since were going into memoir/college essays again.

Until next time, Dear Reader.

Disclaimer: For all intents and purposes, especially for the purposes of a legal matter, all of the following is a joke. Again, any references to any hypothetical theft, piracy, or crimes (punishable by law within the fifty states of the United States of America) are purely hypothetical scenarios made in jest in order to entertain an audience. The persons and events in this blog are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons or events is unintentional. Please don’t sue or arrest me. I’m broke and too pretty for jail.

Anywhoseits, on a completely unrelated note, I refuse to pay the NYT, or any other major news corporation for that matter, any amount of money in order to read a document. (And before you say anything, the writers have already been paid! Any money I hypothetically did not spend on the subscription would have gone to the the shareholders and upper management.) It’s also just so much fun. If you wonder where I get this sentiment from, please watch the video below.

In order to circumvent this, I may have, possibly, allegedly, hypothetically, stolen a bunch of articles for my thesis. I currently, may, have about 45 articles hidden in a google drive folder. I definitely didn’t do this by clicking on the article then hitting command+A before the paywall arose. And I would never open up a blank google doc and paste everything into that. And I most certainly didn’t go through each article to get rid of the ads and find more victims articles. I definitely wouldn’t recommend anyone do the same.

“Freedom is so much the essence of man that even its opponents implement it while combating its reality; they want to appropriate for, themselves as a most precious ornament what they have rejected as an ornament of human nature.” -Karl Marx

How’d that get there?

Now that I have finished my, entirely hypothetical, warning of what not to do when finding sources, let me get to what I have actually done.

So, for those who don’t know, my plan is to write a speculative horror fiction anthology focusing on the impact LLMs are having within writing centric spaces. I am drawing inspiration from works like Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone, and The News (Dun Dun duhhhh). By “The News” I mean that I only want to use events that have already happened or have a foundation in things already happening, similar to the approach Atwood took to Handmaid’s Tale.

““Somebody asked me on Twitter recently, ‘How do you come up with this shit?’ My answer was, ‘It’s not me who has come up with it, it’s the human race over the past 4,000 years.'” – Margaret Atwood

The section I am working on right now hits particularly close to home. The chapter follows a teacher who, over the course of a year, is replaced by the very AI she trained. There are a few precedents I am drawing on as inspiration for this story.

1. There is a large push in the education field to integrate AI into both our professional practices and the classroom. We are being told to use programs like Chat and Magic school to create resources, lesson plans, and activities for our classroom. At the same time, they are telling us to have students use AI chat rooms for activities and project creation.
2. Earlier this year, Melania Trump praised AI in the field of education and suggested that it could/should replace teachers in the classroom. (Which is ironic, coming from one of two first ladies who hasn’t completed a degree since 1897.)
3. While Linda McMahon disagrees that teachers should be replaced, she does cosign that it should be integrated into the curriculum and classroom environment. (Also ironic, considering the fact that she has never actually taught a class.)

My general virtial for the government aside, the move towards AI being a staple in the classroom is terrifying.

So the plan is to draw on that sense of dread that I experience that keeps me up every night, staring into the dark abyss, contemplating my existence. Write what you know and what not.

I want to give a special shout out to Dr. Sisler! Dr. Sisler has helped me a lot with establishing a basis for the research. She was nice enough to send me some links to articles (for legal purposes, these links are completely unrelated to any links mentioned in the prior, completely made up, story.) that really helped when it came down to a starting point for the research.

I’m having fun writing it, so far, and I’m excited for what the other stories have in store.

Until next time, Dear Reader.

So, reading through “Teaching as a process not product” gave me triggered some PTSD.

Story time.

Last year we had a change of curriculum. Typically, we would start the year with narrative writing. (Personally, I think this is the best way to start. Its a lot of low stakes writing. The kids can draw on their own experiences. And it’s just more fun in general. Anywhoseits.) For whatever reason they changed it last minute, and I mean a week and a half into the first marking period, to literary analysis. Now one may assume that this isn’t a huge shift. I mean, we were going to do literary analysis for the second marking period so what’s the difference?

When I tell you it was huge, the difference was monstrous.

While I love me some Shakespeare, and I think my dramatic readings are on point, but good god trying to teach students to write with Hamlet was like pulling my own nails out with rusty pliers. There are a lot of things I think the students can learn from Shakespeare— if they have the foundations for it. Without that foundation, though, these guys were absolutely lost.

Now this is an extremely long way of agreeing with Murray. While it is important that we teach the cannon, it isn’t the best way to teach students to write. I like the way that Murray broke things down to writing in 3 stages: Prewriting, Writing, and Rewriting.

I can also appreciate how he tells us to shut up. I think a lot of people, myself included, spend so much time filling the air that students don’t have the chance to actually put any of it into practice. I’ve tried consciously making space for students to write and it seems to be working.

To avoid ranting for too long, I’m gonna wrap this part up by just saying that the implications are completely accurate. It’s funny that I did a lot of these prior to reading the paper, but seeing it in this context, it did make me consider the way my colleagues run their classrooms. While they do excellent work, I do think there’s a difference in the way students grow over the course of the year.

Then there was the tie in with Bell Hooks. Another flash of PTSD from my days as an education major. I have had plenty of experience with the philosophies proposed by Mrs. Watkins. There is a common theme of student centered teaching, similar to what Murray proposed. I think this is a crucial mindset for all teachers, especially english teachers, to have.

A big hurdle we are facing as educators is a general apathy towards the learning experience. For a lot of students, it’s really just a means to an end. I think shifting the focus from testing centered, which is really where we currently are as a discipline, to one that focuses on students’ intellectual identities. By giving students autonomy in their learning, with teachers still acting as a guiding hand, we can further encourage students to develope their own voice and writing style, as well as a passion for writing.

It is kind of like the activity we did in class the other day. We each have two different birthplaces for our writing. While some did enjoy the academic writing, and there is no shade in that, a few of us did find our passion outside of the classroom in more creative environments. This is what Mrs. Watkins is suggesting we adopt as a practice and I would like to cosign this.

Anyway, that was a bit of a rant. Sorry!

Until next time Dear Reader!