u/NoPatNoDontSitonThat

For ENG 102, I have always incorporated some theory into the course material so that students can work with conceptual frameworks when constructing arguments.

My main two readings come from Bakhtin in his discussion of signs and ideology and Foucault's panopticon with an excerpt from Discipline and Punish. I use Zizek's video clip on They Live to get the ball rolling with ideology.

It's not that I don't find value in these readings, and I do see how they affect my writing classroom in interesting ways. Having my students start to unpack a Black Mirror episode and Orwell's 1984 with the concepts is always fun because I start to see a little twinkle of critical thought emerging in the room.

But...I'm teaching ideology. I'm teaching perspectives that I don't jive with.

However, I cannot imagine using Deleuze and Guattari's work in a freshman composition class. The Bakhtin and Foucault concepts are really easy for them to understand and apply.

So would you recommend I keep going as is considering I think the work Bakhtin and Foucault are doing is working well?

Or, as a Deleuzian, should I look at adapting it to something else?

Anyone with experience with something like this?

I've tried the past few years to curtail the use of AI in my writing classes. I teach composition, and it's just so easy for students to use AI.

My most effective strategy has been to have them handwrite their drafts in class. That takes so much time from the course. Readings, lectures, class discussions, groupwork--the small moments that make a class a class are constrained to the point that they don't feel like they're doing much.

I can do a flipped model and post instruction online, but I don't think they'll watch them. My lectures are always best when they're interactive and more of a "group discussion" kind of thing.

So I'm staring right now at my course schedule and wavering between "handwrite and lose a lot of class time" and "do small writing tasks in class and let them finish at home knowing they'll use AI."

I feel like there's a greater impact on students as thinkers when the in-class portion of the-writing process is emphasized. Handwriting drafts emphasizes the final product, which doesn't do much in terms of their intellectual development.

Anyways, mostly venting here. Any suggestions?

I know this was a topic yesterday, but that thread was more about the speculation. It's official today that NCTE is de-chartering CCCCs. I admit that I am not an administrator nor lawyer, so I'm not sure if de-charter is different from dissolve.

Here's the email that was sent out:

>The NCTE Executive Committee acknowledges the communications it has received from many members of the community regarding CCCC.

>For many years, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) played a critical role in serving the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and its mission. In recent years, however, CCCC has struggled with its fiscal sustainability, declining participation, and governance challenges. As a result, earlier today the Executive Committee of NCTE made the difficult decision to de-charter its special topics conference CCCC. To clarify, today’s decision to de-charter does not mean that NCTE has altered its commitment to supporting teachers at the college and university level. This is exemplified by the fact that the NCTE College Section is thriving. The process in making this decision spanned several years, with attempts to work collaboratively with CCCC’s executive committees across multiple iterations. While the organization appreciates the years of collaboration with CCCC, after deep evaluation and thoughtful consideration, the Executive Committee concluded this step was necessary to more effectively serve the college English and writing and composition community and NCTE membership as a whole.

>Although this has been a very difficult decision, we are excited about the future. This change will allow us to provide better support to the college English and writing and composition community. In the coming days and weeks, we will be working hard to make this transition as smooth as possible. We thank CCCC, its leaders, and its members for its many years of contributions and look forward to continuing to involve the composition, rhetoric, and writing communities as we move forward. NCTE remains devoted to improving the teaching and learning of English and the language arts at all levels of education. As future planning takes place, NCTE will communicate updates.

>A transition team focused on supporting composition, rhetoric, and writing studies will be named by the NCTE Executive Committee imminently.

As someone with an MA in rhet/comp and dissertating for a PhD in curriculum & instruction, this is a wild turn of events. 4Cs has always been one of the big conferences to present at if you're in rhet/comp.

TL;DR - My father needs triple bypass surgery and my mother is disabled. Prior to finding out about the heart surgery, they put their house on the market and moved out to a travel trailer in an RV park by the interstate. Instead of moving back home for rehab and recovery, they're going to leave my disabled mother alone in the travel trailer while my dad goes to a rehab facility for however long he needs. They assume the doctor and health insurance will support this. Every time we bring up holes in their plan, they offload the problems to other people that they have not spoken to about any of this. I think they assume that I will come save them, and I don't have the ability to. I also refuse to when any and all of the potential problems they might have are easily solved by them moving back home.

———————————————————————————— Is this just aging and cognitive decline? Or is it the Boomer generation living up to their reputation of being stubborn, selfish assholes who insist on having their cake and eating it too? I'd be more inclined to say cognitive decline if there wasn't ample evidence of this kind of bullshit behavior throughout the entire course of my life.

My father (67) found out he needs triple bypass surgery, and my mother (66) is disabled. She has a host of conditions including an autoimmune disease that prevents her from driving. She has had multiple instances where she suddenly needs to spend up to a week in the hospital. Just last April, she was practically catatonic due to a reaction to a medication and they had to call 911 for an ambulance to take her to the hospital.

In May, they decided to sell their house so that they could downsize to something smaller. I highly encouraged this because their current house is two stories in addition to a large basement and requires a lot of work for upkeep. It's also in a neighborhood with a lot of hills, and they've felt constrained in being able to go out and walk during the day. Again, this is a great decision and I told them I would help in any ways I could.

Instead of listing their already beautiful, updated, well maintained home, they let their realtor convince them to do a whole list of upgrades. She also told them they could get top dollar if they staged the house. She also convinced them that they needed to sell this summer to get top dollar because this is when families are looking for houses before the school year.

They took out a $25k refresh loan that needs to be paid back with equity of the sale OR with $2200/month payment starting in October. But the realtor convinced them this was the way to sell their house. (Side note - they have emergency savings that could pay off the loan. They refuse to because they're convinced the house is going to sell.)

10 days on the market, the realtor told them to drop the price. Yes, I am fully aware that the realtor should be blamed for some of this bullshit. However, my parents misled me on multiple of these points. At first, they just needed * a few* upgrades and then they were doing most of it themselves and then they were just spending some of their savings and then they were taking out a little bit of a loan to pay for it. If they had been upfront about how much they were spending, I would have stepped in to tell them how it was all unnecessary and dangerous for them to take this risk. Not to mention, because they're downsizing, they threw away a bunch of their furniture and stored everything else in a storage unit.

They moved out of their house and are staying in a small travel trailer in an RV park right off the interstate. It's nice and new but it is tiny.

And sure enough, the house hasn't sold and my father found out he needs triple bypass surgery.

Okay...so here's where shit hits the fan. They are REFUSING to move back to their house for his surgery recovery. They're convinced his doctor and insurance are going to let him stay in a rehab facility for 4-6 weeks. They're convinced it will be a nice rehab facility where nice nurses will provide great care for him. I actually think he will be in a rehab facility for a while but not as long as he thinks. I also know from experience with my wife's parents that these rehab facilities can quickly go south in terms of quality of care.

My mother is saying she'll be fine in the travel trailer by herself. She'll use Instacart for food and get rides as needed to visit my father in rehab.

I told them this isn't acceptable and that we had a better solution.

Through my wife's parents' issues (they're hitting 80), we found a lovely home service that will take care of the elderly for a modest price ($35/hour). They've been wonderful taking care of my wife's father who has dementia and letting her mother have breaks from being his primary caretaker. They play games, watch TV, cook, do basic cleaning, pick out clothes, drive places--pretty much anything outside of medical services or maid services.

So the logical solution here is put the house sale on hold, move back home, hire the home service to take care of my mom, and get my dad through the 8-12 weeks of rehab and recovery.

They're refusing.

Every time I bring up potential contingencies in their plan, they offload the responsibility onto someone else. "Oh so and so would come get me." "Have you called them about this?" "No and I don't want to bother them with anything if it's not necessary." "When's the last time you talked to them?" "About a year ago."

That does NOT work.

This is a dangerous situation. She's disabled and needs care.

And what if the house sells? What if they sell the house and they dismiss him early from rehab? Where will they go?

"Oh, we'll go to a hotel." "What hotel?" "One that has a kitchen." "Which one?" "We don't need to figure that out yet."

My wife and I staged an intervention and had a long conversation with them, and they were so stubborn about everything we were saying.

I eventually had to say -- "Look, I cannot bring you here. We just started a kitchen renovation that is going to take 4-6 weeks. I will not have a working kitchen that can service someone with special needs. We have two young kids who I am not going to ask to shack up and give up their rooms when you have a lovely house to go home to. My wife and I have jobs that we cannot leave. I cannot on a whim suddenly need to take off any extended time from work to save you or take care of you if something goes wrong. None of this is necessary. You need to move back home and wait at least 6 weeks before resuming the listing so that all of the potential problems are taken care of during this difficult time."

My mother looked at me and said, "I need you to hear me. We are NOT going back home. They house MUST sell."

It's mind boggling to see them want to have their cake and eat it too. Directly after our conversation, they went right back to browsing Zillow talking about houses they liked. Like, within minutes of an intense conversation that apparently didn't give them any pause.

I feel like they're banking on me coming to save them for these decisions. They kept naming people that would assumedly drop their own lives to come take care of them.

When all of this is easily solved with moving back home for a little bit and hiring home services. All of it.

So I refuse to feel guilty for saying no. My wife is stressed the hell out because she's convinced they'll eventually call me and when they do, I'll be unable to leave them hanging. But I don't know. I think my only effort is going to be to drive her to assisted living because they are obviously unable to help themselves.

You can find the total write up on his socials. It’s a very involved, scientific-based post on how they discovered it and their innovative method for treating it.

I’m mostly posting it for news sake, but in terms of discussion, I think it’s interesting how something like chronic atrophic gastritis typically goes undiagnosed and is often treated as something you just have to live with. Even with Bryan’s years of intense testing and rigid protocol, it took until now for them to figure out what’s going on with his iron issues and his symptoms.

I think it has to be a bit of a wake up call for him, right? Not necessarily in the “I’m going to die” sense but at least in the reality that the modern methods available to us now cannot account for the myriad issues that may arise in our health. This news comes at the same time I found out my dad is needing triple bypass surgery. His health at 67 was stellar but atherosclerosis crept up on him without him having any idea. Granted, he could have gone through more extensive testing, but based on the measurements he felt were sufficient, he was in the dark to the reality of what was brewing underneath. We’re all in the similar boats in the current scheme of things.

Another interesting aspect is Bryan’s treatment of his condition. Being an autoimmune disease, the doctors typically leave it alone. They can address some basic symptoms but not cure the underlying cause(s). Bryan’s team with the help of AI is going to take on his autoimmune disease to see if he can be “cured,” which would be a monumental achievement of the Blueprint protocol. On an opposite end of the medical and scientific conversation are the carnivorists suggesting Bryan give up Veganism. Mikhaila Peterson was the only (somewhat) prominent name suggesting it. While I don’t believe carnivore is ever an answer, I have wondered if Bryan would ever give up Veganism if the literature or even immediate anecdotal evidence suggested adding meat would help with his specific measurables and issues.

Anyways, thoughts (and prayers if you’re the praying type) to Bryan.

I'm teaching freshman composition, and I feel like I'm doing a poor job of teaching students to use sources. I provide direct instruction with model texts and give opportunities for practice and peer review feedback. However, after an entire year with these students (dual enrollment at a high school), their last essays show little progress.

They are either summarizing the source and shoehorning it into the text, directly overviewing the research they found, or using a Jane Schaeffer model of writing.

The Schaeffer model is intro sentence, quote, "this shows...," and "this means..." to conclude it. Over and over and over again.

One of my students who I would consider a bright and hard worker wrote this paragraph. Emphasis mine.

>In the first article I read it talks about the history of social media and how it has evolved over time. It describes social media as a tool that is evolving to find out how it can be used the best. The quote that stuck out to me the most was, “Social media empowered the people to express their thoughts and opinions and share them with others. To add to this newfound power, people realized that they were not speaking in a vacuum; a highly responsive audience, who took part in the conversation and put across their points of view, heard their voices” (Taprial 6). This gave me my first insight about how social media affected communication. It is an open forum for people to share their opinions to an audience that can give feedback. This is representative of the panopticon because when people have access to feedback they may change the way they act in order to receive the validation they seek, whatever that may be. The next article I read by Arvind Narayanan was all about algorithms and how they affected social media. I wanted to see how content was pushed so that I could find out if this had any affect on how it causes people to act and change. What I took away from this is that algorithms are based on "meaningful social interactions” that are weighted against each other. A like is worth a set amount and a share is too, but these numbers vary based on the website. This information could play right into the panoptic system because when we know what to focus on in order to get the interactions we want then we can change ourselves to receive these things. People can focus on what is good for the algorithm and this could lead to a loss of individuality in the long run because of a focus on what is important for validation. The next article I read focused on social media growth and how it impacts our lives. In particular, I read about its prevalence in teen relationships and why it is being used so much by the younger generation. It says, “We are increasingly restricting teens' ability to spend time with their peers . . . and they're turning to social media to augment it” (Allen). This was very interesting to me because while some may think teens are less social now than in years past, the social interactions have just changed. Parents are more strict now than in generations before and also teens are under more pressure. This is resulting in kids interacting with each other over the internet, where stuff is less restricted and more readily available. Kids are using social media almost as a rebellion and it is causing a noticeable change. My last source specified how social media is affecting politics and democracy across different countries. What I found it very interesting that most countries considered it a good thing but America believed it was resoundingly a bad thing (Wike). It explains that this is because of the spread of misinformation that is prevalent in America as opposed to other countries. This prevails as a way social media can change the way people act and that when information meets the public eye it can change opinions.

This was all one paragraph. I'm surprised and disappointed because I've addressed this exact problem as a common error throughout the year. I stress to not tell me about what they read and what they found interesting. I've tried to show them how to use quotes, but out of 110 students, I'd say I have maybe 10 who are doing it well.

Anyways, if you have any suggestions or tips here, let me know. My only thought for next year is to increase point deductions as the semester progresses for common errors. Maybe it's a few points off in September and a huge chunk of points in December.