While I am grateful for a break from school, my heart and mind are never far from the classroom.  As the teachers-only portion of the school year ended, I was already brainstorming ways to encourage students to as (better) questions.  Earlier this week, on getting a better sense of what my fall line would look like, I started imagining better ways to frame the content of a course I have not taught in some time.  And yesterday my mind turned to my junior-level class, which includes the reading of How to Think by Alan Jacobs.

Jacobs occasionally writes for The Hedgehog Review, which makes a point of reflection on contemporary culture.  And that often includes things at the intersection of technology and education, which Jacobs has said a lot about.  Yesterday’s post by Jacobs had to do with student writing and the technological advances that make writing with integrity difficult.  Such technologies, chatbots in particular, are inspiring a greater and greater “vanishing of trust” between teachers and students, something he as tried hard to work against:

I don’t like this collapse of trust; I don’t like being in a technological arms race with my students. So over the years I have developed a series of eccentric assignments. These days I rarely assign the traditional thesis essay—an assignment I always hated anyway, because it makes both the writing and the grading utterly mechanical—but instead assign dialogues between two literary theorists, or an imaginary correspondence between two novelists, or just an old-fashioned textual explication: Take this passage and explain to me, I ask them, without paraphrase, what it’s doing, what’s going on in it. And those assignments have, as it were, taken us back in time, back to the time when commissioning was expensive and therefore rare: the online paper mills, after all, don’t have a stack of conversations about The Brothers Karamazov featuring Dostoevsky and Jane Austen. It’s been a very successful strategy… until now.

I have thought deeply for some time now about how I encourage students to read (both How to Think junior year and then Mere Christianity in senior year) and reflect on what they have read.  The struggle has included making most of the reading take place in class and then having students complete reading journals in class.  Sometimes it works; sometimes it becomes oddly burdensome for everyone, especially when students are absent.  And while I don’t think my students are yet prone to use outside AI programs for the readings, it’s always a possibility (which is why the paraphrase thing is both necessary and tricky).

I do like Jacobs’s idea of “eccentric assignments,” though I often use those more for lecture material than for reading assignments.  Maybe there’s something to be said for putting those two parts of the course into greater contact with one another?

The piece ends with two possible ways forward.  The first is where many of us in education are currently landing (for good and bad).  The second is more hopeful but also more of a challenge:

The second possibility requires great courage, a courage I am not sure I possess. I am moved to consider it by reflecting on something T. S. Eliot wrote in 1944, a sentence I often have reason to quote: “Not least of the effects of industrialism is that we become mechanized in mind, and consequently attempt to provide solutions in terms of engineering, for problems which are essentially problems of life.” With this sentence in mind—or rather, with the evident truth the sentence points to in mind—I could simply make the assignments that I believe best suited to what I want my students to learn, and then turn to them and ask: “What are the ‘problems of life’ that incline so many of you to turn to the chatbots rather than do these assignments?” If I could get honest answers to that question, then we all might be in deeper waters than we’re prepared for. But maybe the deeper waters are precisely what university education should be aiming for.

You can read all of the post here.  And you can follow Jacobs’s blog here.