Drexel was one of the more recent universities to experience a protest, as toward the end of Drexel’s fast-paced spring term and overall academic year, protesters camped in the center of campus for nearly a week.

The university went on lockdown when the encampment started on a Saturday night, gradually resuming normal operations during a five-day period. For two days, many classes were online, including mine.

In my class, studenting-wise, the kids did alright.

I know this pandemic “generation” has been through a lot, but collective worries that they have fallen to pieces and will not be able to cope or function in the “real world” (whatever that is) were certainly challenged by my students’ quick and in most ways expert transition to a Zoom-based classroom.

The university was functioning hour-by-hour, so the entire Drexel community would only receive information about the next day’s operations in the evening. We all had to be ready to shift gears.

I don’t know if they were happy about it, but every student showed up for our online class on Tuesday, and they were on time and ready to go. All but one had cameras on, and they worked well both in the whole group class and the breakout rooms, interacting with me and their classmates.

We shared a few winky in-jokes about online learning, but in terms of the outcomes for that day’s lessons, we stayed on track–I did my best, but it was largely thanks to their attention and efforts.

Few would likely choose to resume learning in a solely digital modality, but if need be, they showed they could pull it off.

These students are not withering little snowflakes, fluttering about, buffeted helplessly by forces they cannot/will not resist, melting when the temperature of their environment clicks up a notch. I think, as I did during much of the pandemic, that they’re warriors. I keep finding that they adjust and adapt when called upon, and they showed that again last month.

Drexel acted with relative speed in opening its campus and beginning onsite instruction again. We finished the quarter. Graduations for both colleges and the university as a whole came and went.

I watched the students walk in front of me across the stage at the College of Arts and Sciences graduation, and, you know, I felt that I’m not only proud I had a chance to work with many of them, but that I’m confident that they’ll be the ones in charge some day.

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Jason Kelce’s retirement speech from the Eagles and NFL is already famous. It was as remarkable a speech as it was a piece of writing and rhetoric.

The delivery was not just quintessential Kelce, but it was very much of his generation: He sat in a sleeveless workout shirt and sandals and read the speech from his phone; perhaps he even composed it using the phone.

Watching, I had thoughts and feelings from many perspectives: as a (former!) athlete, spouse, Eagles fan. I also viewed it as a teacher, and from that vantage, I had a distinct thought: “No way AI wrote that speech.” Why? Because I was struck by how authentic Kelce’s speech was. It was all him in content, style, and voice.

I thought how proud and excited I am when I receive authentic writing work–sometimes with accompanying speeches– from my students. And it made me think again of the big challenge for teachers to create meaningful writing assignments, and how that challenge has been renewed because of generative artificial intelligence. We are being pushed to develop assignments that are not so much plagiarism proof as plagiarism discouraging because they bring out authentic, meaningful student writing.

I know it’s challenging for teachers to create such assignments. After all, we can’t just drop students into a context like Kelce’s, where they bid goodbye to an activity of passion after nearly a decade and a half, especially an activity meshing the violent and the cerebral like football (especially when you play center).

But I believe GAI will productively pressure teachers to create more meaningful writing environments for our students. Assignments with authentic roots will have a greater likelihood of inspiring such responses.

My nephew/housemate recently submitted his college application essay. Despite living with a college writing professor (!), he went it solo. I respect him for doing this task on his own–he’s an independent guy–and he had no compunction sharing the essay with me afterward. After reading it, I said, “No one will think AI wrote this.” The essay had its quirks and inconsistencies, but my comment was not a knock on it. I was saying it had a genuine voice that I felt reflected him well.

There’s a lot of rightful concern in education circles about GAI, especially for writing instruction. Will these GAI engines grow in sophistication to the point that we won’t need people for that very human task, writing? Maybe, but as I watched Kelce, I thought, “I don’t think so”–or at least, “We’ve got a ways to go before that happens.”

I won’t get prideful. If I start boasting that I can create assignments that will prevent students from using GAI, I’m inviting disaster: they’ll prove me wrong. But listening to Jason Kelce’s farewell from football, I realized that if I keep striving to create assignments that mean something to them, they will return something meaningful for me and, more importantly, for themselves.

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I was sending emails about this year’s Palmyra High School Foundation for Educational Excellence (PHSFEE) Casino Night–there’s a reason for this opening, I promise I’m not softening you up in an effort to sell tickets for our fundraiser–and as usual a few messages bounced.

One puzzled me. Initially it appeared as a cryptic series of letters before the @–and then I remembered it was the address of my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Roseann DiMeglio. We had connected online years ago and stayed in touch. Of course she would be on my education foundation mailing list.

When the message bounced, I got a bad feeling. Alas, I was right. A quick web search revealed that on June 22, 2021–more than two years ago!–my teacher Roseann DiMeglio died. I read her obituary.

Recently, I was asked a simple question by a student: When did you know you wanted to be a teacher? I’m sure I’ve been asked that, but I was struck with how dumbfounded I was in my response. I realized I didn’t have a thing, an incident, a concrete moment that I could point to.

I had some good teachers along the way. I enjoyed coaching after college. I wanted a teaching assistant position as I started my MA program. But… why?

When I received that bounced email, I reflected on my second-grade experiences with Mrs. DiMeglio. I loved her. Some of my friends recalled her as strict, but to me she wasn’t that way at all. She was kind to me and, more importantly, motivated in me an eagerness for learning and specifically writing and reading.

Running atop the chalkboard in her class was a banner that looked like a long strip of wide-ruled loose-leaf paper. On that banner each letter was represented in cursive, both upper and lower case. I remember staring at those cursive characters on the lined “paper,” and I recall being impatient as we proceeded through the alphabet. I remember I wrote a note to my mom one night, and I was frustrated because my note was flawed because I was using several letters before we had reviewed the correct way to form them in class. (I chuckled thinking that Mrs. DiMeglio might be the “cause” of my to-this-day wretched penmanship, because I never did learn to make some of these letters the right way.)

Early literacy memories–five decades ago.

I then considered my involvement with a public school education foundation and with my local school board(s). What spurred this education-focused civic engagement?

So I went back to the question the student asked me about my motivation to be a teacher.

Looking at that bounceback email (it strikes me what a melancholy genre the bounceback email is) I realized that our best teachers’ impact stretches into our lives for years, maybe decades. Sometimes only much later will we realize what they were doing for us: “Yes, I see it now.”

I had returned to Berlin Community School several times when I was in grad school, and I had caught up with Mrs. DiMeglio. So I did tell her how important she was to me. I don’t know if I had the perspective, though, at that time in my life, to really say that she was a model of good teaching for me perhaps when I was a learner, only seven and eight years old, just a little guy who wanted to make his cursive letters.

Of course this is bittersweet because I’m writing this now, two years after she has passed. But that’s the thing about writing in particular, that its force can carry on long beyond its source.

I still want it to be known that Mrs. DiMeglio supplied me with early inspiration to help me want to teach–and write. I may know it now more than I ever have.

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ChatGPT has been out there since November. It’s an artificial intelligence language model that according to its developer OpenAI’s website, does this:

We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests. ChatGPT is a sibling model to InstructGPT, which is trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response.

A visitor to the site can type “input”–give it a try!–and the language-trained bot responds, right in front of you, sometimes quite “realistically.” The rumblings are out there. Is this the end of writing as we know it? Writing instruction? Thinking?!

Two very different friends contacted me about ChatGPT recently. I wrote back to the first, and then I based my email to the second on that initial message:

Happy 2023, and it’s always great to hear from you!

Yep, lots of dialogue—especially on the writing studies/composition forums I’m involved with—and plenty of hand-wringing from others.

The Office of the Provost [at Drexel] has assembled a Task Force about ChatGPT. I’m on it, and we meet in two weeks. I still have to get my head around all the conversations, but I’m not feeling like the sky is falling. Here’s a good piece: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2023/01/12/academic-experts-offer-advice-chatgpt?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=c8d2e06e36-DNU_2021_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-c8d2e06e36-236304341&mc_cid=c8d2e06e36&mc_eid=fccc03c8b1

Also, here’s a snip of an email I just wrote to another buddy of mine. He sent me a text about if ChatGPT means the “end of writing”:

“ChatpGPT—the airwaves are blowing up! Is it the end of writing? I think that’s premature. In fact, if you don’t mind, I’d like to use your message to me in a blog post (anonymously of course). I’m not ripping on you at all. Here’s exactly what your text said: ‘Chatgpt? The.end of writing’ It is going to be VERY challenging for this AI to capture this writing style. All lowercase app name. The period between ‘The’ and ‘end.’…”

It won’t end writing–I mean, in a way, text to speech could already do that–but it’s going to push writing instruction. A lot of teachers are wringing their hands on professional forums I’m part of, but I’m like, well, be more creative with your assignments. If you ask for essays on topics like ‘What do you think of Hamlet’s indecision?’ or ‘Argue for/against gun control in five paragraphs” you might be making the bar too low for students to plagiarize or cheat!

I’m digging into this more each day and can keep you posted.

Take care,
Scott

The communicative “nesting” here is significant. I wrote to one friend incorporating a previous email response to another. This is a deep rhetorical complexity that will be very challenging to reproduce by a machine. Not to mention, as I point out, the kind of quirks that appear for all of us in the fast-paced writing we compose via email, text, and chat.

In terms of teaching, as I say above and wrote on my other blog Online Writing Teacher (chugging away since 2004!), to paraphrase: It’s the assignment, stupid. In teaching, when we wanted to take the easy route with assignment instructions, there have always been consequences. Geez, I knew people in the 80s college scene who drove to a literal warehouse and bought papers on canned topics.

Ian Bogost provocatively said in The Atlantic, “… you may find comfort in knowing that the bot’s output, while fluent and persuasive as text, is consistently uninteresting as prose.”

ChatGPT doesn’t seem to be the end of writing or writing instruction (or humanity), but it will–and should–make teachers more aware of what we do. Stay tuned.

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Pardon my bad Tom Petty “pun,” as I was going to be more direct with this title: “School ratings: F—ed data (as if you didn’t know).”

Stories have been piling up recently that yet again illuminate the hopelessness of school rankings.

One of the most compelling is a Colombia University professor’s finding that the data that plopped his own institution at the top of the U.S. News rankings pile were dubious. In short, a math professor, Michael Thaddeus, showed that Colombia “had provided fraudulent data to the magazine,” and the magazine unranked it. Then, as Akil Bello, director of the advocacy group FairTest, wrote in October in The Chronicle of Higher Education, after Colombia provided only some updated data, the editors “assigned competitive set values.” Bellow says of what the editors did: “In other words, the magazine made up data to keep a popular university in its rankings.”

In another snowballing story, numerous highly ranked law schools are withdrawing from their participation in the rankings.

The problem is fundamental: Once you think you’re going to make any sense of rating schools, you’re in the world of mirrors.

There are things I suppose you might measure with schools–or are there? I was going to start my list with an easy “number of teachers” metric and then paused, realizing even a seemingly straightforward stat like that might need exploration: Full-time or part-time? Tenure-track or not? How is teaching valued at the institution and how in fact is that measured? And then to think that data will turn into a useful value to a particular human being… geez, when you put it like that…

Sports are fun, and it’s no wonder we’re so obsessed with them in our fractured society. There is an objective, agreed upon (for the vast majority of cases) outcome. Elections are like that too. Someone wins. Someone loses. The outcome is clear and accepted.

But almost anything with even a shade more depth doesn’t lend itself to the “clear and accepted.” Look at the effort online dating systems have made to create match algorithms (to be clear: Not that I would know).

What’s the best place to live? The best ice cream? Greatest rock band? (alright, so that’s Led Zeppelin. Sorry). These are fun listicles that provide hours (and hours) of harmless argument. How about your best friend? Your perfect soulmate? Things are circumstantial. Schools are multi-layered, complex entities like that.

In “The Rankings Farce,” Reed College president Colin Diver powerfully decries this “rankocracy,” saying “the entire structure rests on mostly unaudited, self-reported information of dubious reliability.” Diver lists not just U.S. News but other publications’ efforts to rank colleges and says, “Taken individually, most of the factors are plausibly relevant to an evaluation of colleges. But one can readily see that any process purporting to produce a single comprehensive ranking of best colleges rests on a very shaky foundation.”

Diver outlines six problems with such systems, ranging from the selection of variables to the weighting of variables (as an example, U.S. News, he said, “decreed” that six-year graduation rates were worth “precisely” 17.6%) to the overall issue of having the “chutzpah” to claim that an arbitrary, ever-changing formula “can produce a single, all-purpose measure of institutional quality.”

But here we are, almost 2023, and this is still the way many people talk about not just colleges but schools all the way down the line. “How do you unring the bell of the socially accepted rankings?” Bello said in another Chronicle of Higher Education article, “Do the ‘U.S. News’ Rankings Rely on Dubious Data?” “That’s the biggest challenge right now — is that the ‘These colleges are good’ and ‘These colleges are bad’ has entered the ether of the higher-ed admissions landscape.”

You’re not picking a taco. You’re not buying a potato peeler. You’re not even buying a car. When it comes to selecting a school, you’re making a complicated decision. Don’t let anyone fool you otherwise.

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Driven by a Casino Night fundraiser that was the result of the hard work and generosity of scores of people, the Palmyra High School Foundation for Educational Excellence raised $25,000 for PHS–surpassing the group’s overall $100,000 fundraising target.

I was part of the group that founded PHSFEE in 2016, and we stated two primary goals in our bylaws:

• Fundraising for PHS.
• Community relations about the many good things about PHS and its talented students.

In terms of raising money, for one of the smallest public high schools in New Jersey, we’ve done well. We’ve conducted events including a Color Run and a pandemic-forced virtual 50/50, but our marquee event has been our fall Casino Night, which has taken place four times: 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2022 (the pandemic led to our two-year pause).

Through these efforts, our donation total has crept up. At the start of 2021, we realized our total was $78,000. $100,000 seemed like an ideal target, and at a meeting one of our newer trustees, Vanessa Livingstone, did some quick math and pointed out that $22,000 would get us there. A slogan was born!: “$22k for ’22.”

Because of this year’s very successful Casino Night, which took place a few weeks ago, we surpassed that figure by nearly 15%, money that will go to initiatives identified by the high school, including diversity, equity, and inclusivity programming and the arts. We passed the motion for the $25,000 donation at our Trustee meeting last week.

Casino Night itself? It has lots of moving parts, but the result is a fun, energetic event that unites the PHS community, with parents, teachers, and administrators all coming out for a casino-themed (thanks to Tumbling Dice), Sweet Lucy’s barbecue-filled good time..

Also, I appreciate the support of those not directly connected with PHS (including several of my friends). It doesn’t matter if your kid attends PHS or even if you have kids, supporting the public school directly bolsters our community, and people recognized that. PHS, as public schools are, is always there for all the kids in the community.

The number of volunteers–and they are all volunteers–who helped do this? We had our 10 hard-working PHSFEE Trustees and about double that amount who closely coordinated Casino Night. But a small army of others pitched in, the many people and businesses who made direct donations (a list of our sponsors is on our Facebook page), bought or sold 50-50 and event tickets, provided items for our silent auction baskets (and there was some really cool stuff, assembled and themed by our incredibly creative team), or helped with facilities and supplies. In addition, a pleasant gaggle of PHS Interact students showed up to help set up Saturday afternoon.

At the end of the night, we knew we had done well, and as the gym cleared out, I looked around and saw yet more volunteers staying to help us break down and set up the gym so our host, Sacred Heart Church, could conduct a Sunday morning event; this was the communal spirit that has charged PHSFEE, a spirit of collective action for the good of all.

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Concerns about COVID-19 are widespread. I am not an epidemiologist, so I will not make any predictions, but different sectors/segments of our culture will be tested, if not by the thing itself than certainly by the “infodemic” surrounding it. [Read more →]

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A few years ago, I wrote about how my daughter, Elizabeth, wanted to change her major. I said that considering some of the “news” she had dropped on us, this was nothing. In fact, I wrote, eloquent as ever, that it was “No big deal.” [Read more →]

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PALMYRA, NJ – Arts programming at Palmyra High School (PHS) will receive a boost of $18,000 following a Casino Night community fundraiser organized by the school’s education foundation. [Read more →]

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This past weekend, we moved child #2, our son Nate, into college. The next stop on his life and educational path: Drexel University. [Read more →]

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I am an English Professor, so I am invested in demonstrating that students who major in English are successful, as measured in various ways. Keep in mind, thought, that I would consider it unethical to persuade a student to major in English simply because it’s my field: Instead, it’s my field because I believe in its value. [Read more →]

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At the very end of 2018, a New Jersey appeals court struck down the use of the PARCC test (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) as a graduation requirement for public high school students. That’s great news for the many people, including me, frustrated by the excesses of standardized testing. [Read more →]

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PALMYRA, NJ – Science programming at Palmyra High School (PHS) will receive a $15,500 donation as a result of a Casino Night fundraiser conducted by the Palmyra High School Foundation for Educational Excellence (PHSFEE). [Read more →]

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Well, it’s about time. We’re playing some D&D. In school. For the good of all. [Read more →]

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I am proud of my youngest, Zachary, for concluding his elementary school years (that’s it for us!) by achieving Honor Roll for the year and High Honor Roll for the last marking period. He did well and worked hard. But this is a total team win. [Read more →]

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Gore Vidal once said, “Heroes must see to their own fame. No one else will.” So, with all due respect to the Aeneas’s and Odysseus’s of the world, I’ll use this opportunity to tell you about the release of my new book, Writing Together: Ten Weeks Teaching and Studenting in an Online Writing Course, which I co-authored with former Drexel student Diana Gasiewski. [Read more →]

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My daughter has hit us with some doozies through the years, so when, recently, during her so-far bumpy first year of college, she told me with great gravity, “Dad, I want to talk to you about something,” I was expecting a confession about, say, her leadership of an international bank heist ring. [Read more →]

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I’ve used this space for some different genres, and here’s a hyper-specific one: The school board election letter. [Read more →]

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Okay, there are some mean, nasty people out there with bad ideas, and I think it might actually be a turn of good fortune that we’re seeing them so publicly lately. In general, though, I think people have good intentions. But often, good intentions aren’t good enough. [Read more →]

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PALMYRA, NJ — Palmyra High School (PHS) will be the beneficiary of $15,000 in science equipment thanks to a casino night fundraiser conducted by the Palmyra High School Foundation for Educational Excellence (PHSFEE). [Read more →]

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