Writing to Have Written

Dear Friends,

I’ll start with a cliché: I hate writing, but I love having written.

Usually when I say this, I’m saying it to my students, and I’m putting the emphasis on the first part. I tell them: writing is painful, frustrating, boring, an awful way to spend your time. I tell them: I’ve been writing for a long time. I’ve written a number of books. I believe wholeheartedly in the value of writing as a way to clarify—no, more than that, to generate—my thinking, and yet I still hate sitting down to do it. I tell them: you are not alone in feeling this. It’s ok, it’s normal, everyone hates it. Hating writing is not a sign you’re not cut out for it; it may be a sign you are cut out for it, desperate as you are to communicate your thoughts, frustrated eternally by the difficulty of writing even the simplest notion in clear prose.

Today, though, I invoke this adage because I’m thinking about the second part. I do truly love having written, love having things of mine to read. I believe those writers who say they never pick up their old books, never want to be reminded of their past glories, always need to be facing forward. But I’m not like that at all. I feel sheepish admitting it, but I love looking over my old writing. It reminds me of where I was, what I was doing, what I was thinking. Yes, sometimes it’s embarrassing, particularly when I didn’t give the writing enough thought. But even then it’s instructive. More often it’s comforting, fortifying, interesting: a gateway to the past. It’s why I too often lose a half hour reading old emails. (It’s also why I’ve lost countless hours trying to recover my long-lost hotmail account; alas, I think it’s well and truly gone). This past week, I took a cue from Austin Kleon and have been spending time going over my Notes entries¹ for the past year. It reminded me, yet again, how much I enjoy having a record of my thoughts to look over.

So with a new year beginning, in the spirit of resolving to do more of what I find valuable, with unreasonable expectations borne of actually having time on my hands (it’s Dead Week!), I thought I’d start a newsletter. 

Some of you may remember “Pedagogy Unbound” as the title of the column I used to write for The Chronicle. Some smaller number may remember the website I started in 2013 with the same name, an attempt to create a space for instructors to share teaching strategies with each other. The name graced my personal website until this past August, when I let that site lag (honestly, it wasn’t worth the web hosting fee). I’ve been writing about college teaching in one form or another for more than a decade now, and I’m increasingly convinced it’s impossible (for me) to write about what happens in the classroom without writing about things far outside the classroom, from decisions by university administrators to whatever’s in the newspaper to the forces that buffet our students and shape the way they learn (or don’t). I figure it’s still as good a title as any for what I want to write about: the challenges and joys of teaching, American universities at a time when they’re as politically fraught as ever, barriers to equity, paths to equity, the point of education, etc.

You can expect one post a week (he says, as if putting it in writing will make it so), and I’ll do my best to make ‘em interesting. As the opening of this post implies, I’m mostly doing this for myself, but of course I hope other people will benefit from these missives. I’m sure I’ll have no shortage of things to write about. I’m teaching two new courses this coming semester, and I want to document here some of the challenges and (fingers crossed) victories that will come from those experiences. I’m preparing to take over as director of UI’s General Education Literature (GEL) program later this year, so I’ll be doing lots of thinking about how best to manage and improve a program that educates more than 3000 undergraduates every year, and helps to shape the pedagogy of something like 100 graduate instructors as well. I’ve also got a new book coming out in August, and I’ll want to tell you about it and expand on some of its ideas in this space.

I hope you’ll subscribe. Happy New Year, and see you next week.

What can you take from your evals?

I have no interest in disturbing anyone’s hard-earned break, and if you are dead set against even thinking about your teaching during the first week of January, feel free to stop reading here and ignore this little concluding tip. It’ll still be here when you’re ready for it.

We have plenty of evidence that course evaluations aren’t as meaningful as we would hope them to be. Even aside from well-established issues with bias, evals often feel like a whole bunch of noise with very little signal. But if they are going to be useful at all, it’s going to be right now. Your evals are never going to be more meaningful than now, when you can still remember the texture of last semester’s classes. Yes, the answers are anonymized, but you know these students well, and can synthesize what you find with what you already know. What can you glean from their comments?

If, like me, you read through your evals when they came out, reassured yourself that they were good enough, and then closed the window, it might be worth revisiting them with an eye towards next semester. Take a little time this week and look them over again, and aim to take one lesson forward for your teaching this spring. Is there something that really connected with students, really helped them to learn? Or, conversely, is there something that didn’t work, something you need to tweak—or give up on entirely? Try to find one concrete takeaway and write it down for yourself.

The thing I’m taking is nothing radical: double down on in-class activities. The students in both my fall classes singled out how valuable it was to work things out together in class, whether through discussions or in more directed workshop activities. This is something I always emphasize, but it’s instructive to see so much explicit appreciation for what we might call structured social learning. It’s something I’ll make sure to keep in mind when I turn my attention to course design in a week or so.

1  I’ve never been good at keeping a journal, though I’ve wanted to be good at it for as long as I can remember. But over the past few years I have made extensive use of Apple’s Notes app, both on my computer and my phone. This I use for all manner of jottings: actual writing (sometimes I need to type somewhere that isn’t my work-in-progress document), meal planning and grocery lists, brainstorming for class and for whatever else I’m working on, to-do lists, things I want to remember, song lyrics, etc. It has ended up functioning as a kind of journal, even if I rarely write straighforward journal entries.