First Day of Fall Semester, a More Tech-Free Fall Semester

Yesterday I drove down to Spartanburg Methodist College for the first day of classes.  I love the first days of fall semester--many of my students are brand new to college, so they are full of hope and good spirits.  I also have classes with students who are not new to college; they're in their second or third or fourth years.  Most of them return to fall semester well rested and ready/hopeful for a good year.  The first days of spring semester have a certain sparkle, but it's a little duller, a little more tinged with tiredness and fear.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I have three classes back to back, and then I sit in the car for my hour drive home across the mountains.  Yesterday I stopped at the library to pick up the books on hold for me.  I limped across the parking lot; I limbered up quickly, but I always forget how hard teaching is on the body, hard in a different way than my summer chaplaincy training.

I still have an old-fashioned approach to first class days.  I hand out a syllabus and talk about the upcoming class.  I don't read the syllabus, but I like having it on paper.  I like having a handout.  Some years I experiment with a getting to know you exercise.  This year I won't be doing that on the first day of class, maybe not at all.  I just didn't have the brain space to create it.  But yesterday, I walked past other classrooms where people were doing interesting activities, with phones turned into clickers and interesting projections on the wall, which made me wonder if I should plan something interesting for the second day of class.

Yesterday I explained that we will be a mostly technology free classroom.  There are days when we'll use the technology, and we'll be seeing how our writing process changes.  We'll also be experimenting with AI, the large language models that inform ChatGPT and the AI tools now woven into so much of the internet and Microsoft Office.  

I expected some push back; so far, there has been none.  One woman who is older explained that if her phone buzzed, she'd need to go outside to take the call to make sure her child isn't at the school nurse, but she would take care of any issues quickly.  I said, "That's exactly the way I would want you to handle this."

As I was driving home from Williamsburg on Monday, I heard this episode of the NPR program On Point.  The guests talked about how we use our brain, and how we retain information.  The last part of the show included information about generative AI.  It was no surprise to me that experiments demonstrated that people who write information by hand retain it longer and in more useful ways.  Typing information on a keyboard or a touch screen isn't as effective.  Feeding a prompt into an AI search engine is not effective at all.

This morning, I'm listening to a New York Times conversation about AI in classrooms--excellent information presented by people who are either teaching or doing extensive research.  I am hoping that this link gets you to a gift article where you can read the transcript or listen.  The conversation does a great job at discussing what AI can and cannot do.

In my classes, I've designed the grading differently this semester.  We'll be doing lots of in class writing, as we have always done, but this year, the in person writing will count for more of their grade--40-60%.  They will use the in person writing to create three revisions which will be graded; they will turn in the daily writing and the revision.

Much of the in class writing will be done by hand, on paper.  They will generate a lot of rough drafts, and they will have an incentive to come to class.  It's an experiment, and we'll see how it works.  And it's not that far away from other semester-long experiments that I've done.