Placing Book Orders for College Classes in an Age of AI

Yesterday was a day of taking care of small tasks:  ordering books for fall classes at Spartanburg Methodist College, importing syllabi for fall online classes and then putting dates in the syllabus for my online class that starts in late June, picking up prescriptions, reviewing the instructions to get ready for my Thursday colonoscopy, and on and on.

My spouse has been feeling under the weather, so we shifted menu plans, and I made a pot of chicken and dumplings, one of the better ones I've ever made.  I am now convinced that I can only make fluffy dumplings with a biscuit cutter and hand mixing.  The food processor makes the rubberiest dumplings.

In the late afternoon, I went to a neighborhood friend's house for a dinner of snacks and wine (one of my favorite kinds of dinner) and sketching, while her spouse was at church council meeting.  It was the perfect way to end the day.

This morning, I find myself thinking about the Norton Anthology of  British Literature, more specifically, of the 3 volumes that cover the second half of the survey course.  I spent part of the week-end rereading Michael Cunningham's The Hours and watching the film and thinking about Virginia Woolf.  Mrs. Dalloway is now in the anthology, in its entirety.  When I studied British Lit in undergraduate school in the 1980's, Woolf's reputation was in the process of changing.  But at the time, she wasn't always seen as important, particularly not her fiction writing; feminists did prioritize her nonfiction writing on how hard it is to be a woman writer.

I remember when Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was first included in the Norton, somewhere at the turn of the century.  Now we don't have Frankenstein, but instead her novel, The Last Man.  So I ordered Frankenstein in a separate volume.

This morning I wondered how grad studies might have changed.  Would we still spend the same amount of time on Wordsworth and Coleridge?  Is Frankenstein seen as more important, the gateway to much that is modern?  And more sobering, to think about how removed I am from literary scholarship, that I'm probably asking the wrong questions.

I am looking forward to teaching these works again. I will probably not spend much time on the last 40 years, particularly as Norton enlarged the scope to include all sorts of countries that used to be colonies, which makes the topic unmanageable.  We will do a deep dive into post World War II lit and end by thinking about whether or not these topics (fear of nuclear annihilation, seeing an increasing concentration on human rights for more groups, who will rule the world now) are still relevant.  

For decades now, when I got to make my own textbook choices, I've gone with no book.  This year, as I've been reading Maggie Smith's Dear Writer:  Pep Talks and Practical Advice for the Creative Life, I decided to use it in my English 100 and 101 classes.  I'm not sure exactly how yet.  For those first year writing classes, I still plan to do a lot with trees and observing nature.  But some of the chapters in the book will make a great contribution to the class and to their experiences as first year college students--at least, that's my hope.

Last night, at my neighborhood friend's house, we talked about AI and teaching and how life is changing.  I'm glad that when it comes to teaching, I'm in a place where I have a lot of latitude.  All of my colleagues are distressed about AI and how students use it to avoid doing the work of being a student, and we're all experimenting with different ways to engage students.  

I feel lucky to be part of a liberal arts college at such a time as this.