Tag Archives: writing

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what my online students can expect from me, part 1: collegial communication

Last week, I wrote about the top three expectations I have for my online students. Now, I’m going to write a few posts focused on things my students can expect from me. I’m choosing to write these posts exclusively in the first person because I think it’s more difficult to make safe generalizations in this area as compared to the area of my last post. But I’d love to hear from other online faculty members–are your expectations similar?

You can expect me to reply to your communication and not be annoyed about it. First, I want to clarify what this does not mean. It does not mean I’ll reply to your emails, text messages, or voicemails (I do sometimes get those!) immediately. I go to bed pretty early, and I put my phone in sleep mode when I do. Another rather countercultural practice I have, which I believe has done wonders for my mental health, is that I do not receive email notifications on my phone. I sit down to check email, usually on my computer, at designated times when I’m ready to focus on email. So this may mean that, especially on weekends, a student may go 24 hours, or slightly more, without receiving a reply from me. But here’s what this expectation does mean: When I respond to your message, I’m going to read it carefully and give you a substantial answer. (And yes, I may occasionally say, “Go look at p. 24 in the APA guide” or something similar, but I won’t be snarky about it.) I’m not going to be annoyed at you because, as I explained in my post last week, email and other personal communication forums are where I do some of my best work. In fact, right now I have a student who’s been sending me some fairly lengthy emails a couple times a week–sometimes to ask questions, other times to say she appreciated something I said in a video, etc.–but I’m not irritated at her, because our email exchange is allowing us to build a collegial relationship. Also, it helps that when she doesn’t expect a reply to one of her messages, she will actually say that in the subject line.

I’m always baffled when students are profusely grateful that I responded to their emails, when to me this seems like a bare minimum expectation. Apparently, some professors aren’t doing this, or they’re giving their students the impression they’d rather not. I’m thankful for this simple practice that allows me to tailor my instruction to individual students, build relationships, and get good course evaluations in the process. 😉

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    What online instructors want from their students

    I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the misconceptions–or complete mystification–some online students have about what their professors are looking for. In an asynchronous online class, there’s no regular meeting time when students can ask questions and professors can pointedly emphasize certain desired behaviors. I don’t want my students to have to guess what my expectations are for them–nobody likes that game. While every instructor will have expectations specific to each of their courses, there are some that, at least in my opinion, transcend contexts. In this post, I’m going to list and briefly explain several of these close-to-universal expectations.

    1. We want you to write like a real person, not a robot. I’ve been saying this for years, but the recent revolution in accessible generative AI tools has made this advice particularly urgent and very literal! An essay written by ChatGPT and an essay written by a student in a stilted, impersonal academic-ese, while ethically different, are both really boring to read. I want to get to know you through your writing, especially in an online class where writing is about the only thing we have to build a relationship on. Let your own voice come through!
    2. We want you to communicate with us. Often, students who email me will preface their message by saying something like “I’m so sorry to bother you.” I always reassure these students that answering their questions is what I’m paid to do and that my best teaching often happens through email. Again, since you’re not sitting in a classroom with me, I don’t have that weekly or daily time to check that you’re understanding the material and doing okay in life in general. If you’re turning in assignments, at least I know you’re alive, but I’ve found that the students who do best in online classes are those who communicate with me outside of assignments–asking questions, running ideas by me, letting me know what you think of the course materials, etc. And this might go without saying, but if you’re not turning in assignments and you’re not emailing me, then I have no choice but to assume that you’ve fallen off the face of the earth! I would much rather receive an email explaining that it’s been a hard week and asking for an extension than receive no communication at all. Talk to me!
    3. We want you to read our feedback. This one may sound like a pet peeve rant (“I spent all that time writing feedback and they didn’t even read what I wrote!”), but there’s more to it than that. I guess I can’t speak for all instructors here, but I try to grade with the goal of helping my students on future assignments, both in my class and later classes. I don’t make as many grading corrections as I used to (I was trained in the bleeding red pen school), but the comments I do leave are substantial and, I sincerely hope, constructive. If you don’t read my feedback, you’re missing out on a big part of what you’re paying for in my class. If an assignment has a rubric (and I think rubrics are used pretty much across the board in online education today), find out how to open and read the filled-out rubric–otherwise, you don’t know why you lost the points you did, and you’re left to assume the professor just doesn’t like you. I can’t promise that I like all my students (that’s a different topic for a different post!), but I never deduct points just because–the rubric always makes it clear!

    I’ll stop there for now, because those are by far the three biggest expectations I have for my online students. Of course, students also have a right to know what they can expect from their professors, so look for a future post on that!

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    Sunrise over the Sea of Tiberias

    In my last post (which was longer ago than I realized!), I mentioned that I’m working on a couple of short stories based on the life of Jesus. I want to share the latest draft of one of those stories with you. This is based on chapter 21 of the gospel of John. I feel like it needs one more paragraph to bring it to a close at the end, so if you have any suggestions, I’m open!

    The sun was just starting to rise over the Sea of Tiberias. An orange glow crossed by thin dark clouds. The air was still chilly.

    Some of us had gone fishing overnight. It had been Peter’s idea; he’d said he wanted to do something with his hands.

    “But we’re not fishermen anymore,” Andrew had pointed out.

    “What are we, then?” Peter had argued. That had silenced Andrew. “Besides, we’re not going to sell them,” Peter had said. “I just want to do something.”

    Not all of us were trained as fishermen, but those who were gave us things to do, to keep us busy. We sat in the boat all night, quiet in the dark, drained of stories from the past week.

    As the sun began to rise, we headed back to shore. A silhouette of a man was standing there. I shivered. He called out: “I guess you guys didn’t catch any fish?”

    I thought I recognized the man’s voice, but I didn’t want to say it. I glanced at the others.

    “No,” Peter called out. He didn’t sound irritated, just tired.

    The man called back: “Let down your net on the right side of the boat. I think you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

    Someone gasped. I saw John smile and nod. “Do it,” said Peter. Of course we did. I wasn’t there three years ago, but I’d heard the story dozens of times.

    Immediately, the net was full of fish. This was not a surprise—again we all knew what to expect—but it still took my breath away. I paused to gasp some air into my lungs. “Grab the net!” James hollered. I did. But even with all of us pulling, we couldn’t get the net into the boat.

    “Drag it in,” said Peter. “I’m going to talk to Jesus.” He took off his coat and jumped into the chilly water.

    The orange glow was spreading up from the horizon. James and John got us into the little boat, not the main boat, so we could pull the net into shore without having to weigh anchor. My job was to hold onto the net for dear life.

    When we got to shore, there was a small coal fire with bread toasting over it. Just when I realized I was hungry, the man raised his head from the deep consultation he had been in with Peter and smiled. It was unmistakably Jesus. There was a moment when I forgot he had been dead a week before. I remembered when he pushed his hair off his forehead and when I saw the ugly scar in his hand. “I’m making breakfast for us,” he said. “Hand me a couple of those fish.”

    I grabbed two of the fish from the teeming pile. They were cold, and a ray of sun shone off their silver scales. I placed them in Jesus’ hands, which were warm from the fire. “Thank you,” he said, looking in my eyes, and it sounded like a blessing. I didn’t know what to say, and Peter looked eager to continue their talk, so I turned back toward the net. “We should count these,” Thomas said.

    “Why?” I frowned. “We’re not going to sell them.”

    “Someone will want to record the number.” He gestured toward the others. At least two of them were writing down their experiences with Jesus. I was just trying to make sense of it all in my head.

    “Is the number important?” I looked at the net. It was just a small one, not a big commercial net like I’d seen some of the fancier-looking fleets have. But it was bursting, a multitude of fish now glowing with the fire of the mostly risen sun.

    Thomas shrugged, already spreading out a canvas for them to dry. “Anything might be important.”

    So, I helped. As Peter remained in hushed conversation with Jesus, who listened carefully as he turned the fish over the fire, as James and John mended a net just on the edge of their discussion, as Nathanael walked the beach alone, picking up driftwood for the fire, I helped Thomas count the fish. There were 153.

    The sun had fully risen when Jesus said, “Breakfast is ready.” He broke the bread and passed it around. He burned his fingers on the fish as he divided it up. The skin was salty and crispy and the flesh flaky, and I didn’t know if it was because God had cooked this fish or because Jesus of Nazareth just had a lot of practice preparing food in the open air. But it was perhaps the best fish I had ever eaten. The bread, too, was soft on the inside with a faint char on the outside, and this surprised me not at all.

    Jesus looked out to sea, toward the sun in its strength. Then he looked back to us, casting his gaze around the circle, where we all sat licking our fingers. “Remember,” he said. “You are the light of the world. You are the salt of the earth. You are the fishers of men.” He smiled. “But you are shepherds now, too. As I just told Peter, I am sending you to feed my sheep.”

    Peter ducked his head and gave a grin that looked uncharacteristically shy. I thought about how Jesus had called himself the good shepherd. Now he was asking us to be the same.

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    writing goals for 2024

    As I think about my goals for the new year, I’m considering how I want writing to fit into my life in 2024. I have always seen myself as a writer, but after a few highly productive years leading up to the completion of a novel in 2019, I’ve been in a dry spell, at least by comparison. I do a lot of writing for my work–mainly emails and grading feedback–but in this post, I’m thinking about writing that is both more enjoyable and less ephemeral than those, important as they may be. So here are some writing goals I’d like to focus on in the new year.

    1. Get back into the habit of writing in my notebook for 15 minutes a day. I started doing this in September after I read Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg and wanted to rediscover the joy of writing, especially in longhand (a practice Goldberg speaks highly of). Throughout that month, I wrote for 15 minutes every morning. Most of what I wrote will never be shown to the world (though this post was a result of one particularly productive day), but it was a good practice, and I’d like to get back into it consistently in 2024.
    2. Research and revise two short stories based on incidents in the life of Christ that I drafted in 2023. These stories resulted from my daily writing practice. They are quick sketches that need research give them accuracy and authenticity. I may use my research and revision process to help me develop some resources for my students (I wrote about this idea here), but even if I don’t end up doing that, I would like to get these stories into a state that I’m happy with.
    3. Reread Sam’s Town to help me decide whether I want to work on the sequel. Sam’s Town is the novel I self-published in 2019. Soon after I completed it, while still riding a writing high, I started the sequel, Sam’s Home. But then I got married, moved, and lived through the pandemic, and the few brief attempts I’ve made to pick the manuscript back up haven’t really gone anywhere. So in 2024, I’d like to reread Sam’s Town in hopes of recapturing some of that excitement. Even if I ultimately decide not to make writing the sequel one of my goals for this year, I think I’ll enjoy revisiting those characters who played such an important role in my life for several years.

    Three is a magic number when it comes to goal-setting, so I’ll stop there. What are some of your goals for 2024, writing-related or otherwise?

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    a quick bite of food for thought about grading time

    Yesterday, I was watching a video about creating a teaching calendar (which I can’t share here because it’s part of a paid professional development package one of my universities subscribes to), and I heard some research findings that caught my attention. The study was conducted by the video presenter, B. Jean Mandernach, Executive Director of the Center for Innovation in Research and Teaching at Grand Canyon University, and her colleagues.

    Here’s a summary: The research team approached a group of doctoral-level faculty who taught writing-heavy courses and asked them how long it took them, on average, to grade a paper. They monitored their grading time and came up with an average of one hour per paper. The researchers asked if they could lower this to 30 minutes. The faculty expressed doubt, but limited themselves to 30 minutes per paper. In a third round of grading, the faculty then limited themselves to 20 minutes per paper. Next, an objective rater scored the quality of the professors’ feedback, and there was no qualitative difference between the three sets of papers.

    I’m just going to leave you with that. I think the data speaks for itself. I’ll simply say that as English professor who tends to reflexively equate more feedback with better teaching–but who feels overwhelmed by the volume of writing I have to respond to each week–I found these results to be encouraging. Let me know what you think! And if you’re not a teacher, could these findings apply to other areas of life?

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    Don’t ask your students to do anything you haven’t done yourself.

    This post is part of a series on bringing a human touch to online education. See the series introduction here.

    I recently wrote a rough draft of a story, provisionally titled “Sunrise at the Sea of Tiberias,” and I know it needs some historical research. So I have an idea: I’m going to do the Writing in Your Field Project, the major multi-step assignment in my graduate writing class, along with my students.

    I have never done the project, and I know that’s a classic teacher mistake: expect my students to do something I haven’t done myself. I know what some of the common challenges of the project are based on student feedback, but as I often tell my students regarding their research, there’s no substitute for firsthand experience.

    I’m thinking of taking notes on my experience as I go through it (maybe using a combo of written and voice notes), then creating some supplemental videos/documents I can share with students and maybe eventually make an official part of the course. I would also like to write about this experience, with a teacher audience in mind, on the blog!

    I hope to start this project soon, when (I’m hopeful) some extra space will be opening up in my grading schedule. Stay tuned for details!

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    my fall shirt and a habit of writing

    I’m finally reading Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg–one of those classics that appears on almost every list of essential books on the writing craft–and I’m really enjoying it. Nothing about Goldberg’s kind observations makes me feel guilty about my recent lack of writing productivity, but I did decide last week that I wanted to put some of her strategies into practice, so I’ve started handwriting in my journal for 15 minutes every day. Much of what I’ve written is probably interesting only to me. One of Goldberg’s big points is to practice writing concretely rather than abstractly, so I’ve been doing detailed but not particularly lyrical descriptions of things like the house we lived in until I was seven and the sky in front of me while I was sitting on the patio the other morning. But this morning, I wrote something that has a little bit of humor and a little bit of a life lesson–the kind of thing I like to share on this blog–so here it is, with some very light editing for clarity.

    I’m wearing this shirt that I bought last year at the church bookstore because it was on deep clearance and I was standing around bored. I’m not even sure why we were selling it in the church bookstore because there’s nothing particularly Christian about it, but we do sell a lot of basic-Midwestern-woman-of-a-certain-age stuff in the store. (I don’t say “white” because I know some non-white women who like this kind of stuff. It is a widespread phenomenon.) Anyway, this shirt. It has one of those lists that Sarah and Mark [my siblings] and I like to make fun of: spiced apple cider, crisp air, pumpkin pie…(that’s just the part I can read while sitting in bed. The bottom probably says, “hayrides and hoedowns.”). Then in the middle of the shirt, in that ubiquitous hard-to-read script, it says, “But I love fall most of all.” I’m not sure why the “but,” since there’s no contrast being made. I guess the shirt just wants to be argumentative. Also, my wearing of the shirt is a lie, since fall is not my favorite season, and that is how I interpret the claim, “I love fall most of all.”

    The bottom line is that I can’t decide whether I need to wear the shirt ironically (i.e. by making mocking comments about it whenever I wear it). The fact is that I do enjoy all the items on the list, at least those I can see. (Okay, I just looked. I do enjoy the other things too, though hayrides make my eyes itchy.) My conflict over this shirt probably has to do with deep-rooted identity issues and my desire to appear not to be exactly what I am, a basic Midwestern woman of a certain age. By the way, we’ve started selling scented candles in the bookstore, with names like “Vanilla Delight,” and I really want one.

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    Let them hear your voice.

    This post is part of a series on bringing a human touch (cue the Bruce Springsteen song) to online education. See the series introduction here.

    Today I have a simple tip to offer you, yet I’ve received more positive student feedback in response to this practice than almost anything else I’ve ever done as a professor. I would like to invite you to consider making videos for your students. And I don’t mean scripted lectures shot in multiple takes with official-looking title cards provided by your institution (though there can be a place for those). I mean short, personal, off-the-cuff video responses to students’ assignments. Here is a short account of my experiences with this practice.

    I teach two research classes in which students submit a major project in several steps, the first being a proposal. Though the assignment instructions for the proposal are relatively formal and lead students to take it seriously, I treat it as a formative assessment–that is, not a finished product but a stepping stone. So instead of making corrections and deducting points from the rubric, I read each student’s proposal, then use the recording feature embedded in our learning management system (Canvas) to make a short video (2-5 minutes) expressing enthusiasm for their projects and giving them some advice about things like the scope of the project (students often start out a little too ambitious), pitfalls to avoid, and sources that might be helpful. The videos tend to be longer if I know something about the topic and have specific source recommendations to make or if the student seems to have had a little trouble understanding the assignment. But in all cases, I try to project excitement about their ideas and let them know that I’m a helpful resource.

    The videos don’t take long to create because I shoot them in one take, without doing any editing and without even writing down notes first. I am pretty good at speaking ad lib–others might want to jot some notes first (and I do sometimes miss important things I meant to say or should have said!). Video grading gives me a break from writing, which constitutes the bulk of my work, and it allows students to see my face and hear my voice, letting them know I’m a real person who’s invested in them and their writing. The students love these videos–I get more positive feedback on them in my course evaluations than on anything else. Often the videos initiate a warm and enthusiastic exchange of questions and ideas that continues throughout the course.

    Next week, it will be time for me to make proposal feedback videos for my new set of students, and I am genuinely excited to make them–not something I can normally say about grading. I encourage you, if you are a teacher or any type of communicator (aren’t we all?), to find ways to let the people you work with hear your voice. It will lay the foundation for trusting relationships and make your future written communication less likely to be misunderstood. Try it out and let me know what you learn!

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    online education for humans

    Sometimes I wonder if my students realize I’m a real human being, not a machine who grades their work. When students are surprised that I answer a pretty reasonable request in the affirmative, or that I reply to their messages at all–that’s when I really wonder. But I can’t be too critical of my students’ assumptions, because there have been times when I’ve forgotten that my students are real human beings and not machines composing assignments. When all you see of a person is a) their writing (which may or may not sound like something that came from a real human being–we’ll talk more about that in a later post) and b) a tiny, low-quality profile picture, seeing that person’s humanity can be a struggle.

    This will be the topic of my next few posts. We’ll talk about strategies that online faculty and students can use to remember and respect each other’s humanity. And as always, I hope these posts will have a wider application, offering useful advice for all of us who live in this world where so much of our human interaction is mediated by screens.

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    Creative writing tip: Find your Inklings

    There’s a lot of talk these days about finding one’s “tribe” or one’s “people.” If taken to extremes or left unexamined, this attitude can worsen the polarization that plagues our society by excusing us from spending time with and listening to people who are different from us. But underlying this idea is a good impulse: the desire to connect with people who share our interests and joys.

    Earlier this summer, I read Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings, which is a collective biography of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams, but even more than that, a fascinating account of an unusual group of men who “found their people.” The Inklings, as many of my readers will probably know, were an informal club of friends–mostly Oxford and Cambridge academics, mostly Christians–who met for years, twice a week, to eat, drink, have intellectually rich discussions, and–most famously–read aloud from their works in progress, some of which turned out to be genre-defining sagas like The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. The atmosphere of the group, as well as some weird ideas that floated around during their intense discussions (Carpenter doesn’t shy away from these), was shaped by the group’s demographics (almost exclusively middle-aged white Englishmen) and the times in which they lived. But within their similarity, they were a remarkably diverse group in their marital status, politics, religious expressions, and philosophies on all sorts of things (e.g., how a fantasy world should be constructed). And, by all accounts, their strongly-held, often opposing opinions made the group exciting, not threatening. They were fans of each other’s work (even when they criticized it), and most importantly, they were friends.

    In the decades since the Inklings met, aspiring writers (especially fantasy nerds) have been trying to recapture the heady atmosphere of their meetings. I was once part of a creative writing group called, unabashedly, the Inklings, which held long, food-fueled sessions in which we read aloud from our works in progress and received gracious yet detailed feedback from our peers. Like the original Inklings, we were brought together not only by our love of stories but also (for most of us) by our Christian faith, which deeply informed our group’s philosophy even though hardly any of us were writing explicitly Christian literature. And like the original Inklings, many of us developed close, trusting friendships.

    If you are a writer–or if you don’t write yourself, but you enjoy a good story and know how to give helpful feedback (or are willing to learn how)*–I encourage you to join a creative writing group. Don’t try too hard to recapture the atmosphere of the original Inklings; you’re not them. You don’t have to wear tweed or meet every week or even meet in person. (My old group moved to Zoom during the pandemic.) Not all creative writing groups even involve critique of works in progress; some focus on support, encouragement, learning new techniques, or even writing silently in each other’s presence. The greatest gift of a creative writing group is not the activities that happen during the meeting or even the works of literature that its members produce, but that feeling of belonging, of being understood by other people who also have stories in their heads. Or, as C.S. Lewis put it, “the moment when one man says to another ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .'”

    Subscribe to get notified of upcoming posts: an ode to my grandparents’ cabin in the western Maryland mountains and an explanation of how adjunct faculty get paid (much more interesting than it sounds!). Also, if you’re a fan of the Inklings, subscribe to my podcast, It’s Lit Time!, for an upcoming series on rereading J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth saga.

    *Several of the original Inklings weren’t writers; they just enjoyed hanging out with their friends and hearing their stories.