December 13-14, 2025: Kyle at Michigan!

[This week marks the conclusion of another Fall semester, my 21^st at Fitchburg State. Since we’re all going through it at the moment, I thought I’d share one significant challenge I faced in each class this semester, and a bit about how I tried to respond. Leading up to this special weekend post on my younger son’s first semester!]

As I highlighted with this August blog series in particular, my younger son (and phenomenal Guest Poster) Kyle started his first year at the University of Michigan this Fall. It was as full and kick-ass a semester as I knew it would be, and there are countless moments and experiences of which I’m very proud and which make me even more excited for all that’s next. But for a series on teaching reflections, I have to highlight two very distinct but complementary and equally impressive papers Kyle wrote for his tough but fascinating and rewarding first-year history seminar on the study of deep time:

Toward the start of the semester, Kyle’s professor asked them to write a personal observation and analysis of some aspects of the (beautiful) Michigan campus, tied to the class themes of continuity and change over deep time. He chose to observe the seasonal pattern of the changing Fall leaves, to connect it to the cycles of campus construction, and to consider the relationships and contrasts between these natural and man-mind experiences of the landscape, setting, and time. And he did so in a style that was equal parts funny and wise, warm and thought-provoking, very much Kyle’s but also something I hadn’t quite read from him before. My favorite paper I read all semester, with absolutely no offense to any of my FSU students!

The course’s second assignment was a somewhat more typical analytical paper: working with multiple class texts to develop a thesis about and multi-layered analysis of a central class question and theme. Kyle chose a complex and important question/theme about whether and how human progress is possible, and worked closely and convincingly with a series of dense and challenging texts (including one featuring the perspective of the legendary Werner Herzog) to develop a thoughtful and nuanced thesis about different theories of progress as, themselves, the best reflection of both the limits and the possibilities of such change. If Kyle continues in his pre-Law path he’s going to have lots of occasions to work with dense texts to consider big human questions, and this paper made me very excited for that continued arc—and every part of Kyle’s next steps at Michigan!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

PPS. I drafted this post before Kyle wrote his final paper for the course, a truly stunning synthesis of many different ideas about deep time, both from class readings and (especially) from his own evolving perspective. I could go on & on about that culminating essay and his incredibly thoughtful and multilayered work in it, but I'll simply conclude this post with his banger of a concluding sentence: "Through a collective understanding of deep time, humanity can challenge notions of temporal insignificance and inevitable environmental destruction, pioneering a newfound epoch defined by interrelational mutualism between man and nature, not one categorized by geological antagonism."

December 12, 2025: Semester Reflections: Our Graduate Programs

[This week marks the conclusion of another Fall semester, my 21^st at Fitchburg State. Since we’re all going through it at the moment, I thought I’d share one significant challenge I faced in each class this semester, and a bit about how I tried to respond. Leading up to a special weekend post on my younger son’s first semester!]

I’ve covered the five courses I taught this semester in the first four posts in this series (since I had two sections of First-Year Writing), and so for the final post I wanted to focus on my role as the Chair of our Graduate English Studies programs at FSU (we offer both an MA in Literature and a Creative Writing Certificate). But in so doing, I am also shifting the tone of the series: because while we’ve certainly been facing for many years a serious challenge in terms of enrollments in our Graduate English MA, I’m very very proud to note that we have dramatically reversed that situation; a few years back we were in single digits in the number of students in the program, which had been temporarily frozen as a result, while as of this moment at the end of the Fall 2025 semester we have 25 enrolled students!

Mostly I’m just really excited about that trend and wanted to share it. But in case it might be useful for other folks facing similar situations, I also wanted to share two things that have, I believe, contributed to this significant upswing; the first is a practical thing we’ve done consistently and well, and the second a philosophical shift that I’ve made a permanent part of our program.

The practical thing has been to make and share (not only live, but also and I would argue especially as recordings) a ton of webinars, most of them featuring the voices of our Grad students themselves (mostly current ones, but with some alums sprinkled in as well). These webinars have represented our program and our community far better than I ever could by myself, and have I believe modeled for prospective students what the experience and community are like for our Grad students. Every time we’ve recorded a new one I’ve seen at least one or two new applications for the program over the subsequent weeks, sometimes from folks who were in the live audience for the webinar but most often from folks who saw them down the road (generally linked on our website). I can’t recommend this practice strongly enough.

The philosophical shift is a significant one, but it’s also one I very much stand by. For the first couple years of having the CW Certificate, its courses were pretty much entirely separate from the MA ones, and reserved for students in that Certificate program. But in order to recruit more students for the MA, I decided to allow MA students to take CW courses and have them count as Electives toward the degree. Since we only require 9 such Electives total (along with one required course), this shift means that a number of our students might well take significantly fewer Literature courses; but it also and especially means that they will be able to design their own version of the MA, one that might include Creative Writing if it is of interest, and in any case that can be more individualized (which was always a goal, but I believe this shift makes it much clearer still). I’ve put through a proposal to cement this practice as policy, and believe it will help us continue to recruit and grow our numbers, while also doing what we want to do in these wonderful Graduate English programs.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 11, 2025: Semester Reflections: American Lit Online

[This week marks the conclusion of another Fall semester, my 21^st at Fitchburg State. Since we’re all going through it at the moment, I thought I’d share one significant challenge I faced in each class this semester, and a bit about how I tried to respond. Leading up to a special weekend post on my younger son’s first semester!]

To circle back to the starting point of Monday’s post on First-Year Writing: I haven’t seen that much obvious or clear use of generative AI in those courses (no more than general instances of plagiarism over the years); but I most definitely have seen far more than I would like in my online-only literature courses over the last couple years (I’ve been teaching one online section every semester since about 2013). I think that’s no coincidence, for a couple of distinct reasons: these courses are entirely online, meaning they use technology and the web for every aspect, and so AI programs are just that much closer to the surface of our work; and I don’t get the chance to talk in person with these students, to show them how much I respect their voices and work and how much the use of AI takes them away from those things in all kinds of damaging ways (I try to make that case by email, but I’m well aware that it’s just not the same when it comes to tone).

I have to admit that, beyond trying to communicate those overall emphases early and often in emails to the students, my main strategy for dealing with this challenge has been and remained this semester a responsive one: when I see a first instance of clear AI use (almost always in an early weekly Blackboard post/response, and almost always because generative AI programs invent quotes and evidence when asked to work with texts; seriously, they do that, and not just for texts either), I reach out to the student to make the case as clearly as I can for why that’s a bad idea on every level, and to give them the chance to create a new version of the post featuring their own work and to receive the grade and credit it would have had it been the original one they posted (ie, to get a mulligan).

It's not a bad strategy, and it generally seems to help push students toward sharing their own voice and ideas, literally my only central pedagogical goal. But the question I return to is whether there would be ways to shift my syllabus and assignments in order to mitigate this challenge on the front end as well. I’m not sure there are such ways, as in a literature course we are always going to be reading texts and responding to those texts in one way or another, and in an online lit course those responses will take the form of short-form posts a good bit of the time. But I am considering using somewhat more creative and first-person post prompts in my Spring online lit course, to see if such prompts make clear from the jump that only the students themselves can do this work. I’ll keep y’all posted!

Last reflections tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 10, 2025: Semester Reflections: American Lit II

[This week marks the conclusion of another Fall semester, my 21^st at Fitchburg State. Since we’re all going through it at the moment, I thought I’d share one significant challenge I faced in each class this semester, and a bit about how I tried to respond. Leading up to a special weekend post on my younger son’s first semester!]

For many years now, I’ve featured in semester preview and reflection series the question of whether I should substitute shorter texts for longer ones in my literature courses. There have been a number of factors pushing me toward that question, as those hyperlinked prior posts reflect; but certainly one has been my desire to minimize (and ideally eliminate entirely) the number of texts that students have to find their own copies of (ie, purchase, although there are always potentially copies at libraries), rather than that are available online in full. Of course there are plenty of longer readings available in that latter way, but they have to be out of copyright, meaning that any text published after 1930 (as of right now) is not likely to be available online in full yet.  

For the first two-thirds of my American Lit II syllabus, that’s not an issue, as all of our readings (including the longer ones) are available online in full. But in the final Unit, in which we read texts from the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, it is one—and the two longer readings in that Unit happen to be two of my favorite American novels, both overall and specifically to teach: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003). So when I was planning this semester’s section of American Lit II, I really debated whether to keep those two texts on the syllabus or to replace them with shorter readings by the same authors that are available online (such as Lahiri’s wonderful short story “The Third and Final Continent” [1999] in place of her novel, for example).

I ended up keeping the two novels on the syllabus, and made sure to have copies of both on reserve at the FSU library (e-reserve as well as hard copy for Silko, which was available in both ways; hard copy for Lahiri, which was not) so students had at least one guaranteed way to take a look at them without finding their own copies. But I also offered a compromise that I’m still not sure about but that did seem to help a bit—highlighting opening sections in each text that, if students were able to look at, would allow us to have meaningful conversations even if most folks were not able to read beyond those sections (which, indeed, most were not). Since I’m not requiring students to purchase any text, I don’t feel badly from that standpoint about not asking them to necessarily read the whole of a text; but since I especially love where those novels go in their latter sections, I most definitely did miss the chance to fully teach these books. This challenge remains a work in progress, and since I’ll have an American Lit II section next Fall it’s one I’ll be returning to to be sure.  

Next reflections tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 9, 2025: Semester Reflections: Honors Lit Seminar

[This week marks the conclusion of another Fall semester, my 21^st at Fitchburg State. Since we’re all going through it at the moment, I thought I’d share one significant challenge I faced in each class this semester, and a bit about how I tried to respond. Leading up to a special weekend post on my younger son’s first semester!]

As always, my Honors Lit Seminar was an unadulterated joy to teach—a phenomenal group of students who were willing and able to dive into a large and challenging group of texts, including four longer readings and tons of shorter supplemental ones; individual work with our three papers as well as the Panel Presentations (four moments across the semester when a handful of students share their in-depth thoughts on a Unit and its texts as we’re concluding with them) that pushed my own thinking about our texts and topics; and collective class conversations that modeled the best of what a classroom can and should be. Can’t complain at all, and won’t try!

But I would say that this semester’s section of Honors presented one interesting challenge, something I have thought about every time I’ve taught this course but that felt a bit distinct and more fraught this time around. While our class focuses on America in the Gilded Age, just about every one of our texts and topics has complex and compelling legacies and parallels in our present moment. That’s obviously a positive in many ways, including making clear the stakes of doing this work and having these conversations. But in Fall 2025, those parallels were so apparent and so constant that I really struggled with the question of whether and how to make them a much more central part of our conversations than I usually do, or whether that would detract from our historical and analytical focal points.

I didn’t answer that question in the same way each time—that is, in some discussions I engaged the parallels more fully or centrally than in others—but I would say that across the semester I came up with a strategy that seemed to work well: allowing the majority of our discussion time and topics to focus on our texts and their historical and cultural contexts; but making sure to bring up the contemporary parallels in the final few minutes, both to allow me to note them and to see if folks had responses of their own to those connections. Since I give them the option of connecting to contemporary America in their final paper, as long as they bring in a text or two to help analyze our own moment alongside their analyses of the Gilded Age, I thought these brief and still analytical 21^st century-focused discussions helped model that layer while making clear that it’s a secondary one to our main class focal points.  

Next reflections tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 8, 2025: Semester Reflections: First-Year Writing

[This week marks the conclusion of another Fall semester, my 21^st at Fitchburg State. Since we’re all going through it at the moment, I thought I’d share one significant challenge I faced in each class this semester, and a bit about how I tried to respond. Leading up to a special weekend post on my younger son’s first semester!]

I know you might expect me to say AI for the significant challenge facing my two sections of First-Year Writing I this Fall. But while there were a few instances, as there have always been a few moments of plagiarism in every Writing class I’ve ever taught, they weren’t a consistent issue in these courses. What was, however, was somewhat more surprising: a higher than usual percentage of students with life and schedule issues that made it very challenging for them to get papers in on time. In a class that is all about building skills across assignments, with the help of my feedback as well as our continued class conversations, this widespread challenge (which some percentage of students in every class and semester experience, but which was again much higher than usual this semester) made our work together a good bit more complicated than my general FYW experience (outside of Covid and its immediate aftermaths, at least) has been.

I won’t pretend I have some silver bullet solution to this challenge (no more than any of them I’ll highlight in this week’s series), but I did lean into enhanced versions of a couple of my class policies and practices in ways that helped us move forward:

First, I doubled down on my willingness to make some assignments/papers ungraded, or rather standards-graded (if the students get me a paper and have included work on a couple of key levels, they get full A credit). I’ve long made the first graded paper in each case ungraded in that way, to help introduce them to me as a grader with a bit lower stakes. But this semester I circled back to that grading method with a key later assignment, and found that many more students got that assignment in and genuinely practiced its major skills. Does that throw off the class grades in a way that might be frowned-upon by admins? Probably, but it meant students got papers in and did the work in thoughtful ways that I could give feedback on, and I was good with that.

And second, I really leaned into the role of my most consistent pedagogical practice: weekly emails, short, informal, participatory emails where students share reading responses as well as work in progress on papers. I’ve long found countless benefits of using such emails in almost every class I teach, but this time I decided to make one such email required as part of the work on their concluding paper—if they didn’t get me that email at some point, that is, I couldn’t grade their final paper. I hadn’t ever taken that step, and am not sure I’m willing to do it consistently—I want these to feel productive, not punitive—but in this case it did make sure I heard from every student about their paper at some point, and I think the percentage of submissions went way up for that assignment as a result.

Next reflections tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 5, 2025: Urban Legends: The Bermuda Triangle

[On December 5^th, 1945, five naval jets disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle, helping establish an urban legend that has endured to this day. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such urban legends, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On how an urban legend develops, how it gets challenged, and what it tells us about the human power of such legends nonetheless.

The five naval jets known collectively as Flight 19 may have disappeared in 1945, but the legend of the Bermuda Triangle really began to develop with Edward Van Winkle Jones’s 1950 Miami Herald article “Same Big World: Sea’s Puzzles Still Baffle Men in Pushbutton age.” Or maybe it was two years later—Jones charted a number of such mysteries in his article, while George X. Sand devoted his entire 1952 Fate magazine article “Sea Mystery at Our Back Door” to the Bermuda Triangle specifically. Or maybe the legend really took off with Allen W. Eckert’s 1962 American Legion Magazine article “The Mystery of the Lost Patrol”; or with Vincent Gaddis’s 1964 Argosy magazine article “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle,” which Gaddis expanded into the book Invisible Horizons: True Mysteries of the Sea (1965). In truth, it was the cumulative effect of these multiple stories and others across a couple decades that firmly established this mysterious region as an full-fledged urban legend, one that was still very much in force when I was growing up a couple decades later.

Yet still in force doesn’t mean unchallenged, and indeed one of the most extended and successful takedowns of the legend had been published two years before I was born. In 1975 Larry Kusche, who as a research librarian and trained pilot was perfectly positioned to challenge the legend, authored the book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: Solved (he would publish a follow-up, The Disappearance of Flight 19, five years later). What I really like about Kusche’s work is that he took the legend seriously, not only overall but also and especially in terms of the specific stories out of which it had been built—and then thoroughly investigated the details and realities of those stories, as well as those (such as weather events) which had often been left out. For an example of overall challenges, Kusche found that the number of ships and aircraft reported missing in this area was not proportionally greater than anywhere else on the world’s oceans; while for a specific challenge, he learned that a plane purported to have disappeared in 1937 had really just crashed near Daytona Beach in full view of witnesses. It seems difficult to imagine anyone reading Kusche’s work with an open mind and still giving unquestioning credence to this urban legend.

But at the same time, I hope this whole weeklong series has illustrated not just the prevalence and persistence of urban legends, but the power that they hold in our imaginations. And for an excellent explanation of that power, I think we need look no further than both main phrases in the title of that first 1950 newspaper article from Edward Van Winkle Jones. “Still Baffle Men in Pushbutton Age”: who wants to believe that our technological or scientific advancements can take all mystery out of the world? And “Same Big World”: as various factors and trends have made the world feel smaller and more understandable, it remains crucially important to recognize just how much of that world is still outside of our collective understanding, with the oceans at the top of that list to be sure. That’s a scary proposition, especially for those who find themselves confronted with those mysteries (as the pilots of Flight 19 seem to have been). But as someone who believes deeply in the power of stories and imagination, it’s also a comforting thing—and a great reason why we need, and hopefully will continue to create and propagate, our urban legends.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Urban legends you’d highlight for the weekend post?