January 18-19, 2025: Spring Semester Previews: My Scholarly Work and You

[Another Spring semester is upon us, and with it my annual Spring semester previews. This time I’ve focused on one skill I’m excited to be teaching as part of each of these courses. Leading up this post with a request for help with my next scholarly project!]

I’ve got some steady public scholarly work that I very much plan to continue in 2025, from this blog to my biweekly Saturday Evening Post Considering History column to my #ScholarSunday Threads newsletter. But my first experience creating a public scholarly narrative history podcast was extremely enjoyable, and so I’m definitely looking to create another!

We can call that a second season of The Celestials’ Last Game if we’d like, and I might because of branding and whatnot (he said very knowledgeably), but I firmly believe I’ve done what I can with that particular history so this second season would have to focus on a new subject in any case. I’ve got one idea, which is the really fascinating story of the early 20^th century barnstorming baseball team the House of David (to keep the baseball thread going, natch). But I don’t yet know enough about that story to know if there’s a 9-Inning podcast there, so…

…this space for rent! Or rather, as in this blog’s long and proud history of crowd-sourced posts, this space for y’all’s suggestions. Any ideas for other histories or stories—whether related to baseball, sports stories, or some other under-remembered part of American history—will be very welcome! Share ‘em below, or shoot me an email (brailton@fitchburgstate.edu), and thanks in advance!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. You know what to do!

January 17, 2025: Spring Semester Previews: The Short Story Online

[Another Spring semester is upon us, and with it my annual Spring semester previews. This time I’ll focus on one skill I’m excited to be teaching as part of each of these courses. Please share what you’ve got going on this semester and year as well!]

I said most of what I’d want to say about generative AI, in the classroom and everywhere else, in this year in review post on the subject a few weeks back. But since my online-only courses have been the place where I’ve encountered the use of ChatGPT most consistently, I’ll add this: I’m not looking, as I never have looked and never will look, to be a cop in the classroom. What I am looking to do, now more than ever, is to have all the conversations, including the toughest ones. So despite not meeting this class face-to-face, I’m still going to try to have a conversation with them at the start of the semester on why using AI for classwork isn’t just a potentially dangerous thing to do for their own futures, but also will lead to both mediocre work and, y’know, the further destruction of our planet. The skill of resisting these understandably tempting technological tools is no easy task in January 2025, but I skill I look forward to helping the students who are up for the challenge to practice.

Scholarly update this weekend,

Ben

PS. What’s on your radar?

January 16, 2025: Spring Semester Previews: American Literature II

[Another Spring semester is upon us, and with it my annual Spring semester previews. This time I’ll focus on one skill I’m excited to be teaching as part of each of these courses. Please share what you’ve got going on this semester and year as well!]

I’ve written a lot in this space, especially in semester previews and reflections series, on my back and forth, both over the last few years and in different specific courses, on whether to continue using longer readings like novels or to focus entirely on shorter texts. My default has certainly shifted toward shorter works, not only for reasons of attention span/focus but also because such works are much more frequently available online for free (I try hard these days not to require students to purchase readings). But I try to approach each course and case on its own terms, and to think about when and how it does make sense to use some longer works as well. This Spring I’ll be doing so in both yesterday’s subject (Major American Authors) and in my American Lit II survey, we’re start for example with two weeks each on Huck Finn and The Marrow of Tradition. Both of those late 19^th century works are challenging to read in 2025, and I don’t expect most of the students will get through all of them (and they’re able to do the work successfully even if they can’t, to be clear). But I believe that they are well worth making the effort for, and that the effort itself, the goal of staying focused on and engaged with a longer text, is a skill worth continuing to practice despite all its 2025 challenges.

Last preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What’s on your radar?

January 15, 2025: Spring Semester Previews: Major American Authors of the 20C

[Another Spring semester is upon us, and with it my annual Spring semester previews. This time I’ll focus on one skill I’m excited to be teaching as part of each of these courses. Please share what you’ve got going on this semester and year as well!]

This is one of the Literature courses I’ve taught the most times and over the longest period, as I believe I had a section in my first Spring at Fitchburg State (20 years ago!). A lot has changed in what and how I teach it across those decades, but one thing that hasn’t is the second weekly post I have the students write for each of our authors and texts: after a more analytical/standard first week’s post, the second one asks them to imitate the author’s style in order to think a bit about some key aspects of how each of our authors writes (this second post is entirely ungraded so they don’t have to worry about whether they’re doing it “right”). That’s not an easy thing to do, especially when some of our authors have particularly unique and challenging styles (I’m looking at you, Theodore Dreiser and Sylvia Plath). But I think it’s an incredibly rewarding one, not only for what it can help us see and analyze, but also and especially because it requires empathy, imagining ourselves into a different perspective and person. Not sure there could be a more important skill to hone in 2025.

Next preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What’s on your radar?

January 14, 2025: Spring Semester Previews: First-Year Writing II

[Another Spring semester is upon us, and with it my annual Spring semester previews. This time I’ll focus on one skill I’m excited to be teaching as part of each of these courses. Please share what you’ve got going on this semester and year as well!]

I’m not gonna lie, probably the hardest part of my Spring semester is going to be the week we watch Fruitvale Station in my First-Year Writing II classes (as part of a unit where they write a comparative analysis of a couple films/TV shows/multimedia texts). I wish I felt we were in a better place as a country than we were 15+ years ago when that film’s events took place, or a decade+ ago when the film itself was released. I wish it didn’t seem so clear to me that so many of my fellow Americans would watch that film and argue that Oscar Grant got what was coming to him, or worse. But a central aspect of what we do in the classroom is to try to engage with our toughest conversations, to develop individual voices and ideas, but also and perhaps especially as communities. So this hardest part of my semester might well be the most important part of the semester as well.

Next preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What’s on your radar?

January 13, 2025: Spring Semester Previews: Graduate Research Methods

[Another Spring semester is upon us, and with it my annual Spring semester previews. This time I’ll focus on one skill I’m excited to be teaching as part of each of these courses. Please share what you’ve got going on this semester and year as well!]

I write and think a lot about dualities, and more exactly about analyzing them rather than seeking to reduce them as is our natural human tendency. But I’ll admit that there’s a particularly complicated one that I struggle with maintaining in my own work: the duality of nuance and clarity, of trying to approach our subjects as the multilayered things they are, while at the same time trying to stay what we have to say about them clearly and compellingly. I think finding a way to do both of those at once is at the heart of what I do—as a thinker, as a writer, as a teacher, as a public citizen—and so I’m very excited to make it the heart of my Graduate Research Methods syllabus as well. For example, we’ll start by reading both The Turn of the Screw and the manifold contexts and lenses that inform how we read it—and our goal will be to keep a sense of just how nuanced this text is, while still figuring out how to express our own takes on it with clarity. I’m excited to work with our phenomenal grad students to practice those vital skills!

Next preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What’s on your radar?

January 11-12, 2025: The Great Society in 2025

[60 years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson—fresh off his successful re-election campaign—created his Great Society program, pushing Congress to help him (as he put it in his 1964 speech acceptance the presidential nomination) “build a great society, a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor.” So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a number of Great Society laws, leading up to this post on what we still desperately need to learn from these histories.]

Honestly I think I said a good bit throughout this series about what we can, should, and must learn from both individual Great Society laws and programs and the overarching, progressive emphases of this administration and moment. So I’m simply gonna add one follow-up thought here, courtesy of Honest Abe himself:

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure.”

Am I saying we are currently engaged in a civil war? Not exactly, although I think our moment qualifies at least as one of profound civil conflict (that’s only likely to deepen in the coming years). And in any case, I believe Lincoln’s more central point was about the nation’s ideals being put to the test. I would argue, and I hope have argued throughout this series in fact, that the Great Society both exemplified and amplified many of those ideals. And I know that 2025 and beyond will test the Great Society and our ideals alike in all kinds of ways. I’m out of the predicting business, but I know I’m proud to be in that fight with y’all.

Spring semester previews start tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?