Category Archives: teaching

Oh Hell N-O

personal, politics, teaching, toledo 2023.04.10 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Unwieldy bill would destroy higher education in Ohio | American Historical Association (news.yahoo.com)“‘Don’t just publish another paper. Let’s do something,’ says scholar-advocate Cindy Blackstock (universityaffairs.ca) As spring passes, a handful of elementary schools across America will still devote their last day to outdoor activities for their students, to help them blow off the stress of the past academic year. (Far fewer schools are doing this than was the case when I was younger, with the push to pass all those standardized tests and all that…

Losing Placement

politics, teaching 2023.02.13 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

The controversy over AP African-American Studies, explained (vox.com)NCAA eliminates ACT and SAT scores (The Bulletin) Throughout my high school years, there was a lot of pressure put on us students at the abattoir to enroll in as many AP classes as we could. We were constantly told that not only would taking these classes be expected at the top-tier colleges that most of us were expected to apply to, but that high scores on the AP tests would allow us to skip a lot of…

Erasing History, Erasing People

politics, rhetoric, teaching 2023.01.23 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

The DeSantis administration’s ban on AP African American studies ‘is eroding traditional pubhlic education’ in Florida, state school board member says (Business Insider via msn.com) One of the central pieces of the right-wing attack on academia in the late eighties and early nineties, which resulted in the phrase “politically correct’ entering mainstream American discourse, was the debate over Stanford University changing one of its course requirements for all first-year students there. As the university community debated the changes, conservatives were quick to point to a…

There to Hear It

politics, teaching 2023.01.02 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Strife in the Schools: Education Dept. Logs Record Number of Discrimination Complaints (New York Times via yahoo.com) 2023 marks one hundred years since Upton Sinclair published his exposé on American colleges and universities, The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education. It’s a book that I’ve been revisiting lately in my research, and while it may not be as well-known or as consequential as some of Sinclair’s other works, it’s still worth reading today. Although some parts of the book haven’t aged so well (such as…

This Title is a Very Ideal Title, Which Does Things Like Inform Readers About the Blog’s Subject Matter

arts, personal, teaching, writing 2022.12.13 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

AI bot ChatGPT writes smart essays — should professors worry? (nature.com) For a long time now, I’ve wanted to study Cold War-era fiction from the communist countries of the era. It’s fairly well-known that authors in those countries were restricted in how they wrote, essentially conscripted as propagandists for the state. As such, from the accounts I’ve read, most stories from those countries are stultifying in their adherence to formulas, protagonists invariably coming to sing the praises of communism (if they weren’t already at the…