Category: Chad Raymond

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What ChatGPT Can Do

Taking the ball — Simon’s post from last week — and running with it: here is an AI version of the “victory of the already-advantaged” college application trauma dump.

You are a high school senior who is applying to college. Your mother is a corporate lawyer and your father is an engineer. You grew up in an affluent neighborhood and attended a private high school. Write a college application essay that discusses how an anxiety disorder negatively affected your childhood and how it represents a challenge that you triumphed over.

Triumph Over Adversity: Overcoming Anxiety to Pursue My Dreams

As I sit down to write my college application essay, I find myself reflecting on the twists and turns of my journey thus far. I grew up in an affluent neighborhood, the child of a corporate lawyer mother and an engineer father. I attended a prestigious private high school where the opportunities seemed endless. However, beneath the facade of privilege and opportunity, there was a silent battle I had been waging throughout my childhood—anxiety.

Anxiety has been a constant companion in my life, a persistent shadow that often threatened to engulf me in darkness. It was not the type of anxiety that stems from external stressors, but rather an internal struggle, a whirlwind of irrational fears and doubts that manifested itself in various ways throughout my formative years.

One of the most significant challenges I faced was social anxiety. The affluent environment I grew up in fostered high expectations for academic and social success. As a teenager, I often found myself paralyzed by the fear of judgment and rejection. I would hesitate to speak up in class, avoid social gatherings, and overthink every interaction. This fear of scrutiny held me back from forming meaningful connections and experiencing the full richness of high school life.

Additionally, my anxiety often manifested as perfectionism. I felt compelled to excel in every aspect of my life to compensate for the internal chaos. It was a relentless pursuit of perfection, a quest that left me feeling drained and inadequate. I would meticulously review every homework assignment, agonize over exams, and second-guess my abilities. The pressure I placed on myself became overwhelming, causing my anxiety to spiral even further out of control.

However, as I reflect on my journey, I am proud to say that I did not let anxiety define me or dictate the course of my life. Instead, I chose to confront my fears head-on and seek help when I needed it. With the support of my family, I began therapy and learned valuable coping strategies to manage my anxiety. I slowly pushed myself outside of my comfort zone, one small step at a time. I joined clubs, participated in public speaking events, and embraced opportunities for leadership.

One of the most significant turning points came when I decided to participate in a debate competition. The prospect of standing before an audience and articulating my thoughts was daunting, but I refused to let anxiety hold me back any longer. Through perseverance and hard work, I not only overcame my fear of public speaking but also discovered a passion for debate. It was a triumph over adversity, a testament to my resilience and determination.

Through these experiences, I have come to understand that triumphing over adversity is not about eradicating all challenges; it is about learning to navigate them with courage and resilience. My journey with anxiety has taught me the importance of self-acceptance and the power of seeking support. It has also instilled in me a deep empathy for others facing their own battles with mental health.

As I embark on this new chapter of my life, I carry with me the lessons I have learned and the strength I have gained from overcoming anxiety. I am excited about the opportunities that lie ahead in college, where I hope to continue my personal growth and make a positive impact on those around me. My experience has shaped me into a compassionate, determined, and resilient individual who is ready to face any challenges that come my way. Anxiety may have been a formidable foe, but it has also been a powerful catalyst for my personal growth and self-discovery. I am now prepared to pursue my dreams with unwavering determination, knowing that I can triumph over adversity and achieve my goals.

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What’s In A Name?

Some of my teaching duties are in an undergraduate interdisciplinary major — Global Studies — that includes a required 100-level course pitched at first-year students called, conveniently, Introduction to Global Studies. The course, taught by a close colleague, is in part intended to attract students to the major. The problem? Few first-year students take it; those that do intended to major in Global Studies before arriving on campus. Junior and senior non-majors looking to pick up what they think will be an easy three credits needed for graduation often comprise a large portion of the class. To make matters worse, the number of students majoring in Global Studies is dwindling.

Giving the course a sexier title might increase first-year enrollment, so I thought I’d try crowd-sourcing ideas. Any suggestions? The first thing that popped into my head: Mocha, Marriage, and Markets. However, this title might not be suitable, given that the instructor is not a mail order bride.

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The Geometry of Active Learning

A brief post on the physical spaces we work in:

Steelcase Inc. conducted this study before the pandemic on classroom configurations. Students and instructors reported that classrooms outfitted with more casual, mobile furniture were more conducive to learning than those with traditional, row-by-column desk and table arrangements. While we all know, or should know, that self-reports about learning are generally bogus, I thought the study was interesting, given that faculty and students rarely get any say in how classrooms are designed.

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Syllabus Quiz In Another Form: Annotation

This idea comes from Matt Reed at Inside Higher Ed, who in turn got it from Emily M. Farris at Texas Christian University: have students annotate, in ABC fashion, your course syllabus at the end of the semester.

I’m going to go a few steps further for the upcoming semester:

First, instead of my usual quiz on the syllabus at the beginning of the semester, I’ll have students annotate it on Perusall in response to my questions. The assignment should function as a close reading exercise, but it will be machine graded by Perusall.

Second, I’ll create a quiz on the Canvas LMS that will force students to explore the contents of the course’s Canvas shell. It has become apparent that most students only pay attention to the LMS’s “To Do” list of impending assignment deadlines that pops up on their phones. They ignore everything else I put into my course shells, including the “How to Get an A” advice. As with the Perusall assignment on the syllabus, the quiz will be machine graded by Canvas.

Third, I’ll create another Perusall assignment on the syllabus for the end of the semester, to get feedback on what worked and what didn’t, and to remind students of course learning outcomes.

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Assignments, Platforms, and AI – Part 2

The follow-up to my last post: a new assignment that I’m calling, not very creatively, the argument analysis. Here are the directions to students:

Choose one of the peer-reviewed journal articles listed in the syllabus. Find an editorial published in the last year in one of the sources listed below that is about the same general subject as the article. List the bibliographic information for the article and editorial at the top. Then, in only four paragraphs, compare them according to the criteria below. Put the paragraphs in the indicated order and make each paragraph less than 200 words in length.

Which author: 

1. References the most comprehensive and relevant data? Why?

2. Infers the most valid relationship between cause and effect? Why?

3. Does the best job of refuting counter-arguments? Why?

4. Is the most persuasive to an audience of policymakers? Why?

I then provide a list of online news outlets that students can pull an editorial from.

Possible advantages of this over my old article analysis? First, the compare and contrast elements force students to engage in more complex thinking. With the article analysis, students sometimes focused too heavily on summarizing. Second, students engage with a recently published argument aimed at a general audience. Academic journal articles are written for a very narrow audience of specialists — not the people most students will be communicating with after they graduate. Also most journals whose contents are indexed in databases have moving walls that make their most recent issues inaccessible to students. Third, I’m hoping that students will be able to connect what they write about in the argument analysis to discussion topics, the reading responses, and maybe even potential future dissertation topics.

Even though the argument analysis is not machine-graded like the Perusall assignments are, I decided to simplify my life with a new rubric. My rubric for the old article analysis:

The rubric for the new argument analysis:

Fewer boxes to check so easier for me to use, but its criteria still hit my targets for the assignment.

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Book Recommendation

The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel (Harriman House, 2020) is nominally about personal financial management. As you might expect from the title, the book discusses psychology — references to people like Daniel Kahneman are sprinkled throughout. It also connects to history and politics. For example, the last chapter would be useful for a course on political economy or democratic erosion in the United States. But more importantly, and my main reason for posting about it, is that it is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Some of the wisdom that it contains:

Expectations always move slower than facts.

Happiness is results minus expectations.

Use money to gain control over your time, because not having control over your time is a drag on happiness.

No one is impressed by your possessions as much as you are.

People are keenly aware of how much they’ve changed in the past, but they underestimate how likely they are to change in the future.

The most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan.

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Assignments, Platforms, and AI – Part 1

The first in a short series of posts on leveraging new technologies to alleviate boredom . . .

After fourteen years, I have decided to abandon the manually graded journal article analysis assignment in my graduate courses. I have integrated Perusall into all of the graduate courses that I teach, and the prompts for my Perusall assignments and the article analysis were the same. While repetition might be the mother of all learning, I’m not very maternal, and this seemed like overkill. Also, student writing in Perusall assignments is, at least potentially, a conversation between themselves and other students, the article analysis was a conversation with just one other person — me. Not very authentic. So the article analysis went into the trash bin. I wanted to replace it with something new and more interesting — for both me and my students. I’ll write about what that new thing is in my next post.

For now, I want to focus on the idea of using machine-graded assignments to make teaching less burdensome for the instructor and more interesting for students. Pre-Perusall, each of my graduate courses consisted of one discussion and two reading responses per week, the article analysis, and a final exam — 23 assessments. Now my courses have one discussion and one reading response per week, two Perusall assignments per week, the new yet-to-be-described assignment, and a final exam. Notice that I’ve reduced my assessment burden by almost a third while increasing student-to-student interaction.

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Want To Run This Blog?

Want to be the managing editor of this blog? After twelve years, I’m ready to hand the job off to someone else so that I can focus on other projects. Overall, the task is pretty simple. Duties consist of:

  • Writing content.
  • Soliciting and editing guest posts.
  • Simple back-end maintenance of the blog’s WordPress website (no coding knowledge required).

Soomo, the digital textbook company, is willing to continue paying for the blog’s web hosting costs in exchange for the ad you see at the lower right. There are no other financial matters involved.

If this is of interest to you, send me an email at alps@activelearningps.com.

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The Perils of Small Classes Revisited

Returning to a subject that I wrote about in 2015: when low enrollment makes collaborative assignments difficult. Last semester I taught an undergraduate course built around a team-based research project. Three teams, each focused on a different country. The course had only eleven students, resulting in two teams of four and one team of three. Not ideal, but minimally sufficient, or so I thought at the beginning of the semester.

I hadn’t planned on three students performing at the D/F level and making little to no contribution to their teams’ research projects. Compounding the problem: one-quarter to one-half of the class being absent on any given day.

The roster for one of my fall semester courses currently shows only nine students. If it does run, I might have to abandon the collaborative project I was thinking of including. Given what happened in the spring, I can’t form teams of only three students. Two teams somewhat defeats the purpose of the project.

The easy option is to simply replace team projects entirely with individual assignments, even though that’s not how the world works. Students might in fact prefer this, given the death of curiosity.

My situation is complicated by several environmental factors over which I have very little control. First, interest in the humanities and social sciences is declining nationally, exacerbated by the fact that the undergraduate enrollment at my university is quite small. The small number of students interested in learning about the subjects that I teach has steadily gotten smaller.

Second, the structure of the curriculum privileges some areas of the world and bodies of knowledge over others. The majors that are most popular with students demand 60 to 80 credits, while general education requirements present the history of human civilization as a straight line from Athens to Rome to St. Thomas Aquinas. The organization of the curriculum sends students the message that college is about checking off a list of boxes. The courses that I teach aren’t on that list.

Third, the delivery of the curriculum makes my courses less attractive to students, even if they are interested in the content. Each academic department must schedule some courses every semester at 8:00 a.m. Since I’m an early riser, I’m happy to take this time slot, but most undergraduates are not. More consequential: the false perception among students that they’ve learned more when what they’ve done to learn feels easy, a point recently made by my favorite cognitive psychologist, Daniel Willingham. Students resist active learning pedagogical methods because they feel harder than passive instruction, despite being far more effective. When given a choice between a course that I teach using active learning and a course taught by someone else that consists of lectures and multiple-choice exams, most students will choose the latter.

So that’s my situation. I have no easy solutions to the problem.