It Was Never Just About the Essay
I’m going to try not to make this political, but I make no promises. I teach freshman composition, African American literature and journalism. In the comp classes we don’t have interesting content to read and write about that is mandated by our curriculum. It’s just teach them to write, organize, use appropriate conventions. Actually it says more overgeneralized statements like “Write for specific rhetorical contexts, including circumstance, purpose, topic, audience, and writer, as well as the writing’s ethical, political, and cultural implications.” There’s so much to unpack here. You’d be surprised by how different professors are in the interpretation of what this means in our classrooms.
I mean just the first part alone is meaningful. “Write for specific rhetorical contexts” means adjusting your writing based on the purpose, audience, and situation in which the writing will be used. It recognizes that writing is not one-size-fits-all. Effective writers make intentional choices depending on who they are writing to, why they are writing, and where the writing will appear. In our students’ minds, I alone am the audience. They don’t often see the significance of writing for a specific rhetorical context, so we have to teach them what that means. So I give them the theme of “Truth in the US Elections and the Current Administrations Policies.” Now we have content to read and write about. I tell them if you’re mad or happy about immigration policies in this country, then who needs to hear your arguments? What is your purpose in writing? What is the context or situation? We discuss where and how the writing can be used.
The last part of that one course objective, “as well as the writing’s ethical, political, and cultural implications,” means students must think about the impact and responsibility of their writing, not just the technical aspects like audience or purpose. It asks them to consider how their words affect others and how their writing fits into larger social systems. I tell them their writing can be a form of protest or support for ideas, which makes writing more meaningful. I want them to know how writing connects to power, policies, public issues, or viewpoints. So yeah, it’s political, but it’s the real world. Writing can influence how people think about social issues, government actions, or public debates. I tell students, yes, your writing can do that, and I’m going to teach you how. That’s what this class is all about.
But what about the “cultural implications” in this course objective? Why is that in there? I want students to know that writing relates to people’s identities, backgrounds, values, and lived experiences. We’re all different. We come from different places metaphorically. As a writer, they should be aware of cultural differences and respect diverse perspectives. We don’t get to see that very often in society today, so it can be a challenge teaching this. Students often just want to repeat what they are constantly hearing in the media (news and social) instead of researching and finding the truth.
So Freshman Composition is so much more than teaching students to write. It is about helping them understand how writing actually works in the real world. It is about teaching them to think critically, to recognize audience and purpose, and to make intentional choices instead of just filling space on a page. It is where they begin to see that their words carry weight, that writing can inform, challenge, question, and create change. It is also where many of them, often for the first time, realize that their own experiences, perspectives, and voices belong in academic spaces. Freshman Composition is not just a writing class. It is a class about awareness, confidence, and learning how to participate in conversations that matter.
Charlee Requested a Drop
Charlee emailed this morning to say she needed to withdraw. She explained that she’s dealing with personal circumstances that are weighing heavily on her, disrupting her mental well-being, and making it impossible to keep up with school the way she wants to. This wasn’t a student who was struggling academically. Charlee was earning an A, the highest grade in the class. She wasn’t giving up; she was overwhelmed.
I read her message and felt that familiar mix of sadness, concern, and resignation. Not because she failed, but because I know how hard she worked. And I know how hard we try, every single week, to keep our students afloat.
In this era of OPX checklists and intervention logs, faculty are expected to document every nudge, every email, every gentle “Hey, are you still with us?” As if the real problem is that we’re not paying close enough attention. As if we wouldn’t notice when a student goes quiet. As if we haven’t been doing this work long before the spreadsheets and required uploads arrived telling us to “prove” it.
The process has created a quiet, persistent message: We’re watching you. A big-brother-style accountability system that treats experienced, caring educators like we might forget to do the job we’ve been doing for decades. And the irony, of course, is that all those interventions we dutifully type up each week, reminders, encouragement, offers of help, phone calls, Canvas messages, they don’t magically change the realities our students are living through.
Students are balancing jobs, caretaking, financial stress, health crises, unstable housing, grief, trauma, and the everyday weight of being human in a world that keeps getting harder. And even when we show up fully, giving extensions, recording video feedback at midnight, revising modules, offering alternative assignments, cheering them on, sometimes the compassionate and responsible choice for them is still to drop the class.
That isn’t a failure. Not theirs, not ours.
But the documentation culture can make it feel like one. When a student withdraws, the unspoken question becomes, Did you intervene enough? As if retention happens because we clicked the right boxes, not because our students are human beings doing their best in difficult circumstances.
Charlee’s withdrawal reminded me of something important: our job is to teach, to support, to care, and to offer students every reasonable opportunity to succeed. It is not to save them from their lives, or from choices they need to make for their own well-being.
We can keep doing the interventions, because that’s part of the job now. But we don’t have to absorb the assumption behind them. We know the truth already. We do the work. We see our students. We show up, week after week, with patience and compassion. And sometimes, even then, students still step away, not because we failed, but because life is bigger than our classes.
Charlee withdrew today, even as the top student in the course. I hope she finds steadiness, rest, and a way forward. And I hope we, as faculty and administrators, keep reminding ourselves that the measure of our care is not in the OPX log, but in the way we treat the people who cross our paths, even when the outcome isn’t what we hoped for.
Riding the AI Wave: Teaching with NotebookLM and Grammarly Authorship
You’ve heard the saying, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” That’s pretty much where I’ve landed with AI. Students are already using it, sometimes clumsily, sometimes brilliantly, so rather than pretending we can outsmart the bots, I’ve started figuring out how to make them work for learning instead of against it. Two tools I’m using this semester are NotebookLM and Grammarly Authorship.
NotebookLM has become a surprisingly effective tool for essay revision. Students upload their drafts and my feedback, then use the AI to ask targeted questions about how to improve their writing. Because NotebookLM only works with the sources they upload, it doesn’t pull anything from the internet, it stays focused on their words, their structure, and their feedback.
I give students simple prompts to get started:
- What changes could strengthen my thesis or organization?
- How can I make my evidence clearer or more convincing?
- What patterns do I notice in my instructor’s feedback?
What happens next is the part I love most: instead of relying on vague advice like “add more detail” or “work on transitions,” students begin to engage in their own revision process. NotebookLM gives them an accessible way to talk through the “why” behind my comments and to see their writing from a more analytical perspective.
Grammarly Authorship, on the other hand, helps me confirm that students’ writing actually sounds like them. It builds an authorship profile that tracks writing style and habits across drafts, which can be useful when a submission suddenly feels suspiciously polished. I use it less as a gotcha tool and more as a way to encourage students to develop and maintain their unique voice.
If you want to experiment with NotebookLM, you’ll need to use a personal Gmail account for now. It’s not yet available through Maricopa’s system. Go to notebooklm.google.com, create a notebook, upload a few documents, and start asking questions. You’ll get a good sense of how students can use it to think more critically about revision once it becomes available in our district. And I created a video for my students explaining how it works and how to get started with their revision assignment.
AI isn’t going away anytime soon, but tools like these can help us use it with students rather than against them. In other words, if you can’t beat the AI wave, you might as well ride it. Get it? Ride the wave. ?
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Teaching with Email in the Online Classroom
Over the years education has continually changed, or evolved into something that is considerably different from what education was when I was in school. One major difference is the inclusion of online and hybrid courses into the course offerings. This is still evolving on most campuses, so it’s understandable that many people in charge of educational institutions aren’t always clear about how faculty use certain technologies in their classrooms. So I’m going to try to clarify some things.
First, we’ve used email for many years in our district, and all employees are given an email address to use to communicate official district business amongst ourselves. This system works well, as it’s easy to find an email address in the district and send a fellow employee a message. We can even create distribution lists to send to certain groups of people. It works so well, that we used to get tons of emails on a daily basis from just about anyone who had a cause, a need, a show, or any important information they felt everyone in the district needed to know. Mercifully someone recognized the overload we all experienced, and we adapted to a “only specially designated people on each campus can send ALL district emails. Thank God or whoever made that decision. It was nice to see that we could recognize a problem and find a solution.
But as I mention, delivery methods of teaching have changed too, and faculty are now using email in lots of different ways. Before I started teaching online classes, I never gave my students my email address. I couldn’t imagine how I would handle all that email, and there wasn’t really a need. If they had a question, they could just ask me in class. When I first started teaching online, I recognized the need for students to be able to contact me and quickly created an email account just for that purpose. Since then how I use email in my online and hybrid courses has evolved along with the courses themselves. I don’t use email as just a way for students to ask questions. It is so much more than that.
Email can be a drafting space, prewriting activity, organizational tool, assignment dropbox, conferencing space, peer review tool, and so much more. It is so essential to teaching online that it always surprises me that as an educational institution, we have never sought a more robust email tool for faculty to work with. It has always been up to us to figure out how best to make it work. It wasn’t until webmail evolved that some of us began to dream big with email and start to use it in more ways than the obvious. Now it’s hard to imagine teaching without it.
Here’s a brief example of how I use email in the first week of school. I begin by sending all my students an email introducing myself and giving them a list of things I’d like for them to do before the first week of the semester ends. This list includes filling out a form and providing me with a convenient email address for them. If it’s convenient, they’ll use it and hopefully read my correspondence to them. I use the collected information to set up folders, filters and auto-responders in my email client. To get students familiar with using email in my classes and to help me set up the filters, I have students send me an email after they have completed the first assignment. That email is received, filed, and an auto-responder to that particular email is sent out. It all works quite smoothly. I get what I need and students get instant feedback.
I also keep track of student activity on the course network via email. When students fill out the form, register for the network, and participate in the first discussion, I get an email notification for each. This allows me to quickly approve their registration and then welcome them to the network right away. Students feel a part of a community and feel as if there is someone present to interact with in the online environment. In the first week, many students are nervous about the online class and have questions. During this week, I try to answer questions as soon as possible. For instance, the bookstore had a mix-up with the books for my class. After reading the syllabus, students discovered that the book listed in the bookstore was different than what was listed on my syllabus. Many emailed me to asked about this. One student had even emailed from his phone while he was still in the bookstore and got a response right away. He was able to purchase the correct book right then.
I don’t profess to respond that quickly all semester long, but to me it equates to all that extra time all faculty spend during the first week giving directions, advice, answering questions and just plain being “present” on campus for students. Students have responded well to this interaction in my classes. Just today a student responded to me with,
“Wow, I am seriously impressed by the quick response. I will have to remember this when I do ‘Rate my professor’.”
Once the first week is in the books, I continually use email as a teaching tool in my online courses. Students in the ENG102 course send me research prospectuses and we have email conferences about their research progress. Students collaborate on writing projects in Google Docs and use email to invite me to see their work and to receive updates on revisions made. And I use my email contacts groups feature to take role and keep track of attendance in my hybrid and face to face classes. These are just a few of the ways that email has evolved for me.
When I’m teaching, I don’t have time to deal with emails about:
Biology instructors needed, weekly air quality, and employment opportunities. I’ll handle that later when I get back to my work “office.” I have email for teaching, and I have email for work. My work email stays at work, and my teaching email goes with me to my many teaching environments and teaching moments. I control when, where and how I want to deal with it. I love that freedom, and I love that it allows for me to serve my students. I couldn’t do this if I had to deal with all my email in one standard, made for business, work email account. That just doesn’t work for me.
