Frank Bruni on the Teachable Pandemic

I heart Frank Bruni.

I first encountered him at an AAC&U conference in early 2015, in the days of my role as vice provost for learning innovation and student success at Virginia Commonwealth University. Bruni was on a panel discussing the character and value of a liberal arts education. He was so eloquent, open, unaffected, and precise that I instantly became a fan. He eventually wrote a column on the topic (likely behind a paywall for you, alas), and it’s well worth reading. You can find a summary here.

I’ve subscribed to Bruni’s weekly newsletter for the past year or so, and he never disappoints. Today, though, was exceptional. He summed up, and emphasized, many of the things I’ve been mulling over, things I bet many of you have been thinking about too. As is often the case with great writing, even the thoughts or sentiments you’ve encountered before appear more vivid, and more intelligible, as Bruni articulates them.

I was so struck by Bruni’s column today that I wanted to share this part of it with you. There’s a link at the end of the story that will let you subscribe to his newsletters if you wish. I hope you will. His words are always insightful, and very often, a balm for my soul.


https://www.nytimes.com/FrankBruni

March 17, 2021

If you missed the previous newsletter, you can read it here.
Max Whittaker for The New York Times
Author Headshot By Frank Bruni

Opinion Columnist

A year into the pandemic, it’s finally possible to imagine a return to a semblance of our lives beforehand. While new coronavirus variants and fresh Covid-19 spikes could certainly change our current trajectory and foil our hopes, the quickly rising percentages of vaccinated Americans have many of us looking toward the far side of this scourge.
And I know more than a few people who aren’t ready for it.
They wish, as any sane person does, that the pandemic had never happened. They hate what it did to this country, to this world and to many aspects of their own lives and the lives of loved ones.
But its brutal winnowing of their social obligations and commitments beyond home? They actually didn’t mind this, at least not so much. Their movements had grown hectic and their schedules overstuffed.
The way in which shuttered schools, canceled extracurricular activities and closed offices compelled them and their children to spend more time together? There was stress in this, often proportional to a home’s square footage, but there was also intimacy. They liked how many nights everyone ate dinner together.
Now these people brace for a resumption of social overkill, activity bloat, rush hours, staggered dinner times and airport metal detectors. They seem to regard that as inevitable.
But it’s not. At least it doesn’t need to be. From the unfathomable loss and grinding horror of this pandemic, shouldn’t we wring some positives, including a recognition that we don’t have to do everything as we once did, that bits of what was imposed on us over the past 12 months amounted to improvements and that some of the alternate routes, contingency plans and risk-conscious behavior that we latched on to have lasting merit?
I’m talking about big stuff like remote working — and the flexibility that it affords — but also small stuff, like hand washing. It shouldn’t take a pandemic to prompt us to do that repeatedly throughout the day, just as it shouldn’t take a pandemic to make us more conscious of our ability to spread illness. Why not wear masks when we leave the house with bad and contagious colds? (This has long been customary in parts of Asia.) Definitely, we should stay away from the office if we have any sort of potentially communicable bug and retire the idea that it’s stoic — valorous — to show up and soldier through our sneezing, coughing and such. No, it’s inconsiderate. Bosses must make that clear.
Did you find that extended contact and deep conversations with a tiny bubble of people was more fulfilling to you than brief contact and shallow chitchat with a huge, rotating cast of them? You can structure your life that way by choice going forward.
Did you discover that daily walks outside and more quiet, contemplative time did your soul good? Then don’t jettison them when the world whirls back into frenzied motion.
Did less fussing over your appearance feel not like a surrender but like a liberation? No rule compels you to fuss anew.
Most of us have made significant sacrifices during this extraordinary and harrowing period. Some have made profound, acutely painful ones. There may be more of those to come.
But while the trade-off isn’t in the vicinity of equal, we’ve also learned something (I hope) about our responsibilities to one another and what matters most to us. It would be a shame not to heed those lessons.
Forward this newsletter to friends …
… and they can sign up for themselves here. It’s free and it’s published every Wednesday.

By Giovanni Carnovali – Own work, user:Rlbberlin, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2168686
Not a portrait of Frank Bruni.

To Chip German, on the eve of his retirement

Chip:

Every so often I cross paths with a magician, and everything changes.

My first English professor was a magician and I became an English major. My graduate school Milton professor was a magician and I became a Miltonist. In the spring of 2003, a magician named Chip German appeared and I became a leader.

Chip, I am humbled by your generosity, your support, your candor, and above all your integrity. I continue to be inspired by your insights, your creativity, and your indefatigable curiosity. To have you as a mentor has been utterly transformative. To be your friend is to have a custom portal to the multiverse.

But the most astonishing thing is not how you have changed my life for the better and continue to do so. The most astonishing thing is how many lives you have touched and transformed in just that way. If I read about it, I’d think it hyperbole–but I’ve witnessed it, and experienced it, and you my friend are the real deal.

Now it’s time for you to touch us all again with a new phase of your essential artfulness. Get yourself all jabbed and light up that DAW! (I will buy all your records, preferably as hi-res downloads.)

Your friend and fan forever,

Gardner

Chip German

Thicker Skin and Better Wings

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fall of Icarus

By Pieter Brueghel the Elder – 1. Web Gallery of Art2. The Bridgeman Art Library, Object 3675, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11974918

More thoughts on Tom’s Long Goodbye-Biology post.

A substantial part of what Tom narrates either began or flourished while I was a vice provost and leading what became ALT-Lab, the Academic Learning Transformation Lab. Much of the work I helped to initiate or encourage or fund or somehow influence at VCU continued after I was stepped down. I was of course glad to see that work continue and grow–delighted–and continue to be very happy I could help with the first part of it … but it’s not like being there, and would never again be like that. So reading about the work, especially the parts I was there for, has been bittersweet. All of that said, Tom’s posts have also been bracing and wonderful reminders of just how much ground we covered in those early years, just how idealistic our aims truly were, despite some pretty withering opposition from time to time.

There’s a lot I could have done differently, and better, to answer criticisms and modulate (not moderate, necessarily) the tempo and reach of our initiatives. It takes time to assess the political landscape. The trick is always to assess that landscape but not to lose one’s ambition for substantial change where that’s warranted and where change can be fairly and openly worked on. I wasn’t successful, ultimately, but many successes came out of the work and endure today. I take great comfort in that, and I am grateful to Tom for writing about the projects. It was always about the projects.

Several things struck me in particular in Tom’s post on his biology and environmental science projects. I want to cite them here and offer a few words of commentary from my perspective.

Tom writes,

Field Botany

This site was good. It could have been world changing in the way I’d hoped back in 2014. It ran for a semester or three but then another strange political thing happened and the course didn’t run any longer. At least one student reported getting a graduate school job based on the work they did as part of this class. I got to go out in the field and learn all kinds of things about field botany. One of our interns did the art work for this parallel site and then ended up getting his drawing of a fern leaf tattooed on his arm.3

I remember well when this project emerged and the site came online. It was a very exciting time. We talked a lot about this project in our weekly meetings. I was convinced that the site pointed the way toward a genuinely innovative model of online learning, one that was closely aligned with VCU’s emphasis on experiential learning (the 1.0 version of which is the slogan “Make It Real”). The site combined crowdsourcing via mobile technologies with open learning with citizen science–you get the picture.

We all did in fact think that this project could be world changing. That first year, 2013-2014, we had embarked on several such projects, including the first iteration of our Digital Dreamers research-writing sections of UNIV 200: “Thought Vectors in Concept Space.” (Not much to see there anymore.) That spring Molly Ransone joined us to head up our video production department, and we experienced yet another enormous increase in creative reach and opportunities. We really did believe that these projects were fully aligned with what my leadership title stipulated: “Learning Innovation and Student Success.” I saw these two things as connectable and mutually reinforcing. I still think we were right about the potential. What I didn’t understand is that the emphasis on genuine learning innovation via the Internet and the Web would not last beyond the first eighteen months and my first two bosses. I was not fully aware, or couldn’t fathom, that the “learning innovation” was primarily envisioned at the top to be a robust set of revenue enhancements from a suite of online graduate programs. There were signs, but I didn’t see enough of them in time or understand what I was seeing. Do I wish I had? Yes and no. Yes, because I think I could have maintained some innovative approaches even as the momentum bled into the online revenue engines (assuming we could actually have managed the latter). No, because I honestly don’t believe it would have helped, or that I could have worked as a broker for some online course platform provider, which was the direction we were headed when I arrived. (I recall a lot of talk about Deltak, which is something else now of course.)

I don’t know what the strange political thing is that Tom mentions above, and he may not either. There were strange political things all over, as there always are. VCU’s may or may not be more diverse and strange than other institutions. Difficult to say.

Back to Tom:

The field botany site continues to have all sorts of interesting comments and questions from the community. They are identifying unidentified plants. Asking about plants they’ve seen. But those questions sit there unpublished. Maintaining sites like this takes time and energy. It’s also a tricky thing about giving the site away. It’s not my place to go in an approve comments or respond unless we make that part of the deal and do I really know enough about the topic to play that role? I don’t and have to let it go but is sad to see it come so close to being absolutely amazing.

I felt very strongly that VCU was poised to lead the way toward something far beyond SME-ID course templating. It makes me hyperventilate to explain what “SME-ID” means, so I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader. The kind of leadership I envisioned and hired toward, however, was just too far away from what I hadn’t quite ever been told was the real assignment I had more-or-less unwittingly accepted.

It is worth looking at the online experience site. It was made for the VCU board of visitors as something to try to get a flavor for how we were conceptualizing online. It didn’t seem to go over well. There might be lots of reasons for that. It tried to explain the choices and show examples. It tried to blend real-world data gathering and make interactive components that got you outside. I think what they wanted was a slightly polished Blackboard shell. It was pushing an audience too far. They didn’t want a thing different from what was. It would have taken a real investment of time and energy from a lot of people to make this work and we didn’t have that much political backing. Still, we swung for the fences and I remain glad we did.

Once again Tom reminds me that there is no need to regret our ambition. So I will regret something else on my part, something I feel is worth regretting. I am naturally a fairly expansive and exuberant person. At the same time, like anyone else I have my insecurities. Maybe more than some, though I’m told we’re all carrying similar burdens in that respect unless we’re completely covered by the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Yet I do regret that my own fears and insecurities kept me from pounding the pavement more effectively with faculty, with staff, with senior leadership, with alumni, with the entire audience. Too often I sought shelter with allies instead of working to build connections with people who were skeptical or resistant or downright hostile. I can try to forgive myself for this, but my regrets teach me that bravery does not mean not being afraid.

I once asked a wonderful leader how I could grow a thicker skin. He simply looked at me and replied, “Never, ever lose your passion.” I understand the wisdom in the response. This blog and these posts indicate that I have not lost that passion entirely. But I would be perfectly okay with a thicker skin, too.

I’ll let Stanley Kubrick have the last word on this one.

Regrets

Today is the fourth Sunday of Lent. I have blogged every day during Lent, beginning on Ash Wednesday, February 17. Tonight I reflect on the time past in this season that continues. Tonight I apologize to my regrets for not hearing what they have to tell me.

My Lenten discipline to give up silence is paired with my Lenten discipline to start reading blogs again. Both parts have been liberating, but painful too. Committing to feeling both of these things at once, again, has been the discipline. Part of that discipline is not to surrender to diminishment, whether by pandemic or otherwise. Part of that discipline is to maintain my own momentum despite the painful parts. All of that is worth doing, though I have to be careful.

All the emotions get going full-strength as I read Tom Woodward’s series of long-goodbye posts. The feelings emerge because of memories, but they also emerge, with unusual clarity, because of the strength of Tom’s writing.

As Tom tells the story of his biology and environmental science VCU projects, he expresses regret and a sense of frustrated or blocked ambition in ways that help me learn from my own past, a past that, in this very large area first publicly represented by this very blog, I have worked pretty hard to set aside. Now I want and need to do something else, something better. I’ve known all along that my past can be accepted, and then built on, but it can’t be ignored or avoided. Now I decide. That’s a big reason I’ve taken on this Lenten practice.

Tom writes,

If these regrets tell me one thing it’s to get moving and do the things while you can. Time and people move on so swiftly. None of this is wasted though. The ideas and conversations come back around. They shape future conversations and enable future possibilities.

I don’t think I’ve read a more succinct, articulate, and bracing statement of regret, and determination, and hope. I seek to emulate all of that, because it’s part of the way back, and because I owe it to the self I look back on, the one who tried so hard in those few years to make a positive difference and to empower others to do the same.

I do have regrets and I don’t trust people who say they don’t. My Lenten discipline is to listen to those regrets, to sit with them. They tell me what Tom’s regrets tell him. I need to hear that, and learn a stronger way forward.

 

The Appointment

I’ve just made an appointment for my first novel coronavirus vaccine shot, a Pfizer. If all goes well, I’ll get jabbed on Wednesday, March 17. St. Patrick’s Day.

I have started to let myself daydream a bit–okay, a considerable amount–about all the deferrals that might be possibles, even probables after Alice and I are both vaccinated. In doing so, I find myself rehearsing all the things we haven’t been able to do over the last year. I’m surprised to find how long that list has become. Some things I have a hard time remembering I ever did. Maybe I read about someone doing things like visiting a record store, or flying in an airplane. Things like that.

I know that caution and care will still be the order of the day. Frankly, I’m not sure I can get back in the zone of Doing Things In The World Outside very quickly even after Shot 2. But when I heard the President’s address on Thursday and thought about that Fourth of July celebration he envisioned, it felt like something frozen in the middle of my soul had begun to thaw, at least a little bit.

Many a mile to freedom, as the fellow once sang. It’ll be interesting to take that first step on Wednesday.

Third rail blues

Third Rail

The original uploader was Ancheta Wis at English Wikipedia. – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by SchuminWeb using CommonsHelper., CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15595569

As I’ve continued my Lenten discipline of giving up silence here on Gardner Writes, I’ve realized all along that I’d need to tell some stories, somehow, about my encounters with third rails. They include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • scolding adults for playing with matches in a dormitory during a summer program
  • expressing my serious doubts about whether there should include an entry for “God” in The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (to be sure, a microcosm of many other concerns I had during that project)
  • trying to fix an Apple Talk network in a writing center computer lab (no, I wasn’t electrocuted–these are figurative third rails)
  • accepting a promotion
  • trying to figure out if a non-profit organization was actually chartered or not (multiple times) and trying to figure out why it was hard to get that information from the staff (multiple times)
  • trying to encourage a “well-oiled machine” to become more of a site for innovation and program development
  • getting a leadership certificate from a program designed for chairs of boards of directors for non-profit organizations
  • leading an effort to revise a general education curriculum

There are others.

The point here is not that I’ve been unlucky. I’ve been very lucky, and very unlucky; on balance, the lucky breaks have been far more numerous. But touching the third rail is always a shock, and I seem to have an instinct for it (if “instinct” is defined as “moth-to-flame”). I know better now, but that’s not much use really, though I do try to forgive myself for all my blunders, and above all, for not knowing better at the time. All of that said, the things I tried to do, I believe I tried to do in good faith, and I believe they are things well worth trying to do. If I have grown skeptical about whether, finally, there is anything to be done … well, some days I’m more hopeful than others.

Milton once wrote that not everyone is fit to be a champion for the truth, and Johnny boy, I feel that, yes I do, and I’m not even sure it was the truth, though I tried to be discerning. On the other hand, as Jerry Garcia said, “Somebody has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.” So there’s that.

Midterm

bike race

Always good news and bad news.

Good news: many of my students are doing top-notch work, and many of my students who aren’t quite to that level of accomplishment are nevertheless diligent and engaged and often very playful and insightful and inspiring. Every semester I get to watch those blooms emerge, try to encourage the flowering, and try to stay out of the way where that’s appropriate.

Bad news: some students will have that day of reckoning that will define how well they will do by the end of term. Some are in denial; some will stay that way. A few will give up, and a few of those will just ghost me. I try everything I can think of, short of knocking on their front doors. (That seems invasive and maybe even enabling, to me, and it’s out of the question in pandemic time, certainly.) Some have lives that are spinning, or have spun, out of control. For them, I often advise taking the term off if possible. Anything is better than losing time and money while digging oneself into an ever-deepening hole that no ladder can reach down into. At the same time, I always hope and I always encourage hope when it’s warranted–and it’s a tricky business indeed to know when to say “cut your losses.”

Part of the way school is structured today, however, works against the student’s own agency in these matters. There have always been parental pressures, financial pressures, life upheavals, and the sheer uncertainty of so much of what a college degree problem can entail. (Where else are you asked to devote time to study, to reflection, to reading and writing? These are not simply instrumental goods, but they can seem horribly beside the point when one has pressures and upheavals.) Now, however, I do see a change in the way coursework itself is understood by some of my students. Some, by no means all, maybe only a few, but a number that seems to be growing, expect that a course of study will have a prescribed bolus of work that may be completed on any schedule and turned in at any time–or rather, made up at any time. I get students near the end of term who’ve been running out of runway for weeks suddenly asking me if I have any extra credit work they can do. No, I reply: I have work for credit, and I’ve assigned it all along, with a design principle that holds that learning is not about filling my wheelbarrow with what I’ve asked them to bring to me. No, my learning design is curriculum writ small: these activities, in this order, with this duration or persistence or consistency, so that the learning is introduced, consolidated, extended, re-introduced re-consolidated, further extended, and brought into the realm of understanding, which Jerome Bruner defines as “going beyond the information given.”

When high schools put together “credit recovery” packets that allow students to be absent for weeks and then complete the class by plowing through a set of worksheets, the expectation generalizes, and some of my students think that’s what classwork or coursework is. (My skepticism about “competency-based learning” is largely liberal-arts driven, and particularly dubious about the worksheets, tests, and other means of assessing “competency.” But that’s another blog post.)

So I don’t know. But I’ll tell you: the thing about my courses that seems hardest for the students who’re used to delivering packets of coursework in this manner is my requirement that students post to our discussion forum and blog on our WordPress multisite platform: RamPages. This requirement is purely a class participation requirement. I do not grade the forum posts or the RamPages reflections individually. I have no expectation for length, and I’ve told students that they don’t need to spend more than fifteen minutes a day, if that, posting the forum. Maybe a half hour on the weekends for the RamPage reflection. But the amounts don’t seem to be the problem. It’s the character of what I’m requiring. What I am looking for–and I tell this to the students over and over–is consistency of participation in ways that are interesting, substantive, and relevant to the course. I tell them that I understand “relevant” very widely, though it’s a good idea to use the opportunities to post about what we’re discussing in class at least some of the time.

It’s the consistency throughout the semester that stumps the students who want to give me work instead of commit to a course of study. It’s the pure ungraded class participation with a very wide definition of what constitutes participation that seems most difficult, that moves against the grain. It feels as if they don’t want to be in a learning community, or don’t have any real, lived sense of what it means to commit to a course of study over the term. Even if it’s so easy to do so that the only way to fail is just to not show up at all.

I ponder these things. But I know this: when we do a course of study together, it’s a journey, an experience, a life, not a landfill.

See you tomorrow.

Two helpings of soul food

Today was not a terribly good day. I’m well, so far as I can tell, so that’s not it. I didn’t carry a ton of bricks around, at least not the kind you’d build a house with. I worked hard at some prep for tomorrow’s classes, some reading and Big Thinking and some video editing. Two scenes from Dog Day Afternoon, with each shot separated from the other so we can study the editing: the Leon sequence near the middle of the movie, and the climactic ending. (Mild enough not to be true spoilers, I promise.) I discovered that one student has not handed in the first reading exam. I wonder if emailing the student will work this time. It didn’t before, not really.

Maybe I’m just a bit toasty, a little fried. Maybe it’s almost a year since the last time I didn’t worry very much about an imminent viral threat. Almost a year since I ate at the local sublime Mexican restaurant just a couple of miles away, the one with great food but also, and now especially, a warm and friendly wait staff that always greeted us with extraordinary hospitality, the kind of welcome that would put a beautiful glow on a bad day and bring heaven itself to a rousing cadence after a good day. It all seems like a dream now.

I’ve had my ups and downs, but nothing like what many people have suffered. Still, the sense of futility laced with rage (and more bad swears than I’d want you to know about) keeps recurring. Two articles from the Atlantic help me mourn what the world has endured over the last year. They make me grateful, again, for the soul food that deep, honest, skillful writing can provide.

I’ve had so much trouble remembering certain things lately that Ellen Cushing’s “Late-Stage Pandemic Is Messing With Your Brain” came as a relief. It seems that going blank is going around.

Sometimes I grasp at a word or a name. Sometimes I walk into the kitchen and find myself bewildered as to why I am there. (At one point during the writing of this article, I absentmindedly cleaned my glasses with nail-polish remover.) Other times, the forgetting feels like someone is taking a chisel to the bedrock of my brain, prying everything loose. I’ve started keeping a list of questions, remnants of a past life that I now need a beat or two to remember, if I can remember at all: What time do parties end? How tall is my boss? What does a bar smell like? Are babies heavy? Does my dentist have a mustache? On what street was the good sandwich place near work, the one that toasted its bread? How much does a movie popcorn cost? What do people talk about when they don’t have a global disaster to talk about all the time? You have to wear high heels the whole night? It’s more baffling than distressing, most of the time.

That little coda in the last sentence says it all. I’m so very glad Ms. Cushing wrote that article, in that way, for us, now. It’s a terrific article in both senses of that adjective, and there are some new TikTok videos I’ll be checking out when I recover a few of my cerebral wrinkles. I want to read Ms. Cushing’s article again. I don’t want to forget about it. I record it here, now, to help me remember.

The other article is also about forgetting but even more about remembering, and being haunted by memory. It’s called “We Have to Grieve Our Last Good Days,” and it’s written by Julie Beck. Even the title calls to me, iambic tetrameter with a spondee at the end that’s both bracing and melancholy. The article makes it clear that even the lucky ones mourn and are worn away by this grief we share:

I find myself wanting to apologize whenever I show sadness. I’m incredibly lucky, and I know it. I’m not sick, I have a job, I live with a person I love whom I can touch. No one I know has died from the virus. I’ve lost nothing this year but the life I used to know. Which everyone else has lost, too.

But it’s too much, isn’t it? To carry this weight and politely pretend that it doesn’t make us stumble because others are carrying more? “What that does is set up a competition of whose loss is better and whose loss is worthy,” Devine said. “As if there is a finite amount of sadness in the world and you shouldn’t take more than your share.” She thinks that we can respect all the different losses people are experiencing without suggesting that they’re equal. “When we normalize and respect our own losses, that gives us the energy to respect other losses. When we’re stingy, that’s when we get into compassion warfare.” Those who’ve lost “more” resent those who’ve lost “less,” while those who’ve lost “less” may think they don’t have permission to mourn.

Our last times are losses, and they need to be grieved along with everything else. Boss suggested some kind of ritual: “Burn a candle; put a balloon in the air. Someone should be with you, or if they can’t be, tell them. The way we deal with grief is to share it with someone else. You dishonor it by not noticing it as a loss.” These small, private griefs add up: If we each lit a candle for each of our last times, the whole world would be on fire.

Many times during the last twelve months it’s seemed to me that the world is on fire, with a blaze that makes a mockery of candlelight. But there were terrors and injustices aplenty before. How is this different? Why has my brain turned to murk?

“Therapists told me that this grief can manifest in many ways we may not recognize as grief—anger, irritability, sleep disruption, anxiety, even digestive issues. And it can manifest as dwelling on the Last Good Day.”

Ms. Beck explains the concept of the Last Good Day in her beautiful essay. I commend it to you. In this season of Lent, the reminder that I come from dust, and to dust I shall return, feels less like a memento mori and more like the baseline I have to try to rise above each day.

See you tomorrow.

The Dailies

Building on this post:

I have a workflow for my synchronous Zoom sessions. It’s very much like a cinematic workflow–or at least the analogy is illuminating for me:

  1. pre-production, in which I scout and gather the material, assemble my storyboards (my PPT slides), which in this case are also kind of a “script,” though I don’t write out what I’m going to say,
  2. production, the live-in-the-studio synchronous session, with my PPT slides as a set of storyboards and my own riffing as what a director might do on location on the day of the shoot, guided by the storyboards
  3. post-production, in which I take the Zoom recording, the “storyboards,” and the Zoom chat transcript and prepare them for “release,” i.e., posting to the LMS (yes, this part does involve an LMS, at least for now).

It occurred to me today, in large part because I read Jon Udell’s marvelous and re-inspiring back-to-the-future post, that when I do that post-production, it’s a little like what happens when a director and cast and crew look at what what used to be called “the dailies” or “the rushes,” the footage shot that day (or the prior day, back in photochemical times). It’s the raw footage that accumulates from a day’s work. It’s a way to assess what you’ve got, what you might need to redo, what you should plan to do next.

When I edit the Zoom sessions, then, and amass and prepare the associated materials for upload, I’m reviewing the “dailies’ from the day’s class meetings. And when I do that, I’m creating and encountering a massive feedback loop for myself, as I’m reviewing and revisiting the day’s teaching as well as the chat backchannel (sometimes so lively I can’t track it in real time) as well as all the things I thought I was going to do when I was in pre-production. As all that happens, I’m also casting my thoughts ahead to the next class, and already in my mind I’m drafting the continuity as well as the new materials for that next session.

It’s a much more mindful and continuous process than I can recall from pre-pandemic times, to the extent I can actually recall those times (it’s getting harder, as this article helps me understand). It’s a more immersive process. I also find that each day’s classes become more inspiring to prepare and also more exhausting to experience, though when I’m in the live session the adrenaline kicks in–and when the chat lights up during the session, I get very excited indeed. (The chat often responds to my excitement by becoming even more energetic–I love that.)

In sum, more of a ramble today, for which my apologies. But I wanted to get some of these ideas down, even in rough shape. (My blog posts are also “dailies” of a kind, I guess.) I recall Alan Kay’s maxim that we shape our tools, and then our tools shape us. I find the cinematic stages of my own experiments in online teaching have begun to do the same to me. It doesn’t feel like a rut at all–at least, not yet. Instead, it feels like I’m comprehending my own efforts better than I have to now. At the same time, I’m using my comprehension immersively, in a strange but rewarding loop, inhabiting my own cognition and creativity in a deeper and more extensive way.

All very meta, and sometimes more than a little exhausting. Also, exciting. Now showing on the Gardo Cinematech: Thought Vectors In Concept Space: A Teaching-Learning Odyssey. Now In Imax.

Community and cognition

I’m delighted to share this piece with you, published today in Campus Technology online. Mary Grush has done several of these Q&A pieces with me, and I’m always very grateful for the opportunity. Mary has a particular way of asking questions that are invitational. She listens carefully to what I have to say, then asks follow-on questions that start to shape and focus my responses, just the way a good teacher can begin to elicit work from the student that’s sharper and more interesting the longer the questions continue. The result is better than anything I would have accomplished without that leading.

When Mary and I discussed the article, we remembered that it had been about ten years since our first conversation. Where has that time gone? In this case, for me it’s gone into a marvelously reciprocal relationship with a very gifted editor. Working with Mary has been one of the great delights of my post-2003 career–the career that took me by surprise. Perhaps the career that’s not yet quite done.

Thank you, Mary.