Preliminaries:

No AI was used in the creation, brainstorming, or editing of this piece, though I did appreciate spellcheck.

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I recognize my privilege in teaching only two medium-sized classes.

I just finished nearly 45 meetings with my undergraduate students and as always this was the most enlightening part of the semester.

It’s part of my ungrading, active learning, reflection, portfolio, learning community, lots-of-learning-and-not-too-much-stress focus-on-threshold-concepts system. I’ve written about it here and here and here, and in my books Schoolishness and Ungrading.

It’s not ABOUT assessment, but I do assess, and so do the learners.

Following a method that I’ve been using for over a decade, I have a lot of activities and students reflect on the activities—they liked musical chairs and Conversation Analysis, which is really hard and time-consuming—about their overall learning and what grade they suggest they have earned. We meet midsemester for five minutes (we’ll do it again at the end) and they write responses to questions I pose to them, asking them to review what we have learned as well as their own work (projects, questions, class leading, etc).

It’s a holistic grade because in my courses there are not specific tiny little gotcha pieces of information that I’m concerned about them having, but rather global threshold concepts. If they have those, then they have learned. I know it sounds fuzzy to some of you, but it is truly the meaningful part of the semester. It’s an exhausting stretch and also exhilarating.

They talk about their insights, changed ways of seeing the world, activities we’ve done, things they want to improve on, now that they know more. They give me suggestions, and tell me things I wouldn’t otherwise have learned: One person had made a puzzle for her UnEssay and her boyfriend framed it. Several people shared the transcript of a conversation with the participants whose permission they had obtained, once they analyzed it.

Sometimes they say things like “I love this class!”

Actually

Sometimes I asked them about the ungraded nature of the course, and sometimes they spontaneously brought it up.

They inevitably contrasted it with the majority of their other courses which are conventional, where every single thing is evaluated and rewarded, everything is threatened, and in many students’ experiences there are also curves, so they are in competition with their classmates.

One of the words I’ve become completely obsessed about is the word actually. Actually introduces information that contradicts what the speaker assumes of your expectations. It’s often very cute when toddlers start to use the word actually, to correct something that someone has erroneously said, as they’ve heard others around them do.

When my college students in our meetings use it, it often sounds like this (most are verbatim; I wrote them as we spoke):

“Actually I’m learning a lot.”

“Actually I’m enjoying coming to class.”

“‘Actually I’m more motivated for this than I am for my classes with tests.”

“Actually I can understand the reading because the examples are actually helpful.”

“I can actually try to learn.”

“I actually try to take something from the work to apply to everyday life.”

The actually is as if to say you don’t expect to learn in a class without strict grading policies, but actually you learn more. Or I am actually learning for the first time. Or I am actually remembering the material.

Listen for it.

More like a club than a class

One student told me they usually post their work in our LMS, Canvas, and pray for a good grade, but never see it again, nor do they want to.

In my classes students help each other brainstorm, revise, workshop their projects. They look at each other’s when they’re done, and give appreciative feedback plus suggestions.

One of my students this semester wrote that the class is so cooperative that it feels more like a club than a class, a place you would choose to go and learn with others.

I could do worse than that, couldn’t I?

We’ve lost the plot

One student and I talked at some length about AI (some of the meetings got a little elongated; I do schedule some breaks between them, so I can catch up), and why I was making some of the pedagogical choices I was, such as having them write in class rather than producing essays at home. I explained that it was partially to prevent students feeling the need to resort to AI.

And we started to talk about the fact that AI is now being used in all kinds of ways, such as glasses that can serve as transmitters for information that is being conveyed by a bot, even if you are taking a test in a locked down room on a computer.

He was aware of the pitfalls, such as cognitive offloading, which he mentioned, and other loss of real learning.

And he raised the issue of “intelligent” pens where you can essentially scan the material while writing and it can give you the answers.

He also told me of students who keep Claude or Chat open in class, so they can listen to the class and then suggest something that you can say for your participation points.

He said to me, “I feel like we’ve lost the plot.” (I asked his permission to quote directly.)

And the story is….

The moral of the story is that it is really hard to create structures that invite students to develop confidence in their learning, to create conditions that help them find motivation that matters to them, to create communities of cooperative learning (though not all the time).

But it is possible.

As I head off into our welcome Fall Break, I feel that learning has happened; students have reflected; we have had fun; and more is to come!

Image from Wikihow.com

In my Anthropology of Childhood and Education class today, we opened with musical chairs.

Our topic was early childhood and preschool, and one of the threshold concepts that I am trying to inculcate is the idea of culture, and the idea that while there are universals, there are also cultural specificities that get taught—without teachers—from the very beginning.

I am lucky enough to teach in a room with very flexible seating, so when the students came in, they did not go to their tables as usual, but I had a big hodgepodge of chairs in the middle of the room. One of the students immediately joked that maybe we were playing musical chairs.

In fact, we were. But it had seemed impossible, ludicrous, out of the realm of the possibility, that we would do such a thing in a SERIOUS college class.

I counted the students, and put the chairs back to back. I’d found a video that played musical chairs exactly right, with the music stopping arbitrarily and unpredictably. I made sure to take away one chair.

You have to understand that fully one half of the students in my class, ten out of twenty, are official athletes. So they understand competition. We played till the bitter end, with one student in the final triumphant chair.

They asked if there was a prize; in fact I had some candy in my nearby office, and I gave some to the champion. Then I gave the rest of them “participation prizes,” if they wanted some.

I asked them to process this experience with me, and they commented on the fact that it was fun, and they were focused. One student contrasted this activity with her other classes, where they were having tests. I observed that I saw several of the students really strategizing carefully in a calm but focused way.

I asked if they felt bad when they lost. And several of them said it was momentary but they got over it.

I told them a story: When our elder daughter was four years old, we had a birthday party for her in the basement of our house, and I set up for musical chairs, because all I knew at the time was what I had been raised with. (Though I was an anthropologist, I was not yet an anthropologist of childhood.) And musical chairs was a staple of my childhood.

So we set up the chairs and, this being an era of cassettes, we had a cassette player ready to start and stop. I explained the rules: we would have enough chairs for everybody but one, and the children would run around and the music would stop and everybody would get a chair except for one child.

And one of our daughter’s friends, someone with whom she is still friends, more than thirty years later, a year younger than the other kids, looked at me and said, “Why?”

Why indeed?

It was assumed that competition was the purpose of play.

And one of the things that I wanted my students today to get, deeply in their body, not to forget, was the fact that the cultural message was: only one person could win. The message was that they were individuals, out for themselves, and that this was not fun for its own sake, but fun for the purpose of winning.

This embodied learning exercise got across the message about the cultural nature of play, the early inculcation of cultural values, and the fact that this is all done without direct instruction or preaching.

It did also allow me to mention that there are societies where the dominant form of play is cooperative. (The academic formulation states that “games serve as training grounds for group-specific norms and values and thereby have an important function in enculturation during childhood,” according to Sarah M. Leisterer-Peoples, Cody T. Ross, Simon J. Greenhill, Susanne Hardecker, and Daniel B. M. Haun.)

We had spoken on Monday about the fact that play and curiosity are natural endowments of mammals. We watched a brief video of crows playing, and of monkeys playing. One of the potential readings was Gregory Bateson’s “A Theory of Play and Fantasy” and others chose to read Benny Karpatschof’s article “Play, But Not Simply Play: The Anthropology of Play” in which he detailed some of the classical attempts to define play.

At some level all humans are the same, in contrast, say, to fish. And at other levels we vary as individuals, one of whom loves purple and another of whom loves yellow. But that middle level, the level of social meaning, is where we tend to differ as groups, and that is the message I tried to convey today.

I hope they are talking about this experience one day, long in the future, and that they remember that once in their college class they played musical chairs like young children.

If it sticks, then learning happened.

So many lessons.

We can’t always control what is learned, but something always is being conveyed.

Image source

Notes from Aug 24, 2026

“The room is set up in kind of a weird way because we were doing something there on Friday.” The administrative assistants warned me as I headed to the flexible room where multiple types of events happen, including my classes.

“Good! I like weird.”

And they were right. The movable tables were set up in a kind of connecting serpentine arrangement, which the students called an “S” shape.

I had two classes and wanted to set the tone, with the overall message, “This class will not be schoolish, or at least not fully.”

In my book Schoolishness, which was my attempt to describe and analyze the structural elements of what people think of as prototypical school (I organized them into ten dimensions, including being inside, sitting at tables or desks while a professor speaks, using textbooks or PowerPoints, worksheets, papers and tests, rules for compliance and interaction, constant judgment, etc). For nearly twenty years, even before I had the organizing term, I have been trying to reduce the schoolishness of my own classes (after celebrating them during the first half of my career). I have learned from others, including the rich literature on progressive pedagogy, about how people learn, analysis of interaction, and more, as well as ongoing autoethnography and a lab devoted to understanding school.

The first day sets the tone.

The Anthropology of Childhood and Education

In my class The Anthropology of Childhood and Education, where I retained the S arrangement, I gave each student a small physical notebook and asked them to put away devices. I asked them to notice things about the room.

They remarked on the arrangement, of course. The multiple screens. The whiteboard. The windows. The white soulless walls. One person said they liked the lights. Why? It seemed that they were more than just utilitarian, because of the broader frame, like “polite lights.” They noticed that they were sitting and I was standing. Some commented on the sofa near the window, and the large speakers, maybe for music or entertainment. What kind of room is it, actually?

We talked about how they might figure that out. They noted the computer setup at the front of the room, the whiteboard, the tables.

We talked about what they usually expect on the first day of class: The teacher telling them what the class would be about, and what the requirements would be.

“The opposite of what this is,” one student said.

I liked that.

I told them that we would be doing a lot of observing of things that we usually take for granted.

Then we went outside and did a “barometer” exercise. No right answers. No judgment. Just to get a feel of these topics.

1. Are you an adult?

2. Does learning need teaching?

3. Are kids inherently good?

4. Do you prefer lectures or active learning?

5. Do you like grades?

6. Are you stressed right now?

7. What should the age be of the following:

   1. Coffee

   2. Alcohol

   3. Driving

   4. Voting

   5. Buy cigarettes

   6. Buy guns

   7. Have sex

   8. Serve in military

   9. Marriage

   10. Have children

It was a sunny day, but a little cool in the shade. One student was nearly shivering. We were glad to be finished. I skipped a few items, but they got the point.

We went back in and talked about the three major terms of the class title. They numbered off and divided up into 3 groups. “Anthropology.” “Childhood.” “Education.” They discussed the terms and what they already knew, and came up with bullet points or a definition, which they put on the whiteboard, and they presented it briefly to the class. I took pictures. One student, I think a first-year student, said we should get in the same groups on the last day of class and see how our understanding has changed. Great pedagogical idea!

(As I wrote this, I decided I would create a tab on the syllabus/Google doc called Gallery to post images from class.)

I pointed out that I could have lectured about these terms, but they wouldn’t have had to grapple with them. They could have asked Chat or Claude for definitions. But this way they began to wonder, on their own.

Our day was analog.

The activities were social (but gentle and optional).

We aimed for students to construct their knowledge from where they were.

We emphasized curiosity.

This activity primed them for the book The Anthropology of Childhood 3rd edition, by David Lancy, a favorite book of mine.)

I have written at length about these concepts, which I tried to enact:

• Time for telling.

• Curiosity.

• Constructivism.

• Active learning.

Then I asked them to help classmates who had not yet signed up for Slack (I’d sent the invitation link on Thursday of last week), and a scheduled message arrived via Slack with a link to the syllabus, a Google doc. I am not required to use Canvas, our LMS, to which I have multiple objections. Over many years I’ve developed a simplified system so students now need bookmark only one link. (Thank you Google for creating the Tabs feature. This has made a huge difference. I used to use organized folders but students don’t “file” mentally that way. They only search. There is research about this. See this article.)

the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.

The first assignments are to create a learning journey document where they and I can have conversations, privately, and a few questions about their goals, and to write a preliminary philosophy of learning.

It went well, as far as I can tell.

There was energy, people understood what we were doing, there were several students with social energy making introductions with strangers.

We’ll see how many drop!**

Fundamentals of Linguistic Anthropology

My other class is a more technical one and it’s something I’ve been teaching annually for my entire career. I have experimented regularly with it. I set it up similarly to the other class with a Google doc for a syllabus and Slack and all of that. But it was also different: we began with two videos, to show them that the field of linguistic anthropology—which few of them knew anything at all about—can actually address anything and that it has practical and social implications. The first video, “The Linguistics of Peeing,” was from Etymology Nerd (Adam Aleksic), about the linguistics of “urinal conversations.” It was a one-minute video and we got to look at his questions and his methods, which surely involved observation, which also raised the issue of who can observe urinals. He had graphs, so clearly there were some metrics. And he had hypotheses about which settings and which relationships would yield which kinds of conversations and how long. He had technical terms such as “urine onset time” and it was both hysterically funny to me and also real science.

I think the students were stunned.

Also just as an aside, I made a comment about the fact that I was not privy to such conversations, not being a male, and I made the kind of gesture that one makes when you do a pun, in this case privy, meaning “allowed to access,” which is etymologically related to a privy, or a toilet and possibly an outhouse. I looked at them and I asked, “Do any of you know what a privy is?” and they all looked blank. So that was interesting to me.

We also watched a video of Key & Peele called Phone Call, in which the two men were on their phones but when they saw the other person, they changed the way they were talking.

I was trying to get them to wonder what was going on there.

One person suggested the term code switching, which was helpful.

Some of them talked about trying to be safe, and danger, and different social groups.

I raised the topic of race, which is often taboo in US classrooms but will keep coming up all semester as we address factors that influence and perceptions of ways of talking.

Then we did an exercise which I’ve done many times before but not always, called a Human Scavenger Hunt, in which students circulate and try to fill in boxes about who has which characteristics, some related to the class and some general, and many silly. I emphasize that students need not disclose anything they don’t want to. It’s kind of like bingo.

I emphasized that there were no right answers and not to worry about it. And I asked them to talk to one person at a time.

But when they began, I noticed that they were sitting at their tables of three or four, and trying to fill in as many boxes as possible. I stopped them. I said, “Yes, that would be very efficient, if the goal is to fill in the boxes. But actually, our goal is to be inefficient. Our goal is to circulate and to speak to one person at a time, not so much to fill in the boxes, but to get to know each other. So let’s aim for maximal inefficiency.”

I have decided that this concept may be one of the things to keep in mind this whole semester as we navigate the AI and digital, in contrast to the human and analog, universe. The goal is not to get to the end of the route for a marathon, just as the goal in exercise is not to get the weight lifted so many feet above the lifter, but the goal is to do the running, to actually do the hard work of lifting the weight.

And here the goal was to do the work of circulating and speaking with classmates, not so much for the box completion, but more for the experience. I know people have contrasted the product (a completed form) with the process (talking to other people) and that’s a helpful shorthand.

Just as some people talk about slow food, and slow education, and I have written for decades about industrial agriculture versus permaculture, analogizing industrial education and permeducation, I think that seeing the cult of efficiency as problematic could also help us think about these issues.

Fall 2026 Intentions

So in this confusing year, my aim is to slow way down, to do less, to do as much as possible with physical objects while still respecting people’s varied needs and tastes and also sometimes taking advantage of the affordances of the digital.

Perhaps I can keep the word inefficient in my mind.

** Ten day update: nobody dropped that class. One person added. My other class had a little more instability, with two or three drops and three adds.

image source

Today is Thursday, and classes start Monday morning. That gives me four days, theoretically, but I have a family obligation this weekend, so really I have today. I have been thinking about my classes for a while, of course, and in the past several weeks, I have recorded podcasts with quite a number of colleagues throughout the country, and I have given several talks in person and virtually, and with each one I say something about the semester.

Can I do everything I recommend?

Substack reminded me that a year ago I wrote a kind of manifesto about preparing for teaching, “A Manifesto for Teaching in 2025: A Human-Centered World That Could Be.”

Did I live up to those lofty goals?

Do I have the same ones a year later?

I thought it would be helpful for me, and perhaps for some of you, if I returned to that manifesto and updated it with thoughts about this coming semester. This year, 2026, seems to be the year of reckoning with higher education, in terms of grading, reading, writing, and generative AI. Politics are, of course, the eternal substratum, and they rise and fall to consciousness, hourly or daily, but this post will not primarily concern politics or economics.

Grading

I seem to be known for my work on grading and alternative assessment and what I have tended to call ungrading, and cannot summarize everything here. But just in the last several months, national and indeed international attention has focused on two specific prominent universities contrasting plans for how to address desperate problems in grading, and their role in education. I’ve written about both of them: “Oh Harvard. Limiting A’s Is Not It: Grade Inflation, Deflation, and Obsession” in May 2026 and “The Audacity of Piloting a ‘Grade Covering’ Process: Hail to the University of Michigan” just last week.

Harvard University has decided to double down on limiting high grades, emphasizing their need for sorting students at all times, and assuming that a scarcity of high grades, meaning A’s, will motivate their already high achieving students to become excellent. This in turn, they assume, will ensure the value of the brand of a Harvard A. They have not really addressed the possibility that this will lead to an increase in cheating and sabotage of classmates.

In contrast, the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA), at the University of Michigan, has announced their plan to implement a pilot program in fall of 2026 that will allow students and teachers to proceed as usual with assessment in the classes, but in their transcripts, for that one semester, the students will see only a “pass” or a “no credit” grade recorded. They argue that this will free students who have spent their entire childhood obsessing about grades to take risks and to explore some of the riches of their abundant course offerings, perhaps to try something difficult without fear of failure. And failure, in the context of a selective university like this, means anything lower than perfection.

Both of these experiments have attracted inordinate attention, including an editorial in the Dallas Morning News, applauding the attention paid to experiments with regard to assessment, and even mentioning ungrading as one of the options linked in some Texas universities, but in the end, they come down to the fact that they believe that grades must certify excellence, and that there is some objective meaning to precise grades, which will remain.

I will not rehash everything that I have written and said everywhere, except to say that this semester, like all semesters for the last decade, I will emphasize to my students that I am here to help them discover motivation, and that we will emphasize feedback, and that risks will not be penalized, and that I will have conversations with them about their learning that will result in their suggesting grade for the course, accompanied by their reasoning. Essentially, my grading approach has not changed.

Reading

In contrast, my approach to reading is being modified. I was concerned last year about the use of generative AI for writing, but this year I have become concerned about it for reading as well. Many students use it constantly to summarize everything they read, which suggests a certain approach to reading, an extractive approach, which is not generally what I want students to experience. I am still grappling with this even four days before the semester begins.

Last year in all of my classes, there were times that we read aloud from a text that I really wanted them to experience. Sometimes they had the text on their own, whether in print or digitally, and sometimes I passed a physical book around the room. For the first few minutes, everybody paid attention, but if it got to be too long, everybody zoned out, especially when the readers were not compelling.

I know colleagues who complain that students are not skilled at reading aloud, but my firm belief is that this means we should do more of it if it’s something we value. If students appear in our courses without skills that we want them to have, then it is up to us, the teachers, to help them develop the skills, not merely to blame them for prior deficits nor to complain about “kids these days.” If they have not been asked to read long passages aloud, nor to pay attention to their classmates, and if this is something that we find essential, then we must make time for this. That of course means that there will be less time for other things.

Students report to me that in many classes there are no books and there’s little assigned reading, merely case studies and lecture notes. This is not a skill that some have exercised since perhaps their first general-education courses.

I have learned that it is helpful for me to scaffold what is to be done with the reading, which may include drawing conclusions from sections of a long piece and then abstracting up a level to draw more general conclusions. For many years already, I have had students take notes in class about certain key readings, for instance, the important but long and detailed article by Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, “The weirdest people in the world?” about the dangers of generalizing about humans from research conducted on subjects in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies. Lately some students have used AI to summarize it and they have not actually learned anything in the process.

So this is something that I need to puzzle through. Producing a summary of something you haven’t read defeats the purpose. This is where my grading policy should reassure students, but they come already trained to focus on producing whatever product is asked of them. Many colleagues around the country have spoken about the need to focus on process rather than product, but this is a too-blunt distinction.

I ask students to present their section to their classmates; at least during the moments of presentation, they are necessarily thinking about it.

(Annotation has been presented as a solution, but agentic AI can do the annotation, I believe.)

Writing

Last year I worked hard to reassure my students that their own work would be welcome, and that informal writing—for instance, jotting notes in a journal or writing thoughts with bullet points—would be fine. I often ask students to reflect on their own learning. Last year one student had clearly asked one of the chatbots to write or edit for them.

This year I am including a statement against the use of Generative AI. Last year I had such a statement available, with links and resources, and hoped to persuade the students. This year I’m being a little more heavy-handed. I am going to process this with them, using all the analogies I can find about the goal being “building muscles” and the counterproductive use of machines to do the lifting for them. What I hope to produce is a change in thought; writing is only evidence of that, and it contributes to it.

I have purchased cheap notebooks for all the students in my classes and will encourage them to use them for ethnographic observations, entrance and exit tickets, notes, and more. Students with accommodations are free to let me know. I am torn between what we know about Universal Design for Learning and keeping things as analog as possible. It probably helps that in no classes are there primarily lectures on which students have to take notes, and there are no exams. The notes are about what strikes them as useful and interesting.

Presence

My campus is an almost fully residential campus, and in fact in the last several years, the campus implemented a policy requiring on-campus residence for at least three years. A cynic might argue that finances have something to do with this, but the reason given is that the administration wants students to benefit from interacting regularly. Few of my students are older than conventional, college age, and almost none have responsibility, caring for children or parents or others. Financial aid is generous. This contrasts with many campuses everywhere, so let me preface this section by acknowledging my students’ privilege.

I am aware that at many campuses attendance is a huge challenge, and it is an equity issue as well, in the sense that students with real obligations should not be punished for their inability to attend class.

At my campus, in the last several years, many colleagues have become frustrated with the increased number of excused absences that our students present to us. It has been a topic in the Faculty Senate. One year, I had three golfers who missed seven Mondays in a row, all excused. I spoke with one and I asked about this. He said that most of the golfers that they played against over the weekend were taking classes online, so they didn’t have to attend class. I had fencers who were qualifying for the Olympics and traveled internationally many times during the semester. I applaud their incredible commitment. I lament their frequent absences.

There are many conventional classes, classes that I would call particularly schoolish, which are traditional lecture-and-test, and the lecture notes or slides may be posted, and attendance in courses like this is often seen as optional. Some faculty try to motivate students’ attendance through fear and policies, threatening punishment or lowered grades.

The challenge is that we know that active learning promotes better learning, and this is enhanced by physical co-presence in a community of learners. I work extremely hard to establish such a sense of community in my classes. So when athletes miss up to eight or ten class periods, excused or not, they miss a lot of the learning. Other students may miss class for interviews, which are often excused, or conferences or other more academic or professional opportunities.

I have students who have health problems and, whether physical or mental health, and they too have many excused absences.

In accordance with my own philosophy of treating students as adults who make decisions and who are full human beings, I have not in the last few years demanded proof of excused absences, but students usually provide them anyway because this is standard practice.

But this year, I am going to begin the first day by stating that if they know that they will be missing a lot of class, perhaps a different course would be more appropriate for them. It has become increasingly difficult to teach with so many absent students, who may have a role in a small group.

Attention, Engagement, Presence

Like everybody, I am easily distracted by all of the options in our devices. In one class last semester, in addition to bringing in physical notebooks for the students, and in all classes, I asked for a no-device policy, unless we were using devices for specific reasons, which was actually very common as well. (I actually love tech and use a lot of interactive activities such as polls and collective writing and collective slide production.) This semester, I put it on my syllabi.

This challenges my desire to co-create norms with the students. But I don’t have time to do everything I want and still get to some of the course content, reduced though it may be.

I know that if we begin the first day and establish norms of phone checking, and the like, it will be harder to break the habit later. One thing that has become common is that students say that they are in other courses that are device-free, so they are not resistant. Last semester in one class I had a student who kept checking their phone anyway, but they had not been there the first few days of class and they were absent much of the time, so the community norms never really shaped their activity.

Embodied Interaction

As much as possible I hope to find ways for students to move around the room and the campus, to switch tables and notice the classroom from a different perspective, to pay attention to their interactions. It helps that my classes focus on communication and on education. We will become meta-analysts.

But even more than last fall, I am aware of all the ways that education—that beautiful endeavor to which I have devoted my life—is imperilled and every small classroom decision may make a tiny difference in furthering our humanity, which is to say our curiosity and commitment to understanding the great mysteries of the universe. Or we can throw up our hands and give it over to the bots.

The choice is easy for me. The enacting is hard.

As those who pay attention to higher education know by now, The University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) announced late last week that they will be initiating a pilot study in which the grades for first-year first-semester students will be “covered” or not revealed in their transcript. What will appear is either “pass” or “no credit.” Students will still receive grades and feedback from their instructors, who presumably will be encouraged to teach in ways that they find most effective.

The university presents this as offering a solution to several problems:

“Our goal is to help first-year students acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys—core elements of a liberal arts and sciences education. For example, they can explore a subject that may not come easily to them or take a course in a new field without the fear that a low grade may have long-term consequences. LSA is investing in students’ well-being and growth by fostering a culture of connection and collaboration—rather than competition.”

This has been covered widely in the national press and in the press concerned with education. (I personally have spoken with two reporters about the topic: at the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Detroit Free Press.) I have read numerous comments on LinkedIn, the New York Times, and elsewhere, both in support and, probably more numerously, against.

Let me say at the outset that I am enthusiastic. I think this is an audacious attempt to take on what those of us working in higher education recognize as a system that is not exactly working. We may have different understanding of what it means to say that “higher ed is not working,” but it is obvious that our students are not thriving nor are they learning well. It’s not all cell phones nor AI; it’s not still COVID lockdowns. This has been an emerging problem for a long time.

I have been studying higher education for over 20 years (after 20 years doing something else) and as I titled one book, students recognize, and have recognized for a long time, “I Love Learning; I Hate School.” (A student at a highly selective university uttered that line in an interview nearly twenty years ago.)

Arguments against the policy seem to fall into several categories: the “real-world” argument, that at a job people have to face tough consequences, the “in my day” argument, the “lowered standards” argument, and the “life-is-tough” argument.

I think all of these are erroneous but I understand that the centrality of grades in our thinking about school makes people believe that grades are necessary and useful for every purpose. Don’t forget that there are institutions of higher education without grades and their students often thrive and do well.

Just to put this out there: the majority of medical schools in the US have gone to essentially pass/fail grading structures for their first two preclinical years, with the understanding that students need to be motivated to learn well by something beyond grades, and that medical students’ mental health, already precarious, is made worse by a fixation on grades.

The job argument? If you go to a job and you don’t write the document the right way at the beginning, you probably won’t be fired, but rather you will be instructed on how to do it again. If you are learning to bake at a bakery, you will probably apprentice and will not be given full responsibility immediately. Vygotsky, a psychologist, talked about the “zone of proximal development,” the idea that we gradually increase our challenge with the help of and in company with others, as in the process of moving from one level of schooling to another.

Metric Obsession

Image from Mother Jones

But for me the most important issue involves the world in which our students are emerging, especially into highly selective universities like the University of Michigan and the one at which I teach (the University of Notre Dame): their entire childhood has revolved around grades and scores and metrics. This is essential: the acceptance rate at UM is 17 percent.

In high school, students and their parents can check the online gradebook daily to see whether they got the extra points for the extra credit, or to see their class ranking, or to see how they did on the biology exam. Add this to the teaching-to-the-test that has really consumed most of K12 education in the last two decades, with often-annual exams, and in high school SAT, ACT, Advanced Placement, and International Baccalaureate, and the notion that you have to excel at every single thing, from being captain of your sports team to winning state at least, or nationals, for Mock Trial, to your class rank, in order to enter a highly competitive school like Michigan, and you have students whose every waking moment has been consumed with metrics. Alexandra Robbins wrote The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids in 2006, and it’s far worse now.

Add to that our increasing economic inequality and the fear of falling out of, or fear of not entering, a class of security, and you end up with students who believe that all of school is essentially a gauntlet. Survival is not guaranteed.

This is not to say that students don’t learn, nor is it to have any kind of nostalgia for a golden age where all students were completely obsessed with learning in a pure sense, but most students nowadays see college as an entirely return-on-investment transactional enterprise. There is no room for error and there is no room for risk. The game is existential.

Hidden Curriculum

One final feature is that students enter college with disparate degrees of preparation and security. Some students have had what is essentially a college course, and may in fact have had a dual-enrollment course in college. And they know how to play the college game, knowing what some called the “hidden curriculum.” Others managed to get to college but almost everything about it is new, from living away from family to having a lot of unstructured time, to having papers that are not entirely guided by a simple rubric, to being allowed to visit faculty during “office hours.”

In contrast to the comments about how the writer had failed a course and this motivated them to try harder, failing a course for some will mean flunking out and losing their opportunity for college. This may or may not be a first-generation low-income college student, the kind of students we admit in the hope it will lead to some kind of social mobility, which is one of several sometimes contradictory goals of college, but do we really want such a high-risk first semester?

Nostalgia for the Precision of Grades is Misguided. Grades have never been consistent or fully meaningful.

Grades have never been good at communicating information. Feedback with the opportunity to revise, to learn from mistakes, is what all learning experts know contributes to learning. A hundred years of research on grades shows their flaws. Current efforts at “grading reform” and “alternative assessment” are proliferating.

All of us who went to school “before” are removed from the painful alienating experience of students these days, with their fixation on high GPAs above all else and the disconnection between learning and school, and the fear of taking any risks at all. Perfectionism is not only an individual mental health issue but also limits the genuine learning that happens in classes.

I have been trying to disrupt the “game of school” for nearly twenty years. My students tell me that in most of their courses they don’t dare take a risk because anything that threatens to disrupt their perfect metrics will be too costly. My students work hard and learn a lot, but I don’t grade on the specific assignments. I have spent decades working on motivating them through intrinsic interest, just as the UM pilot program hopes to do: what can students genuinely enjoy learning? What will revive their sense of curiosity and wonder? What hard things can they attempt, without the terror of failing?

With AI available to take students’ courses, to produce facsimiles of learning, to produce surface-level perfection, what might we do to disrupt the transactional high-stakes school game?

UM may not have all the answers, but I applaud their audacity in trying.

• Susan D. Blum earned 3 degrees at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor: MA in Chinese Language and Literature, MA in Anthropology, and PhD in Anthropology

TL;DR

• I had a brain tumor (a meningioma) removed.

Acknowledgments

• I have a lot of privileges, and they helped me enormously.

• I want everyone to have the same opportunity, whatever their identities or situations.

Anonymity

• All names are pseudonyms, except my spouse’s. (This is common in my field of anthropology.)

Caveat

• This is a layperson’s first-hand account of her experience, not at all a source of medical information. I may have made mistakes.

And as long as I’m making prefaces

• No Generative AI was used in any way for research or writing or brainstorming, ahem, or editing.

• This piece may not be used to train large language models or generative artificial intelligence.

• "No Generative AI Training: Unauthorized uploading, data mining, ingestion, or use of this manuscript—in whole or in part—to train artificial intelligence technologies, machine learning models, or large language models is strictly prohibited. No right is granted to use this text for synthetic content generation or algorithmic adaptation."

• "The Recipient agrees not to upload, input, or otherwise transmit the Work, or any portion thereof, into any generative artificial intelligence system, large language model, or consumer-facing AI tool (such as ChatGPT, Claude, or similar technologies) for any purpose, including editing, summarizing, evaluating, or machine learning training, without the Author's prior express written consent.” (from Melanie Conklin)

• License: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International - Creative Commons

  ** An entirely different post could be written about my irritation with the concept of “summer vacation” for professors, because I am a product of the Protestant ethic and emphasize how hard I work in the summer, though without teaching, and that even just contractually my job is only 40 percent teaching, unlike K12 teachers, and that what “counts” is scholarly productivity, and then I would have provided a rant about the labor conditions of higher education….you’re probably going to be glad you got this one instead of several other topics…..

The Origin Story

About four years ago I started to notice that sometimes I had to close one eye to be able to read street signs, especially at night. Like so many aspects of decline, it came on gradually. When I got new glasses at an independent outlet, I said I was kind of seeing double. The enthusiastic person who had helped me said something about grinding prisms (it sounded so mysterious) but that they don’t do that. I mentioned it at my next annual ophthalmologist appointment. The weird thing was that my spouse, a longtime type-1 diabetic, had had double vision the year before and it resolved on its own, so I wasn’t worried.

“Well,” “Greg” (all names are pseudonyms) said (he’s a friend as well as my eye doctor), “One of the reasons would be very serious, like a stroke, but you would have known by now. Probably it’s not serious but just to rule out a fluke, let’s have you get an MRI.”

He didn’t seem concerned. I wasn’t concerned.

I went to a brand-new facility far into our suburban area, nearly twenty-five minutes from my house; in the context of South Bend, that’s very far. It was a few years after Covid restrictions had begun easing, but I was still always cautious. I asked the workers to wear masks and—-it was a brand-new medical facility—-they had trouble locating any.

I’d never had an MRI before. People had talked about how claustrophobic they became, but for me it was kind of relaxing. I wished I had John Cage’s talents and could have written a musical piece about it, capturing the banging and clanging and tapping, metal and electronic sounds.

A few hours later—it was a Friday afternoon—I got a notification that there were results.

A meningioma.

“FINDINGS: There is a 2.0 x 1.8 x 1.8 cm dural based enhancing mass over the left frontal convexity, which is T1 isointense and T2 iso to slightly hyperintense. There is mild mass effect on the adjacent left frontal lobe parenchyma. Minimal T2 FLAIR signal abnormality in the periventricular and subcortical white matter. Globes and orbits are gross unremarkable. 1.8 cm mucous retention cyst in the left maxillary sinus. Optic chiasm is unremarkable. Probable tiny developmental venous anomaly left frontal lobe.

“IMPRESSION: 1. No acute intracranial abnormality. 2. Extra-axial avidly enhancing lesion in the left frontal convexity, likely reflecting meningioma. There is mild mass effect on the adjacent left frontal lobe brain parenchyma. No midline shift. 3. Minimal chronic microvascular ischemic changes.”

I read them over and over, pit in my stomach. I looked up all the unfamiliar words, looked up “brain tumor” on the Mayo Clinic website.

I didn’t know what to do.

I called my brother, “Jonathan,” a pediatrician, and he did his best to translate it to me.

I emailed eye-doctor Greg, reluctantly, because I hate to ask for favors, and it was the weekend.

Basically he said it was a small tumor, nowhere near the optical areas, and we would probably just watch it. The office set me up with a neurosurgeon.

Dr. Local was calm. “You can decide if you want to remove it, so you don’t have to worry about it, or we can watch it. If it grows, we can discuss it later. If you have symptoms, that would change things.”

What kind of symptoms?

It’s near my frontal lobe, the site of cognition. Symptoms would be seizures, fainting, dizziness, headaches, loss of cognitive sharpness, including memory issues, or a change in personality which I probably wouldn’t notice but the people close to me would.

I’m a professor, a writer, a speaker, someone who uses her brain pretty darn often.

But….no symptoms at all. Maybe this little tumor would just stay in its little self-carved lane, beneath my skull. In fact, maybe I’d had it a long time. People probably have them all the time and they don’t cause any trouble. For all of human history people have probably had them without knowing. (And how did that turn out for all of them?)

Here’s the plan: we’ll do another MRI in six months, then in a year, and another year, and see if we have to keep following it.

Meanwhile I used a temporary (Fresnel) prism and later incorporated a prism into my eyeglass prescription to correct my “diplopia” (that’s the technical term for double vision, one of a lot of new terms I’ve been learning).

It’s just an “incidental finding,” I kept saying. I had no symptoms. I might have had it for years already.

This year, it grew. Again. It’s almost double where it started.

I’m in my sixties. My parents are 89 and 94. If it grows a centimeter a year it will fill up my whole skull soon.

April 2026: Figuring It Out

I’m meeting with neurosurgeons virtually to schedule the surgery. I had appointments at two different facilities in a nearby state, one academic and the other a large hospital system. My local neurosurgeon’s office, after a delay, had initially referred me to the wrong branch of the academic hospital, but after some time, we got it straightened out.

Meanwhile I did not cancel the appointment with my local neurosurgeon, in case the others didn’t work out.

But they did.

June 22, 2026: Everything is Ready

And now I have everything set up:

I found a period of nearly seven weeks between all the preexisting travel and professional obligations that had accumulated for the summer. The surgery date, June 30, has been selected with the precision of, um, brain surgery? (That comparison is forever retired for me.) I return from a talk on a Wednesday and leave for the other state and the round of tests two days later, on Friday.

I selected a surgeon and a facility with a brain tumor specialty. My entire extended family lives in the area, and several of them are medical people.

I’ve had two types of bloodwork and an EKG done in South Bend.

I have memorized the password to my MyChart account, and linked the new and my preexisting accounts.

Insurance preapproved the surgery and a two-day hospital stay—in network!

I signed up for Medicare Part A, hospitalization, to which I’d been entitled for a while, but since I’m still working it hadn’t occurred to me that I might need it.

I have drafted an email to send to a few very close friends, explaining that I will be having this surgery and that either my husband or one of my daughters would update them—and please don’t all call and text, though you can send good thoughts.

I have received a package from the hospital containing an “incentive spirometer” to strengthen my lungs, which I’ve been using; disinfectant soap to use the night before and the morning of the surgery; mouthwash to use similarly; an electrolyte drink, Ensure pre-surgery. And a lot of paperwork, plus redundant electronic check-ins for every appointment.

I have sent questions to the presurgery team and to the surgery team and to the billing office, and they have been extremely responsive.

I’ve driven five times across the border to a neighboring state because the doctors and hospital don’t have a licence to practice medicine outside the state, and made calls from parking lots. The default browser on my phone doesn’t allow the sound on videocalls using their platform so mostly we’ve resorted to phone calls. (I have been using DuckDuckGo for privacy, and I have to change some of the settings, but….)

I’ve handed over my sourdough starter to my friends “Florence” and “Leo,” who live around the block and will check on the house and mail, and water the plants.

I’ve packed a small bag with items for the hospital, and made a list for the other things (reading glasses, phone, ipad, chargers, books, good black and herbal tea).

I’ve assembled passwords for our financial items (some of them)...in case I can’t manage this on my own.

I’m trying to get ready to have at least a month without much physical activity other than walking, and with a lot of dependence on other people.

I’m not used to doing that.

But it will be a psychological and medical adventure, and assuming all goes well, I will report back.

The Move

I packed up for three days at my parents’ house, hoping to get in some final long walks and at least one more yoga class, which I did as the guest of one of my nieces. Lionel and I both like to drive but since I would be not be driving after the surgery and since I know my way around better than he does, I drove more. My daughter “Sophia” (pseudonym) flew in from Los Angeles.

On Saturday morning we drove down to the hospital’s Cancer Pavilion for a CT scan and an MRI.

This brand-new building reminded Lionel and me of the Mayo Clinic, where he had gone twice. It was light-filled and airy, with a sweeping staircase, a grand piano, and high-quality copies of artwork from the renowned local art museum. The staff were courteous and everything was seamless. The CT scan took just moments and the MRI was about half an hour, “with contrast,” which meant I had to have an IV. I had alerted them that I’m a “hard stick,” so they allowed extra time in case they had to call in an expert from what I thought they said was the PICU to insert the needle, but the technician was quite skilled herself, and it went in easily. They chose a spot midway up my arm, rather than in my elbow or hand, and it worked fine. She had a warm pack, which helped bring out the vein.

The clanging and the banging and the tapping and the drumming and the alarms of the MRI were both similar to and different from the ones back home; I have since realized that they are just more intense versions of the “crystal bowl sound baths” that one of my yoga teachers uses, which I encountered for the first time last summer, and which I now sometimes use to soothe my monkey mind. Unlike the MRI at home, this one had a set of mirrors which allowed me to see—blurrily, because my distance vision is terrible without my glasses—the technicians in the control room.

The tumor keeps growing. It was initially 2.0 x 1.8 x 1.8 cm and is now 3.2 x 3 x 2.2 cm. Though at my first neurosurgery visit the surgery was borderline elective, clearly it has become essential.

One of the doctors told me it was too large to be treated with radiation.

So, I feel comfortable with my decision to proceed.

****

After the two tests on Saturday, we went to a late lunch and then relaxed at night. On Sunday, we met my sister “Sandra,” my brother-in-law “Kirk,” and their daughter for lunch, and went for a walk in a newly refurbished, popular nature preserve, with tertiary growth, amenities, and trails. Then we had a group of eight for dinner: my brother Jonathan and his wife “Anne,” Sandra and Kirk, Lionel, my parents, and me. On Monday, the day before the surgery, and a day devoted to relaxing and waiting, we spontaneously went to lunch with one of my nephews, who had been traveling, and my parents and Sophia.

I had a ten-minute video meeting (this time on my laptop, so it worked fine; I used a different browser) with the intake doctor, Dr. Out-of-State, who assured me that everything would be fine and that Dr. Precision, the doctor who was performing the surgery, is someone he would’ve chosen for his own family, and with my own good health, he expected good results. Dr. Out-of-State, a renowned expert in certain areas of brain cancer and a co-founder of the brain tumor center, was consistently comforting.

As scheduled, between 2:00 pm and 4:00 pm on Monday they called from the hospital to say that my arrival time was 5:30 am the next day, with surgery scheduled for 7:30 am, which seemed good, because then it would be over quickly. And then they called again to say that things had changed because some things had to be moved around and now my arrival time was 10:00 am and surgery was scheduled for noon. That of course made things easier in terms of preparation and departure. (I was looking for all the good omens I could find.)

We stayed a little while longer; I took another little walk, and then I said goodbye to my parents, who were quite emotional, and we moved to my sister Mabel’s house, where I would be returning, to recover. Mabel is a nurse. She has a loving Golden Retriever, Mack, and had prepared with everything I could possibly need: clean sheets, a pile of pillowcases (I was supposed to change them daily), lots of clean towels, coffee and tea and fruit and yogurt and vegetables.

After dinner at Mabel’s was over, Mabel, Lionel, Sophia, who was also staying there, and I went over the paperwork that I had and the bags I had packed. The more we read, the more anxious I got, especially when it came to the restrictions for recovery.

We talked about what I had to do that night—a disinfectant shower and a mouthwash rinse, clean pajamas and clean sheets and my final food—and what I had to do the following morning—another disinfectant shower and a mouthwash and drinking a pre-surgery drink and taking my levothyroxine and having my last clear beverages two hours prior to departure, which made it 8 o’clock. We did all that, and I brought my license and insurance card and things to read which I would entrust to Sophia and Lionel, who were accompanying me for the day.

I had a lot of trouble sleeping.

As we entered the elevator to go from the parking garage to the 100-year-old Main Hospital (they are building a brand-new one across the street, for $2 billion, to be completed in 2029), a woman came in and said she had had a double lung transplant here a few years ago; she looked amazing. I told her what I was doing and she said I would be fine, and God is good. And I thanked her and appreciated all the blessings that people were giving me from any tradition and any source of faith.

Waiting

Even though it was an unusually hot nearly-100-degree day, the 100-year-old building managed to condition the air adequately. How many retrofits had that poor building experienced in its life?

Only one person could come from the waiting room into the pre-op, which we assigned to Lionel, and we designated Sophia as the comms team because she is much more adept at technology and responding to things. She was the post-op person. There was a colored board in the waiting room with each person’s case number, so the two permitted visitors could keep track: preparation, surgery, recovery, etc. (Several other family members had asked to come wait with Lionel and Sophia, but the hospital had serious restrictions on visitors.)

They brought me back to the pre-op site (“Name? Birth date?”—questions I was asked dozens of times), where an IV was inserted by a young woman chewing gum, her hair long, dark, bouncy, and she casually put this IV into my hand, “like butter,” as one of the other staff members said, observing in awe. Expertise can look a lot of different ways.

I could hear all the conversations around me: the stalwart orthopedic patient, with his wife attending, and right across the curtain from me, the poor young woman with endometriosis finally getting a hysterectomy after years of pain that healthcare providers had dismissed. Her visitor was her mother.

I spoke with the anaesthesiologist, and another person from the anaesthesiology team, and a fifth-year resident in neurosurgery, who was absolutely committed to learning more and more. Before medical school she had been a nurse, had done work at Mayo Clinic, and was planning to do two more years as a neurosurgery resident, with an additional year as a scholar, doing research. It would total eight years after medical school. The nurse and the resident had spontaneously offered views of Dr. Precision being a terrific surgeon.

“Would you say that about any doctor?”

“I just would not have said anything, unless they asked, and then I would have said, ‘He’s a good doctor.’”

Then finally, I met the actual head surgeon, Dr. Precision, whom I’d previously seen only virtually.

Dr. Precision arrived, a competent, energetic, reassuring person. He answered questions, explained the steps, and left to go get ready.

Then they took me away, and I was in anaesthesia, and I breathed some oxygen and….I woke up.

Waking Up

Sophia was there looking relieved and I don’t remember that much about what happened right then. It was 6:45 pm. I had a really bad pain from a tight white gauze cap that they wrapped around my skull to reduce swelling, and it really hurt my ears. I have learned now how to put my glasses through some of the gauze, but only my one pair of glasses that are titanium and flexible are able to be used (not my reading glasses).

We stayed in some waiting area, waiting for a room in the step-down ICU; I took that as a good sign that I was not in too much danger, since I didn’t have to go to the full-fledged ICU. Sophia and Lionel had been in and out, eating various things, and left to go back to Mabel’s around 10:30.

They took me to a room on the fifth floor, and the clock said 5:30, so I remarked on the time, completely ready to believe that it was now 5:30 am, but it turns out the clock was not working and it was not 5:30! (This is a cognitive test lol?) I had a CT scan at 3:00 AM, which involved my nurse, Malik, and a transport person wielding me through this incredible labyrinth of hallways and carts and buckets and signs and turns and into an elevator and out of an elevator and into a room in which I was able to move myself onto the table for the CT scan, which was very quick. Then we repeated the adventure back up to my room, and apparently I slept.

The Next Day

I had a nurse named Ahmed though he said, “You can call me Andy because it’s easier.” And I shook my head and said, “Americans Americans, how hard is that?” And later when Sophia was here, she also, being very sensitive to cultural inclusion, asked about this, and it turns out Andy is his middle name, but it’s actually ANDI [a different spelling and pronunciation]. He said he’s Indian, but then we got his story. He’s from Kashmir, on the Indian side, but then lived in Saudi Arabia for ten years, and then had his education and training in Canada.

I was hooked up to quite a number of things (IV, catheter, monitors, extra IV port just in case). My blood pressure got tested every hour. Like the reformed perfectionist that I am, I rejoiced every time I got the external validation that “That is perfect blood pressure.”

I did a little walking, and then later some more walking. Dr. Precision came in and checked on me early in the morning on Wednesday, and various people checked on me all day long, particularly because I am taking steroids to reduce the swelling, but they elevate my blood sugar, which then necessitates some insulin. They also are giving me Pepcid to mitigate the effects of the steroid. One thing leads to another….They’ve taken my temperature and my oxygen was low, but then it came back and they checked my blood pressure and my pulse and my respiratory rate. And at one point, my nose was running and everybody was worried that maybe it was cerebral-spinal fluid so they were collecting it, but the resident told them not to bother.

The food situation is a little bit confusing. I asked Malik if I was going to eat and he said, “What do you want to eat?” They sent a box of pudding and carbonated, citrus, drink, and applesauce and flavored yogurt and some other things. I ate the applesauce.

Andi asked, on Wednesday morning, what I wanted to eat. I said maybe some oatmeal and eggs and fruit and something like that? Meanwhile, a regular breakfast was delivered of a kind of scrambled egg thing with a dry chicken sausage and coffee and something else.( Turns out my memory isn’t as sharp as I want it to be.) Later the breakfast I ordered also arrived.

Lunch was the same: they brought a fish Po’boy with coleslaw and milk and the same grapes and cantaloupe and honeydew from the night before (which hurt my stomach and didn’t appeal to me at all, being just a few hours post-op). But I also ordered something gentler.

And dinner was barbecued chicken with roasted potatoes and broccoli and a piece of apple cake and iced tea and milk and butter, but I had also asked for some vegetarian soup and rice and applesauce, which also came. I had also requested tofu and broccoli, but those were not available. I am not sure why they send milk with every meal. I was never asked about my food preferences. Sadly, it seems like they waste a huge amount. There are many things I am not able to control and it is good to have a sense of humor and an exit plan. (I will recommend more consultation about the food.)

July 2, 2026: The Other Side

Modah ani lefanecha. Melach chai v’chayam. Shehechezarta bi, v’chemla rav v’emunatecha.

I am grateful to be awake, alive. There’s a Jewish prayer that we are to say on waking in the morning, thankful to the Spirit that we have another opportunity to be alive. It felt right to say it today.

I realized before the surgery that I was at peace with the idea that I might not get through it. When Jewish children are named in a community ritual, their parents express the hope to raise them to Torah, chuppah, and ma’asim tovim, Jewish learning, marriage, and good deeds. I feel satisfied that I have done that, at least to some extent. It could be considered a complete life, if it came to that.

Clarity is a good result of this.

Last week I told a friend about my upcoming surgery, and she said that when she had had her breast cancer diagnosis several years earlier, she also got great clarity, and years later it has not diminished.

Discharge

Dr. Precision and his physician’s assistant and my nurse for today (Rita, a Canadian, with a masters in nursing, specializing in psych) all came by earlier and they gave me a full report, and I asked a lot of questions. (Apparently I asked more questions than most people, according to Rita. All that academic training got put to use, I guess.) He said that the meningioma was quite easily removed, because it didn’t even penetrate the pial which is kind of a saran-wrap-like covering of the brain. But it had compromised the bone of the skull which they then had to clear. They got as much of the dura as they could, and they wanted to get to clean margins. The tumor will be sent to pathology to determine whether it is benign or not. When the PA took off the gauze I tried to touch my head to see what my hair was like —oh blessed release—and immediately the nurse and Dr. Precision and the PA exclaimed simultaneously, “Don’t touch your head! It’s not clean.” So I need to find a mirror to see this hairstyle that they created for me.

I asked Dr. Precision if he was doing many surgeries today.

“Just one. A meningioma, like yours. But five times the size.”

Later That Day

Released to Mabel’s house. My discharge instructions are fairly simple: no bending and no lifting, no intense water pressure on my incision, though it can get wet. No driving. No cigarettes, vaping, alcohol. Clean pillowcase every night. Return in two weeks to remove stitches. Take the steroid for one more day, and Pepcid if I need it. (Each medication leads to more….)

Now that I can see it, I observe that they made a long, maybe ten- or twelve-inch, incision like a sweep along my head to be able to peel back the skin, and it will be easy enough to cover it up with hair flipped the other way. Meanwhile it looks like a movie incision, so neat is it, going from one side of my head fully to the ear on the other side. It is not at all like I expected it to be; I thought it would be a tidy little square or circle near the tumor.

As I write this, I have already forgotten to limit my movement, and bent over my suitcase to get out a clean shirt. People are reminding me, but I’m feeling pretty good and my general speed is quick. I have to be more mindful.

I am relearning.

Next Steps

I will return in about ten days to have an appointment with Dr. Out-of-State, and to inspect the incision and remove the stitches. Meanwhile I am trying to schedule an appointment with my primary care physician at home, to let her know what’s going on.

I still have to avoid bending and lifting and driving. I have a virtual visit in about six weeks. The full internal healing will take seven to twelve months.

I have avoided telling several people about this, for various reasons, but now, in my zeal to educate, I am posting this.

Lessons so far:

• Have a good support system

• Have good health insurance

• Be lucky

• Hospitals are filled with dedicated, humane, skilled, inquisitive people with all different jobs and levels, who rely on each other. The guy who cleans came in to mop the floor just because he wanted us to enjoy a better smell. The nurse who showed me how to unplug all the lines wanted to give me more freedom, and dignity, while maintaining concerns about safety. The social worker community person kept asking, “What else are you worrying about?” The PT/OT team took me for my first walk and reminded me of many things to keep in mind. An in-home PT person will come here to show me some things as well.

I’m not exactly religious, though I am a practicing Jew. I am finding this a moment of reflection on health, faith, and indeed education.

July 6, 2026: Recovering

It’s been almost a week since the surgery. I am currently, with Lionel, at my brother Jonathan and sister-in-law Anne’s house. We had been at Mabel’s but there were tremendous Midwest summer storms and the power went out early Saturday morning and it is not going to be restored until very late on Monday.

Jonathan and Anne’s son and daughter-in-law also lost power, so they are here too, with their sweet six-year-old dog Penny, currently trying to get my attention from her cage. I’m the first one up, but I don’t think it prudent to try to control her, placid though she often is.

I finally slept. The first night that felt like real sleep.

Steroids interfere with sleep, I have learned. For several nights, memorably the one before last, for nearly twelve hours I tried to sleep and was asleep perhaps for three or four of them. On Saturday night, waking sporadically and trying to get back to sleep, I read an entire book.

I have no pain, but I have awareness and discomfort around the incision, which goes all the way to my left ear. There is tenderness at both temples still, where the tight bandage had been wrapped, and sores are visible on my forehead from the tight wrap.

Jonathan wondered about painkillers. They had offered me Tylenol or Norcan at the hospital. An easy choice for me: the least intense option possible. I don’t tend to addiction, but why take chances?

I said I hadn’t been taking them, though they were on my discharge sheet. Maybe they would help? We looked for Tylenol, but couldn’t find any. We found Advil, which he said may have some more concern because of bleeding. I asked if I should worry, and, clinician, he said firmly, no.

I felt enormous relief, and when I woke at midnight I was aware of myself being aware of having slept. I slept another chunk.

The next morning Anne noted that there was a bottle of Tylenol behind the extra bottle of Advil. Both agreed that Advil may be more effective, but the recommendations are based on thousands, if not millions, of surgery results, so I’m following the science and taking Tylenol.

People have been offering food, though my appetite is low, and I have gotten many greetings, so many, that I’ve asked Lionel to manage most of them, along with the overwhelming questions about our plans and logistics, coming from all the well-intentioned but numerous family members. (I am the eldest of five children, all with our own children, and several of our children now have their own partners and children, and most live in this area.)

I have taken walks, including a solo walk to the corner and back and around the cul de sac last night. As someone who treasures solitude and quiet, writing now, at 6 am, feels like a nice gift, while I also recognize the absolute dependence I have on all the goodwill around me.

July 8, 2026: Home

Yesterday Lionel and I packed up again, having gone to Mabel’s the night before to assemble everything we had left there in our removal to Jonathan and Anne’s, and we drove home to South Bend. The medical people have not been especially firm about my inability to drive, but I have not been authorized to drive, so Lionel did the driving.

At the best of times, I am not a very happy passenger. I don’t like freeways, and I don’t like trucks, and I don’t like not to be in control. So we drove, following the GPS, which temporarily sent us on a service road, but then was directing us onto the freeway. We drove on the freeway for a while, but it made me quite anxious. There was a lot of construction, and a lot of trucks, even though in the context of this area, it was a pretty low-traffic midday on a Tuesday. Because of the danger of blood clots, following surgery, it was recommended that we stop every hour or so, so we got off at Starbucks in a small town and after that we took the non-freeway route back home.

It took a very long time.

Instead of the freeway route, which would have delivered us at 2 PM, we got home at 3:45, though we had several other stops as well, including a lovely little mini-stop at a roadside picnic table.

We got home and Lionel had to unload the car entirely himself, and we did a lot of unpacking. The house was in good shape, after 10 days on its own, though with the assistance of our friends, Florence and Leo, who had seen to it, and I made a list of things to do and get, including a skid-free bathmat to ensure no falls in the shower. Lionel, always eager to do errands, went to our nearby TJ Maxx, as I recommended, and came home with five options. The ones we liked best were mum about their ingredients, though one of them in faint print on a patterned background, almost invisible, did admit that it was 100% PVC. One of them, our favorite, had fine print from California, warning that the ingredients in this were associated with carcinogenic effects. Only one of them said “no PVC.” So even though it was not the fanciest, cushiest, most-loofah like, it seemed prudent. We found some food to eat, and I began to recover from my profound exhaustion from the drive. I’m not entirely sure why the drive was so grueling, but perhaps it was because of my energetic copiloting as well as my (sarcasm alert!) medical oversight of Lionel’s diabetic control.

Today, Wednesday, I am still waiting to hear about the in-home physical therapy, which I am entitled to, to set up a specific exercise regime that will increase my strength, but only within the permitted limitations of my surgical recovery. The order had been written on Thursday of last week, as I was being discharged, and the social worker who oversees these things was clear that I was entitled to this. Rather than just generic brochures about exercise and light activities, they will actually assess my own needs, and I will presumably get a program that will get me back in shape, perhaps lifting weights or whatever. It turns out, this has been the only weak link so far. I had met with the social worker Thursday afternoon. Apparently she wrote the order, but last Friday was the observed Fourth of July holiday, and then there was a weekend, so the order actually only went in on Monday morning.

As we were driving home on Tuesday, someone called to schedule the visit from the home health company associated with the hospital. I explained that we were on our way home to South Bend. He said I needed to call my local primary care physician to arrange the care. By some miracle, the printed-out paperwork for my discharge was accessible to me, even from my front passenger seat, and I found the name of the social worker, with a phone number, and I called the number and she actually answered. She said that the order has already been submitted for the South Bend portion of it, so she would work on getting that set up. My hope is that that happens sometime during the second half of this week.

All in all, this slower phase of recovery, following the acute phase, is a little bit more fuzzy. I have a graduate student who is in the middle of her qualifying exams. This is at the end of her third year in our doctoral program, and they are required to be completed. Normally they would have been done during the academic year but for a variety of absolutely legitimate reasons she has had to extend them, and the absolute deadline for completion is July 31.

I have been communicating with her and my two fellow committee members (I’m chair of the committee) and I scheduled the email with the questions to be delivered Monday morning, the day before my surgery, with the responses to be returned within a week.

She submitted her responses this past Monday morning, forty-five minutes early. We will have the oral component next week. I am capable of reading and thinking and concentrating, to my great relief, and I have no doubt that I will be able to ask proper questions. Because the exam is so detailed, it ended up being 67 pages, so I asked our administrative assistant to print it at our office, and I will send Lionel out for an errand to fetch that. (Yes, lots of paper, but when I read long things that I need to annotate, I still need paper.)

When our administrative assistant, who had been on vacation last week, read the email I sent to a few people about this whole thing, she wrote, “Wow Susan. I am really kind of shocked by this. I had no idea.”

So now, as I begin to reintegrate myself to whatever extent I am able, I have to perfect my spiel about my summer vacation. I think the easiest is to say I had some surgery, but I’m fine.

The pathology report, uninterpreted, has arrived. It does not have a general conclusion.

July 15, 2026: The Longer Recovery

Most summers for the last quarter-century my parents have rented a big house on Lake Michigan, inviting every one of their children, spouses, grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren, to come visit at some point during the week. Most but not all come, some for a night and some for the whole week. Everyone brings food, and each family unit, or a few solos bundled together, cook dinner one night. Others do the dishes. We order pizza the first night and have leftovers the last night. There’s always a lot of cereal and snacks. Someone has to shop for something needed nearly every day, if not more. Often we leave with more food than we come with.

This had been planned for months; sitting here at the lake seemed surrounded by people who love me and understand my situation seemed like a great idea, though I did have a period of near-anxiety and near-panic as I packed up for the sixth time in two weeks.

The house has good WiFi, so I’ve been able to conduct personal and professional business from here.

I have now had the virtual, two-week follow-up visit (they mercifully changed it from an in-person visit, which would have necessitated two four-hour drives) with the intake neurosurgeon, Dr. Out-of-State, who advised me to gradually reintroduce activity, and reminded me that we are still awaiting the final pathology report, which is dependent on some new genetic test that will “grade” the tumor. The initial report has a lot more complicated features than I’d expected, “The tumor is composed of a proliferation of meningothelial cells arranged in fascicles, whorls, and lobules.” I’d expected it to be smooth and homogenous like a mushroom. In a soothing clinical manner, he said that it would just tell us if we need to follow up with one single MRI or if we’ll need more than one. It seems to be between CNS [Central Nervous System] WHO grade 1 and 2—neither benign nor malignant. (Apparently this is a false dichotomy.) I’m not thrilled about it, just as I wasn’t thrilled when they said the surgery was around a level 3 in terms of difficulty between 1 and 10. I wanted it to be 1.

Research scientists and clinicians have different answers to the same question, apparently.

Yesterday Lionel and I drove to my local doctor’s physician assistant, who removed the staples—there were eight—and stitches (she stopped counting, there were so many).

She recommended that I continue the restrictions for two more weeks.

My main concern is what I have now learned much about, increasing intracranial pressure (which is sometimes done intentionally, in what is called the Valsalva maneuver, for some cardiac issues). This holding-breath-to-increase-pressure can be helpful for heart issues. It is absolutely to be avoided by someone who has had brain surgery. It’s what happens when you bear down with weightlifting, or in some yoga poses, or in bowel movements. I’ve had a lot of discussion of my bowel movements.

I asked the PA too about my upcoming planned trip to give a talk at a university that I am very eager to see in person. I’ve made my reservations to fly and stay at the hotel.

Like my surgeon and several other people, she said she thought it was “early” to fly.

“Would you probably be fine? Yes. If you had to, you probably could. But it might be a little early.”

Today I sent a long-dreaded email, regretfully offering to do a virtual talk rather than go in person. Their conference is important to me. I am eager to visit their innovative campus. But does it rise to the level of essential?

This whole experience has been clarifying.

I have played with my granddaughter.

I have conducted an oral exam, virtually, for a doctoral student, building on her written answers. I have answered a few emails.

At the clinic yesterday, we encountered a woman I know from several contexts.

“How is your summer? Have you been traveling?”

And I think this is the answer I’m going to keep giving, except when I have the energy to elaborate:

“We’ve been in and out of town, doing a variety of things. It’s been a good summer.”

July 20, 2026: Learning Well: Lessons about Learning from Brain Surgery

In our era there are multiple attacks on expertise and the notion of science. I have been involved for decades in activities to improve education and make it more authentic, and one of the approaches is to focus on genuine motivation. One way to do that is to de-emphasize grades in favor of fostering individual commitment to learning for authentic reasons.

A colleague, John Warner, in his contribution to a book I edited, Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), wrote about his response to people’s horror when he says that he does not want to use grades. In his chapter “Wile E. Coyote, the Hero of Ungrading,” he writes, when he introduces the idea of ungrading, people often raise the topic of proficiency.

“I want my doctor so far beyond proficient that proficiency can’t even be seen in the rearview mirror. I don’t want my doctor even flirting with proficiency, let alone settling down with it for the duration of their career. I want my doctor obsessed with being the best doctor possible on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis. I want my doctor inhabiting their ‘practice’—the skills, attitudes, knowledge, and habits of mind of doctors—as though it is a second skin.” (p. 211)

He writes idealistically, “Doctors are significantly motivated by attitudes that invoke values like caring for others, a sentiment embodied in their professional oath” (p. 212). They can’t just go through the motions, pretending they are learning. They have to learn for real.

I observed my doctors, nurses, medical technicians inhabiting their practice, experts committed to good outcomes, even if they are also motivated by ordinary vocational concerns of salary. Their motivation helps fuel them through their training.

In fiction writing, authors have to make sure that “the stakes” are high. Otherwise readers will not care.

In brain surgery, the stakes could not be higher.

Several people have told me how many years neurosurgeons spend learning: thirteen, by one measure: four years of college, four years of medical school, five years of residency. Many, like the resident involved in my surgery, do more than that.

Several people have told me a joke about a party or a bar where a brain surgeon and a rocket scientist meet to one-up each other.

We could also see high stakes, genuine motivation, in some other medical situations. And in education in general?

When the stakes are real, authentic, students are invested in making sure they learn well and for the long term. When the stakes are entirely extrinsic, the real investment is minimal.

July 31: A Month Out

So here I am, a month out from the surgery. I have begun to do normal things, such as prepare to give a talk, virtually, next week, and I have had at least three Zoom meetings in the last week with two new people and one familiar person about professional topics.

I’m starting to revise my syllabi for the fall semester.

I have even begun to bake sourdough bread again, which, as I write, is proofing in the kitchen, but the Dutch oven in which I bake it is too heavy for me to lift, still, so I am forced to rely on Lionel’s lifting of it from the oven once it is baked.

When I scratch my head, my skull sounds different, because of the materials packed inside. The clinical notes mention what was implanted: a sealant (dural adherus autospray); a flexible sheer weave surgicel; a hemostatic bonewax; a hemostatic human vistaseal fibrin; a surgiflo kit with thrombin; a patch bovine dura-guard graft; and much more.

An attentive physical therapist, “Caitlin,” came three times: to assess, to work with me, and to discharge. She gave me exercises for leg strengthening and balance, and spoke with me about how to gradually reintroduce strength training once I’ve reached the six-week mark.

I have had several events, including an in-person dissertation prospectus defense, which truly was exhilarating and also depleting. Intellectual work is noticeably tiring and social interaction can also be fatiguing.

I am much more mindful of every activity; I have learned to squat down to tie my shoes rather than bend over. I am choosing to forgo some events.

I chose to skip an annual summer gathering hosted by a friend of mine where women get together for a potluck and conversation every summer . But this year I realized that while it was fun, there would be people I did not know well or at all, and the work of having to explain and monitor and limit my responses was beyond me.

In contrast, my husband’s cousin—a musician and retired professor and current tutor and incredible storyteller—came and stayed for two days, and his stories and presence were invigorating. He had also lost his wife to cancer three years ago, and we were thrilled to see him remembering her while also plunging into the world again.

I am still awaiting the final genetic testing of the tumor, an up-to-date sophisticated grading of the tumor. I suspect there may be more scans in my future.

One thing that has been a bit of a surprise is that almost everybody has a story about someone with a brain tumor. Lionel and I went with two friends to see the native plant garden of a woman with a local business, and “Frida” said that her father had a meningioma which was discovered when he fell off his bicycle at the age of 80, and her late husband had died quickly of a glioblastoma.

A colleague told me about a close friend of his who suddenly discovered a brain tumor.

“Was she okay?”

A beat.

“She died.”

A friend from my synagogue had a brain aneurysm, discovered by accident, and is back to running.

There is a Brain Tumor Network that came up for me on Instagram, but only after the surgery.

I see references to brain tumors every day now. I notice with great sorrow all the loved ones lamenting their children’s, partners’, parents’, friends’, deaths of brain tumors and cancers.

As several of the doctors said, “If you had to pick a brain tumor to have, you picked the right one.”

As I face this new post-brain-tumor season of my life, I feel committed to savoring all my possibilities. I know I have some that others don’t.

Final Thoughts as Summer Moves Toward August (= Academic Autumn)

“Don’t worry about it. It’s not brain surgery.” We dismiss concerns about precision, and details.

Sometimes it really is brain surgery.

More lessons:

• Moving from place to place is stressful. If you can recover in a single location, that is better

• You don’t owe everyone you see a complete explanation

• It takes energy to answer even offhand, casual inquiries. It’s good to have a prepared, true-but-not-complete response ready

• Expertise is essential, and must be cultivated, motivated, supported. It might take a long time. It is truly motivated by caring about high stakes

• Science and medicine (socially applied science?) are imperfect but at their best correct their mistakes and improve

• I am the luckiest person alive. I hope to remember this every day for as long as I am able

Sometimes they say, “Well, it’s not brain surgery.”

And sometimes it is.

And when it is, I want to have, and I want everyone to have, access to brilliant professionals focused on their outcomes, not on a mere grade or metric, but the real, authentic deal, the life-and-death, health-and-recovery, the dignity-and-meaning outcome.

I recently had the pleasure of finishing an intriguing book, What Sheep Think About the Weather: How to Listen to What Animals are Trying to Say, by journalist Amelia Thomas. It is in the spirit of Ed Yong’s book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, but it is also a year-long account of her life among animals and humans on a farm, in the spirit of James Rebanks’s The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape, and many other chronicles of a year. Thomas digests a lot of scientific studies and puts them in conversation with her own experience, as well as consultation with various types of experts.

The whole book is thought-provoking, but here I want to mention only two chapters with profound implications for human learning: Chapter 8, “‘Happy Them Up’: How to Listen Through Humor, Fun, and the Biology of Joy,” and Chapter 9, “Training the Untrainable: How to Listen When Animals Say No.”

These two chapters also have implications for the crisis currently facing virtually every educator: what do we do about Generative AI?

I quote below at length from the book because I want you to hear “learner” every time you read “dog” or “horse” or “sheep” or “bumblebee.”

All these living beings enjoy and demonstrate positive effects when they have greater autonomy, as stated in Self-Determination Theory and affective neuroscience. Read on to learn more about this.

In “‘Happy them Up,’” we learn about the power of joy—biologically motivated and visible—to motivate animals such as goats and cows and sheep, who—like humans—experience “emotional contagion” such as yawning when they see others yawn. They express happiness through play.

Bumblebees play.

Rats like to be tickled. They laugh.

In “Training the Untrainable,” Thomas challenges the dominant paradigm of how to “train” (i.e. “control”) animals, such as but not only dogs.

Mostly the familiar method is to reward and punish: use harsh, dominating language, reward with praise and treats for desired behaviors, and the like. Anyone who has ever taken their dog to obedience training knows the drill.

But in a profoundly unlike paradigm, she learned to “be with” animals, such as abused horses. Rather than trying to show them who’s boss, she learned to let them choose. And what they often chose was play, joy, exploration, resulting in cooperation.

Thomas cites laboratory research showing that rats and bees will often choose the harder, but more challenging-and-interesting, method of procuring food, rather than just eating it even if it’s available.

As Alfie Kohn wrote more than a quarter-century ago, even “rewards” punish.

Self-determination theory argues that one of the primary dimensions of motivation is autonomy. (The other two are competence and relatedness.)

Neuroscientist Jaan Panksepp shows that SEEKING is a feature of the animal kingdom. His affective neuroscience has held up well as explaining emotional systems.

And yet we are so familiar with the notion of domination that it’s counterintuitive to do anything else.

“‘Generally…you get yeses by being fun and by building your relationship through training,’” animal trainer Shawna Karrash tells Thomas. “‘But the nos are where your human learning happens’” (p. 211).

When we listen to students’ resistance, we too learn.

Thomas goes to a display of birds of prey that uses a completely unconventional approach and permits the owls, falcons, and raptors to say no (p. 213). “‘Every action we ask of our birds,’” says Naomi Johns, manager of the Bird of Prey Project, “‘is voluntary; everything from stepping on a weighing scale to going out to lead a display’” (p. 214). They permit the birds to have daily time to fly without supervision.

“If the bird is out flying free, there’s absolutely nothing you can do if he decides ‘That’s it. Goodbye. I’m done here.’ The relationship has to be strong and built on trust. And trust starts with respecting their decision to say no.” (p. 216)

They have never lost a bird.

Thomas visits others, tries this constructivist approach with chickens, dogs, pigs, horses. It is all founded in what she calls, following Panksepp, “the biology of joy” (p. 230), the set of relationships, fun, and play, that all beings seek.

Okay, the implications for education write themselves, right?

Choices, the ability to say no, play, mutuality, activities done for their own sake—these motivate animals and insects.

Yet so much of education is essentially brute force: “Do this boring, meaningless activity because I am ordering you to, or else!”

Thomas hears the conclusion from Pilley Bianchi, who is a musician, author, and dog trainer.

“Play…whether it’s with your animals or your kids, is innately reinforcing and second to none at building your bond… ‘Dogs and other large species play in the wild, with big, elaborate movements that could attract predators and expend energy they might need to save. So why do they do it? Because it feels good, in the joy of the moment.’”(p. 195)

Often we ask dogs [and kids and other students!] to do things they’re not so fond of, but with play, your dog is doing something they like. So pay attention to what makes them tick, and build on that. If they come to find you, it’s like your kid pulling on your sleeve: Don’t ignore them. Ask what they want.’” (p. 195)

When educators say we need to “meet students where they are,” it doesn’t mean to remain there, to lower standards, to pander, but to build on their own desires—such as curiosity. (This is apparently a controversial view.)

Thomas has a traumatized Icelandic horse she’d been trying to work with. (“Trauma-informed teaching” recognizes that many students arrive with their own past trauma, not all disclosed to faculty.) Using the ideas of choice and play, she invents some playful interactions, and her horse Andvari responds.

“It’s not, I’m confident, just about the rewards. They aren’t impressive, simply, praise and scratches and plain old hay, all of which he gets anyway. Free from halters and lead ropes, he can leave our play sessions at any moment to munch from a bag of identical hay always hanging in the shelter.

“So why does he do it? For the feel-good factor, I believe: Panksepp’s ‘biology of joy.’ And perhaps due to contra-freeloading, a term coined in 1963 by psychologist Glen Jensen to describe how many animals prefer to make an effort to obtain food rather than simply receive that food ‘for free.’” (p. 199

Jensen “gave two hundred rats the choice between accessing food in a bowl or the same stuff from a pedal-operated dispenser that the rat had to push a random number of times—from forty to a whopping 1,280.

“The rats overwhelmingly chose the pedal.” (p. 200)

This has to do with Panksepp’s SEEKING system: urge for play, desire to hunt or forage.

“Birds, I conclude, sing for joy, just as baby goats bounce, bees play with balls, rats like tickling, cows watch sunsets, sheep enjoy company and big red horses fetch sticks.” (p. 206)

What do students do for joy?

How do we observe students to see what they enjoy, sit with them, meet them there, and build on this? How do we construct activities and settings where they feel free to choose, and find inherently rewarding work and effortful play?

I have been spending decades trying to figure this out for my own courses.

There is a network of schools, especially the Sudbury schools, founded on principles of autonomy and choice (“self-directed, democratic schools”), and there are forest kindergartens where young children direct their own learning through physical exploration.

“But won’t the kids just do nothing all day?”

It turns out, this is not what they choose to do.

It rats chose to work for their food rather than just going to get it, and if horses remain in playing-and-training sessions rather than going to get the freely available hay, can’t we believe that students will work for their learning?

In the world of transactional schoolishness where the goals are grades, points, and credentials, in a system of coercion and control, of course force and threats would lead many students to take the easy path and outsource artifacts to GenAI, if they can get away with it.

So our challenge, fellow educators, is this: How do we make the enjoyable, effortful learning itself the goal? How do we create settings that will provide opportunities for the biology of joy?

Many of us have about a month to ask this question, before we return to accompany our learners in their own adventures in exercising competence in their lives.

If animal “trainers” can back off a little, surely we human coaches can too?

No Generative AI was used in any way for research or writing or brainstorming, or editing.

This piece may not be used to train large language models or generative artificial intelligence.

License: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International - Creative Commons

Image source

Prelude: On Metaphor

Metaphors, ways of thinking of one thing in terms of another, can reveal, inspire, and mask. There’s no “literal” unmediated depiction of reality, as Locke, Derrida, George Lakoff, and other philosophers have shown. I wrote my Master’s thesis on metaphors in the Chinese text Zhuangzi and talked about how these revealed some of the ways of thinking of the philosopher, with the emphasis on movement. Even so-called objective science uses human-created categories, as philosophers of science—though maybe not those with a simplified scientistic view—know. This might be called a nominalist versus a realist perspective. We see this in politics, art, literature, morality, and theology. Whether we call God a father or a parent or a force, a friend or a judge or an artist, a he or she or they or it, we have different relationships to that system of theology, and many theologians discuss this, not only in terms of translation but in terms of the entailments of one form or another. The human-like Greek gods versus the multifaceted Hindu gods versus the ancestral Chinese gods ... these all have different implications.

Ways of thinking of time, or the mind, or the body—as cycle or clock, as container or computer, as machine or computer—influence the ways we think about the world.

Metaphors for school have abounded, as I wrote in an old 2018 post that I rediscovered and finally posted on Substack last week. Whether schools are factories or gardens or sandboxes or oases or homes, each will have a different set of experiences. Whether teachers are parents or judges or coaches, whether students are colleagues or scholars or subjects, all of these have entailments, and we are often unaware or unconscious of how they dominate our thinking. We see it in the architecture and the conversational interactions and the clothing.

And ideas about change—teleological (goal-oriented), degenerative, inevitable, dangerous, necessary, natural, difficult—are also influential. The history of science and the field of intellectual history have grappled with this for centuries. I just want to present a case, reporting back from the field (in this case, from a conference), and to think with it. What is a useful way to conceptualize educational change?

The Grading Conference, Grading Reform, Alternative Assessment, Ungrading….

Last week I had the great pleasure of attending the eighth incarnation of The Grading Conference. (Full disclosure: I attended as much of it as I could, but I had some other obligations and, honestly, on Thursday afternoon I had to—emotionally had to—watch the livestream of the opening of the Obama Presidential Center.)

The conference had begun when Sharona Krinsky, Robert Bosley, and several other math educators got together to talk about shortcomings in the grading system. Their conversation grew and included more people, not just mathematicians, and it became a robust place for thinking about what might be called alternative assessment. They offered a free conference for a while, beginning in 2020, then called Mastery Grading Conference, but then established a non-profit called The Center for Grading Reform which puts on low-cost conferences. They do amazing inclusive work. (They have a podcast with 153 episodes, and counting, just since it launched in 2023.)

How to talk about grading reform, alternative assessment, etc.

Different audiences and different purposes may demand different ways of addressing any topic, which may in part account for why terminology for a certain phenomenon is, and must be, unstable. Rhetoric scholars remind us that there is always a “rhetorical situation,” and that the writing or speaking must suit that.

A graduate student once asked me, “When I am applying for academic jobs, should I state that I use ungrading?” I suggested that this term is unfamiliar and may trigger alarm, so it might be better, but still honest, to say things like “I emphasize student-centered assessment and feedback-rich interactions, and active learning.”

“Grading reform” clearly aims to be a broad tent (I’ve called it “the ungrading umbrella” which is obviously not the term that the field is choosing), and possibly unthreatening. Who doesn’t want a little reform?

But more important, the existence of such a conference reflects the fact that people recognize that conventional systems of grading, perhaps one-off tests averaged into other assessments or conflation of behavior/compliance (following directions) and learning of material, is not working.

What it means to “not work” is a matter of discussion, though not for this already-long piece.

(I often talk about the fact that grades fail to motivate in positive ways and they are very poor at providing useful information, whether it’s feedback for the student or a communication about what the student can do.)

There is also instability about whether by assessment we mean the artifact, such as the test, or the process of assessing, which can sometimes be done as simply as noting that students light up when a certain concept is discussed, or whether it is the final artifact that is the summation of the learning. People distinguish formative and summative assessment. Even if experts on assessment try to force agreement about the terms, educators are an unruly bunch. There’s a journal, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, which can provide some sense of the scope of the topic.

Perhaps it is widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo that requires “reform”—a relatively nonthreatening term. Many, if not most, faculty feel vulnerable and afraid as they try to introduce practices that are novel, but they find courage through events such as this conference and solidarity with others similarly trying new approaches, especially if they are mere “reform” or “alternative.”

At The Grading Conference, with its practical reporting on implementation, its careful research done in various courses and using varied methods, its keynotes reminding us of student differences and needs and tastes—perhaps a menu of choices—we got a sense of the lack of agreement, lack of shared meaning, lack of shared goals, lack of shared values. Do we call it grading or assessment or marking, alternative or reform, ungrading or any of the specific variants, such as standards-based grading or mastery grading or specifications grading or labor-based grading or contract grading or collaborative grading? How to decide?

Here are the terms used in titles for the presentations in 2026, some many times and some only once:

• alternative grading

• standards-based grading

• specifications grading

• student assessment

• mastery-based grading

• threshold grading

• point-free mastery-based grading

• feedback

• ungrading and un-grading

• grading innovations

• cumulative- and mastery-based grading

• retesting without penalty

• holistic grading

• completion-based grading

• grading for accuracy

• equitable grading

• contract grading

• project- based grading

• self-graded homework

• helpful feedback

• collaborative grading

In one talk, someone casually mentioned (I’m sorry but I don’t remember who) that maybe in the future, we’ll just talk about “grading” and mean all of it. (I’d rather we not talk about grading at all….but I digress.)

But in addition to the specifics of the discussion, I just want to point out that the conversation has attracted hundreds if not thousands of participants, who work throughout the world in every possible identity and position and ability; in every possible subject, department, discipline; in every possible role from graduate student to adjunct to full professor; and in every possible institution from community college through regional public universities to the most elite institutions.

….Or Defying Change and Sticking to Tradition

Still, and useful for our consideration, at the same time that this conversation is happening, a parallel conversation is happening about so-called grade inflation (Is it in fact a problem?) and restoring a limited bestowal of “high grades” (which means A’s at elite schools like Harvard and Yale), returning to grading on a curve, to emphasize the sorting dimension of grading, which all the rest of us are trying to minimize.

Can You Say….Instability?

This disagreement, in a nutshell, indicates the profound disagreement about almost every dimension of grading/assessment in education, which in turn points to disagreement about the purpose of education.

Some of the specifics include the question of: For whose benefit is the grade? Is it for the benefit of employers and providers of internships and entry into further levels of education? That is certainly an actual use of this information, of these metrics, and as we all know, metrics become the goal when they are widespread, in what is sometimes called Goodhart’s Law.

Are grades good for students? Do they force them to work better? Do they incentivize cheating? Do they produce anxiety and harm mental health? Research, student reports, evidence I heard at the conference consistently (but not universally) suggests no, no, yes and yes.

Education, especially mass education, has attracted enormous dissent because it embeds theories of society and humankind, values of thriving (cooperation or competition?). Such questions can’t be settled by technocratic research. Tests might give information about certain dimensions of learning (See Gert Biesta on “learnification”) but are there other less tangible goals as well? How do we measure joy?

Earnest disagreement about methods and purposes means that easy implementation might occur without even stretching the expectations, but should it?

This is a domain ripe for….schism? Collapse? Given the current realities, can each of us just reform our way to the promised land?

I’m writing something longer (maybe a book?) to engage more deeply and fully with the instability of the whole enterprise, revealed by the sudden descent of AI into what was already a troubled region.

But right now I want to raise the question of what metaphor of change we can discern from this one event: What is change in education?

Change in Education

Change in education has been conceived of in various ways.

Like other domains, change in education has sometimes been conceptualized as a linear process like the theory of diffusion of innovation from Everett Rogers.

Image source

Is the notion of alternative assessment, ungrading, and all the variants, an “innovation” working its way through the sector, with a few innovators, speaking in early years to the “early adopters,” and now to more people? What about those who resist? Who fully dissent? “Laggard” doesn’t seem to apply completely.

Paradigm Shift

I have often conceived of change in education in terms of paradigm shift in Thomas Kuhn’s sense.

Kuhn, who wrote about scientific revolutions, argued that there was a period of instability when multiple paradigms were being proposed to account for anomalies in observation and evidence, after which a new explanation settled down and became what he calls normal science again, but a different version. We observe this in theories of astronomy, geology, genetics.

If everyone stopped using conventional grades, this might indicate a paradigm shift.

Evolution and Revolution

In terms of education, we can think about evolution and revolution. In my own two-decade journey rethinking education, I have been on the side of revolution, or what one of my graduate students called “burning it all down,” at the same time that I have continued to engage in evolutionary practice. Alfie Kohn talks about this functioning at two different levels, a gradual and a sudden level. There is a whole category of people that we might call faculty development or instructional designers who are trying to work within the actual system we have and make it work better, for instance by figuring out a way to hack the learning management system such as Canvas to work with alternative grading systems such as standards-based grading, which tends to be about points, rather than letter grades. Many faculty have no power to change the system, but must operate within it. How do we use the tools available to reach a different end?

And would this bring about systemic change, or merely allow it to endure?

The final metaphor I want to talk about today is hacking.

Hacking

Image source

In the 2010s, a series of books, Times 10 publications, used the notion of hacking as a way of suggesting change in K/12 education. in a series called “Hack Learning” (titles include Hacking Education, Hacking Instructional Design, Hacking Engagement, etc.)

Hacking Learning

The Hack Learning Series explains itself:

“In 2014, Times 10 publisher Mark Barnes had an idea about three big problems in schools that he felt could be easily fixed. What they needed was the perspective of a hacker—someone who viewed its underlying issues through a different lens. Mark wrote a short blog post identifying three problems and included a few very easy fixes.

“The post sparked thoughtful discussion, and readers suggested that schools have more concerns like the ones in the blog post—enough perhaps for a book.

“Some time later, one short blog post turned into the first book in the Hack Learning Series, Hacking Education: 10 Quick Fixes for Every School. #HackLearning: It’s What You Can Do Tomorrow.”

I have not read all the books in that series, but one that I discovered in 2016 really influenced me—nay changed my life—when I encountered it: Starr Sackstein’s book Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School. This gave me the courage to begin to implement what I called ungrading in my own classes, in a conventional education system. (I am delighted to have contributed a short section in the second edition, published in 2022.) (The series now has an “AI Coach”….things change.)

The question I would like to engage with here, though, taking a lay person’s understanding of what hacking means, is when does the hacking break the system?

When do the “easy fixes” end up leading to further changes? How many does it take?

Stretching….Until It Breaks?

How far can faculty go with alternative grading or assessment and still function within the system?

How much inconsistency can operate within the system and still represent it as a single system?

When does the elasticity end and the rubber band breaks?

What is the best fitting metaphor for change in education?

Earthquake?

Tsunami?

Collapse?

A hack?

Development?

Normal scientific development?

Abandonment?

Revision?

Reform?

Does the current system endure, muddle along, or does something else emerge? What forces push it to change? Is there violence along the way?

Will it snap?

What do you think? And why?

Image from Bohiney.com at this source

NOTE: I wrote this in 2018. I’m not sure if I ever published it…I can’t find it anywhere! So I’m putting it out there, as an artifact. And a new post building on this is coming soon.

If metaphors organize our thinking and if there is no truly neutral or literal way of speaking about anything, even to the ways we think about time and space, as Lakoff and Johnson showed long ago, then it is worth looking into the dominant metaphors used for powerful domains.

School is a domain that has been referred to in ways that help and in ways that harm. I would like to propose an old-made-new-again metaphor, The Garden, that might help.

The ancient Greeks, at least some of them, conceptualized a Symposium as a drinking, dinner, and discussion party.

Other ancient Greeks moved and walked while they discussed matters, in the peripatetic model.

For millennia Jewish students studied the Talmud in friendship pairs, chavrutah, carefully matched for their differences by the teacher. Their task was to struggle together.

At the same time, the synagogue was conceived as a place to gather and also as a school, a shul, in Eastern Europe—a place not only to worship but to learn.

From Fröbel’s inspiration to use the term Kindergarten in 1840 into the early twentieth century, a battle ensued between progressive educators conceiving of schooling as a garden where students need nurturing and cultivation, and traditional educators conceiving it as a factory where inputs and outputs and assessments and uniformity reigned. Can you guess which won?

Talk with students and teachers and they will offer that school is war with battles and sides; school is a prison, with walls and identification cards and guards and metal detectors; school is a game where the goal is to accumulate points, to learn the arbitrary rules and master tricks that give an advantage. (I posted this piece about The Game of School back in 2015.)

Or school is the entirety of life, with all needs met and every aspect of a young person’s being included there. Sociologist Erving Goffman considered schools total institutions, just like the old mental hospitals (“asylums”) and prisons.

Critics and workers alike sometimes see schools as machines: when all the components are well oiled and every part knows its place, it can go smoothly and without crisis.

Many administrators operate schools like businesses. The goal is the bottom line and the humans involved are simply one aspect of capital to be managed efficiently and flexibly.

I suggest that we rethink our metaphors for school, and bring back the metaphor of the garden, but this time with a century of ecological knowledge included. The metaphor that helps even more is of permaculture, a design system aiming for permanently sustainable results, producing no waste and benefiting from the diversity of needs and resources in a complex system.

Every aspect of the system would change. In the appendix of my 2016 book “I Love Learning; I Hate School”: An Anthropology of College I provide details of what this would look like.

But what is important is that there would be no wasted resources. Energies would be channeled usefully. It would be created with the goals of creating a diverse and self-sustaining system with something for everyone, able to withstand adversity and containing the characteristic that Taleb has termed antifragility.

It would be beautiful.

It would feed the mind, body, soul, soil, community.

Image source

It would look completely unlike the schools we have now.

There would be no misery; no sense of uselessness; no sense of conflict among elements. Instead of having students shove unwanted information into resisting minds, students would learn what they need or want and would use it. Students would no longer boast that they forget everything as soon as the exam is over. Some of the learning would sometimes involve teachers but that is beside the point. Schools would be integrated into the world and there would be opportunities to learn by doing; learn from fellow learners; learn by observing; learn in teams; learn completely alone. In short, learning would look like the way people learn in real life.

As the basic insight of permaculture rests on the basic premise of ecology, there is only this world and everything in it is connected to everything else.

Even students.

This should be a welcome opportunity, not a dreaded fact fought with gates, doors, walls, trying to keep out the mess.

Just as in a garden the debris turns into nutrients, so the apparent distractions and diversions of school should be used as precious matter.

Image source

This radical rethinking is coming sooner than later, tried out in experiments grand and tiny. It has to. The old models—factory, prison, game, machine, business—cannot be sustained, just as huge industrial farms cannot ultimately be sustained.

Design for living fully has to be the guiding principle for raising up the young. Even in schools.

Is College Worth It? The Question

Image of geocentric view of the universe, source

Every few years in the US people ask whether college is worth it and whether it is accomplishing its goals. In 2026 the answer seems to be firmly yes, no, and it depends.

But what are those goals?

And for whom?

I am beginning to think that the contradictions are so great as to be insurmountable. I believe we are in a moment of competing paradigms, to use Thomas Kuhn’s term, and that the inevitable battles ahead are going to be intense. Can we “save the appearances” as Simplicius, Plato, and others did so assiduously, adding more and more complex fixes to explain the irregular orbits of heavenly bodies? Can the Ptolemaic earth-centered theory be maintained despite all the evidence of contradictions?

In other words, is the quest to harmonize the goals doomed to fail because the paradigms are in conflict?

1 The Question

A few weeks ago I participated in a conversation titled What Is College For Today? It was hosted by the Cambridge Forum. (Since 1967 “Cambridge Forum has invited guest speakers to inform, explore and challenge audience preconceptions on a range of current and timeless subjects, through salient civilized discussions.”). There was agreement that this issue is urgent, and that different kinds of colleges serve different populations and for different goals, but that access should be more open than it has been. (You can watch it here, through their partnership with GBH.)

But the goals?

Just a few feet away from my desk I see two books on my shelf with titles indicating that this is far from clear. One is What’s College For? The Struggle to Define American Higher Education by Zachary Karabell from 1998. (That Karabell is not to be confused with another similarly surnamed author, Jerome Karabel, author of the eye-opening 700+-page The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton from 2006.) The other is What is College for? The Public Purpose of Higher Education, edited by Ellen Conedliffe Lagemann and Harry Lewis from 2012. And there are countless other books talking about the end of education, the goals of school, the purposes of higher education and so forth. Some describe but most prescribe.

The fearless Neil Postman wrote not only Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969/1970) but also The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (1995), which I am rereading now (and of course the anti-TV Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985). He argues against the “false gods” of economic competition, technocracy, and measurement and in favor of meaning, ethics, and stories of responsibility.

And thirty years later, where are we?

The false gods are worshipped even more, if possible, and discussion of those other goals (democracy, Earth as home, language and meaning, community, truth) seems especially quaint.

David Labaree, historian of education, calls the US system of higher education “a perfect mess.” He lists the many goals, without favoring them, and suggests that we resist changing this system, which has served as a model globally. Our motley assortment at various times has existed to

promote the faith, enrich developers, boost civic pride, educate leaders, produce human capital, develop knowledge, provide opportunity, promote advantage, supply a pleasant interlude between childhood and adulthood, help people meet the right spouse, and enhance state power. Oh, and yes, it has also served as a minor league for professional sports, a major venue for public entertainment, and a massive jobs program. (Labaree 2017, pp. 182-183)

It is a truly American hodgepodge of individualistic choice, “a system without a plan” (Labaree 2017, p. 182), unlike higher education in many countries where it is much more centralized—and supported. We have a free-for-all with opaque funding (sticker price versus cost of attendance versus net price versus….) and shocking levels of debt, even though community college is tuition-free, to some extent, in around thirty-five states. (In Indiana, where I live, tuition is free for certain fields.)

2. The Goals of College: Some Answers

For more than twenty years I have been teaching and researching about education, and I teach a class called The Culture of College. I often ask my students, “What is college for?” Last year they gave answers including networking, getting a job, making friends, having a major, and “academics,” which sometimes even included learning. (I wrote a Substack post about it last year.) One student told me recently that their parents sent them to this school to get good grades and to go to law school.

This is at a highly selective private university; class mobility is a goal for some, but class maintenance is the aim for others: while not every student is paying the unbelievably high full tuition, many are.

Ask at other places, and you will hear other answers: it is about social mobility, leveling the playing field, providing opportunities for those who had been excluded to enter the middle class. It is for citizenship, because we need an educated citizenry. It is for job training, and skills development. It is for credentials.

It is about sorting, providing limited access, discerning “merit.” This is why arguments about so-called grade inflation are so heated. There is an idea that college is to produce a meritocracy who then have the responsibility and the opportunity to rule the rest of us, in Plato’s idea of an elite. Michael Sandel, the philosopher, has challenged this idea of a meritocracy as have many others. Michael Young, who coined the term meritocracy, intended it as satire. What does it mean for the haves to get more and the have-nots to be left behind?

I feel like I write this paragraph every year, and in every book.

But in response to an article from the New York Times in April 2026 titled “Yale Report Finds Colleges Deserve Blame for Higher Education’s Problems”, by Alan Blinder, and then to the report itself, it is essential to post it again.

3. Political Opposition

A study commissioned by Yale argued that colleges and universities have done a poor job in selling their purposes to the public. They frame the purposes this way: “universities exist to preserve, create, and share knowledge” (p. 4). But at least one of their ostensible motivations for commissioning this study is true: The US public has lost faith in college. So maybe better publicity would do the trick? Or tougher grades?

But I think in fact the problem is that the goals are incoherent and often contradictory.

The Yale report laments that “In recent years…universities have been expected to be all things to all people: selective but inclusive, affordable but luxurious, meritocratic but equitable” (Adams, Gage, et al. 2026, p. 4). Obviously contradictory aims cannot all be met, so failure is foreordained.

Maybe the era of the “multiversity,” as Clark Kerr, president of the University of California system, coined the term in the 1960s in his lecture The Uses of the University, is at an end.

In the 1960s public higher education was similarly under threat. There was a concerted effort for instance by Ronald Reagan as governor of California to reduce funding to the University of California system, which he saw as an oppositional force. Reagan fired Clark Kerr. He reduced funding, and threatened to dismantle the Department of Education. (The opposition didn’t start with Project 2025 and the current “occupant” of the White House, who actually resides in Florida.) Student debt rose, in part because of this, but for multiple other reasons too.

We don’t have to look far to see that education is often positioned as the antidote to authoritarian regimes, who embrace book-burning and who inevitably target intellectuals, and ban objectionable books. Examples abound, from Nazi Germany and China’s Cultural Revolution to the fictional worlds of Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury. These books are now, in the irony-murdering world of 2026, themselves often banned.

The tech bros such as Peter Thiel have systematically promoted suspicion of higher education, as others such as Sal Kahn have fostered suspicion of publicly funded K-12 schools, though opposition back more than a century as people—-parents and children—-opposed mandates for compulsory education. “Government schools” might as well be a slur.

Certainly the publicity that private universities have attracted in the last two years, with protests about Israel and Gaza and Palestine, and squelching of protests, with accusations of wokeness and challenges to the idea of free speech…These are all real.

But I’d like to suggest that as Christopher Newfield says in his courageous book The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (2018), there was a great mistake, involving treating universities like businesses. And also that there may be a fatal mismatch in the goals, illuminated to many people’s despair, by the rise of AI. (More on that anon.)

What is to be done? Like many, such as David J. Staley (2024) and Steven Mintz, I have been writing about potential new directions. The closing of Hampshire College, as announced last month, is a reminder that colleges need to attract customers.

But who are the customers?

4. Clients, Customers, Beneficiaries

Are the customers employers? Are schools designed to prepare workers for industry, which is why schools resemble factories? (John Taylor Gatto says yes. Audrey Watters in 2015 claimed this history was “invented.” Davis, Conroy, and Clague argue in 2020 that this metaphor “should be treated with caution.”)

Image source: Bohiney News

Factory or not, the sector of education is enormous, including that of higher education.

And for whom does it exist?

Are the customers the public? In what sense? Is it to reap the benefits of research? Could the research be done outside universities, and in self-contained research institutions? One of the distinctive dimensions of what Charles Eliot in 1869 called “the new education” was incorporation of research and the beginning of graduate education. That’s not usually what people think about. ( Cathy Davidson named her book The New Education, in homage in 2017.)

Because…who would fund that? Few people realize that tuition helps fund research at research-intensive institutions (the model for all institutions) because all of the grants and investments from public and private sources is not enough to fund all of the scientific research and medical research that we need. And the growth in administrative roles, which is rightly mentioned and deplored as “administrative bloat,” is often because of the need to support the research program. (Lampooning the titles is fun, for instance Office of the Vice Provost for Visioning and Enterprise Development and Brand Management and Saturday Sports.) And at top-tier research institutions, the prestige of the institution comes from the research profiles of the faculty, so students have an interest in maintaining the status of the institution, even if they never interact with it themselves.

Is higher education for the purpose of character formation? At some point this was the claim, especially when most institutions were religiously supported.

Is it a finishing school, as it was for the sons of the wealthy? Is it a highly resourced summer camp for spoiled children? Is that why the dorms are so fancy, and the climbing walls abundant?

What is the role of athletics? Athletics lose money on almost every campus, and in the cases where athletics is so successful that it earns money, it often is at odds with the academic mission, both in terms of donations and time and energy and building attention.

In my own case, in the last several years I have had an increasing number of athletes in my classes, and they are officially excused from so many classes that it’s hard to square the academic responsibilities with the athletic responsibilities, as these young people juggle essentially two full-time jobs.

Some argue that athletics at public institutions attracts the support of the citizens of the state, whose tax money supports the university, and without which there would be no way to make the case for those who don’t attend.

Community colleges attempt to broaden access, with the understanding that there is a financial premium for college attendance, but really only for college completion, because it is the credential, rather than the content, that is the currency. In that sense, the purpose of college is to attain a credential that is better than others. Such an “arms race” (military metaphors are apt) breeds ever-increasing credential inflation. The New York Times had an article 10 years ago about how file clerks are now going to need an BA to stand out. (It Takes a BA to Find a Job as a File Clerk , 2013) even though people needed only a high school diploma to be able to do the work. This is called “underemployment.” Randall Collins has written about credentials in an increasingly stratified society: The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification (1979 and 2019). If the society is stratified, getting some students into higher-esteemed and higher-paid positions will help those individuals but will do nothing to repair the system. John Marsh has written about this in his thank-goodness-someone-articulated-my-discomfort kind of way: Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality (2011). It’s not about the learning.

Is college worth it? Only if you get the degree. But most people think it’s not worth the cost. Is a College Degree Worth It in 2024? | Pew weighs in.

And is it a private or a public or a commercial good? A social good?

Not good at all?

We’ve put more of the burden on individuals, without transparency about all the public supports, so it is no surprise that most people regard it as purely a private good.

5. “Return on investment”

If higher education is primarily for the purpose of getting a decent job straight after finishing, in increasing lifetime earnings, or preventing unemployment, then the investment must be returned. Many analysts discuss this issue, for example Akridge and Hummels and the Federal Reserve of New York.

Then we might ask which specific institutions, and programs, and majors, offer the best investment. Special education has the lowest unemployment rate, as of February 4, 2026, for the year 2024, at 0.7%, though with low salaries, and the highest rates are anthropology (7.9%), computer engineering (7.8%), computer science (7.0%), fine arts (7.7%), performing arts (7.0%)—some highly remunerated and others not.

Increasingly institutions must compile this information.

The current political atmosphere also politicizes this.

Fields such as gender studies, race and ethnic studies, and anthropology are seen as challenging the position of the current administration, especially in red states. Do they analyze or promote certain perspectives? Should they be supported? Eliminated? Renamed? Consolidated? Do they attract sufficient students? Do their graduates find jobs? Do they earn enough?

Beyond undergraduate education, which occupations deserve support for graduate degrees? “Professions.” The US Department of Education is capping loans for “professional” programs, defined problematically. But they recognize only eleven fields.

If school is seen as purely transactional, and if learning can happen effectively and enjoyably outside school, then the return on investment is seen in purely instrumental terms, which I hear all the time about things like success and completion. If we take an older adult returning to school to secure a promotion at work, and they have a job and children, then they want to be as efficient as possible, and understandably so. Their fixation on getting it done makes perfect sense, and it doesn’t mean that they don’t value learning, but it does mean that their reason for attending may not primarily be about learning. Can these values be aligned?

It has become one of my principal preoccupations to figure out how to align them and to ensure that I am not engaged in the moral injury of doing the opposite of what I think is right despite many of the incentive structures in the institution on the part of many different parties.

6. AI Reveals….

A student at my university emailed the entire student body offering to save students the pain of actually having to learn anything through an AI agent startup called Kerra. It would do the work for tired, stressed-out students. “You’re paying $90k a year to be here. The goal is the degree, the network, and actually enjoying college—not memorizing orgo at 3am or some useless frameworks for foundations of marketing. Kerra is how you get the GPA you want without sacrificing the four best years of your life.”

It was taken down immediately.

So-called Einstein, another agentic AI, was advertised to students as able to complete entire online courses, especially by logging into the Learning Management System, Canvas. It was quickly removed after a cease-and-desist order from the company that owns Canvas, Instructure.

But these efforts are calling into the open the temptation to get something for nothing.

They provide opportunities to obtain the appearance of learning, and the payoff of the appearance of learning, without the effort—or the learning.

I’ve been studying cheating and plagiarism for more than 20 years.

At the time, we were quaintly concerned about plagiarism using things from the internet or test copying. Two decades earlier it was copying from actual books. A decade ago it was contract cheating and essay mills, where you could pay for a ready-made essay (cheap) or have one custom-made, or you could hire someone to impersonate you and take the whole course.

Now the AI bot can sign in, make comments on the discussion board, take the quizzes, write the papers, take the tests.

Freeing you to do….all the other stuff.

7. An Idealistic Take, As Long As I Can Sustain It

My own position is that despite all the confusion, muddiness, and cynicism, there is still a value in college, which cannot be substituted by Googling or asking Claude questions or getting microcredentials.

This has to do with gathering with others, experienced and less so, and learning deeply and confidently, increasing the ability to learn, and gaining confidence and insight about learning to learn. Bridget Pearce has listed dozens of capabilities, dispositions, knowledge, and skills. The University of Georgia has identified six “institutional competencies” (critical thinking, analytical thinking, communication, social awareness and responsibility, creativity and innovation, and leadership and collaboration)—high-level general learning, rather than arbitrary lists of facts or skills.

People might attend college for the purpose of learning well and permanently, which is what the credential is supposed to certify. (It also signals, in economists’ terms, the kind of person who can complete tasks and persevere.)

But focus on credentials, points, and grades commands the bulk of our attention. In many ways we have mistaken the metric for the purpose, as Goodhart’s law states: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” This along with game theory explains why we are bound to be disappointed: Can game theory explain grade inflation and AI cheating?: a non-technical conceptual analysis and proposed research program (Pritchard 2026)

Widespread frustration has to do with misalignment of incentives and non-cooperation among faculty and students (and, I would say, administrators and the public).

Given this, I do not find it likely that we will be able to fix the “grade inflation” or cheating tendencies.

If teachers were like coaches, therapists, or doctors, the goals would be aligned: improvement, for the benefit of the client.

But teachers and professors occupy multiple, and contradictory, roles, as both coach and judge, as doctor and police.

When our goals clash, as they obviously do now, nobody will be satisfied.

The only possible option is to change the incentives, and (for me) to persuade everyone that learning is the goal. I try to do that in my courses, while recognizing all the other goals that students understandably bring into the room.

And we’ll continue to struggle to maintain our view that all the planets actually revolve around the sun.

Image source, University of Colombo Rotaract

Image by Evgeni Tcherkasski on Pixabay

Chasing rigor and challenge and quality is an eternal cat-and-mouse effort in higher education. Every ten or fifteen years, a new panic about grade inflation catches the imagination (see, e.g., Valen Johnson’s 2003 book Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education and Lester Hunt’s 2008 Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education) but never quite like the Inflated Grade Panic of 2026. This one has caught the attention of all the many critics of higher education, steeped as we are in the concomitant AI Panic of 2026, and the Don’t Coddle the Left Panic of 2024-26.

A perfect stew.

How, everyone wants to know, are we going to make high grades meaningful again? (They never were, BTW.) How can we force students to care about the quality of their work? Let’s terrify them into excellence.

“Restoring the meaning of grades” sounds good, like all backward-looking efforts.

But it won’t work.

******

Harvard has announced a plan to limit the number of A’s in a class to 20 percent, or 20 percent plus 4 (or more, depending on the size of the class). It doesn’t matter if all of them are extraordinary or just pretty darn good. The number of A’s is fixed.

The idea is that this is going to fix a terrible problem: the students aren’t all excellent but they nearly all get excellent grades.

Never mind that Harvard accepts only about 4 percent of the applicants, which should mean that they are all extraordinary. (Hey, if they’re not extraordinary, maybe the admission process is flawed. But that’s hard to fix by decree, as they have to weigh so many considerations….and also their admissions process has also been under attack for years.) The meritorious…are underperforming? The winners in the childhood academic sweepstakes are not as worthy as they should be?

Attention to grades sweeps over so many other problems with education and society, and it is not likely to solve any of the real problems.

Never mind the gaming of the system throughout childhood, the multiple pressures and incentives that have convinced these masters of the universe that the stakes, as represented in their grades, are a matter of life and death, for instance in McKinsey or Wall Street internships or medical school admissions. Never mind that the outcomes of college are nearly always spoken of in terms of further competition, or pure instrumentality. Return on investment. Efficiency.

Never mind that the students will be graduating into a heartless system with fewer and fewer decent opportunities.

Never mind that the classes are seen by many as the price they pay for the high-power networking to which they devote themselves tirelessly.

Never mind that outsourcing learning to AI is easier than ever, and in fact promoted by many institutions of higher education.

Never mind that faculty will be evaluated by the students that they evaluate.

No, let’s up the stakes.

Let’s reduce the number of excellent grades, where the majority of the students will receive only almost-excellent grades.

All meaning will be compressed into a tiny range of those few decimal points, where distinctions are essentially just “vibes.”

******

This demand for limiting the number of A’s has been tried before. Princeton tried it in 2004 and cancelled it in 2014. The University of California Berkeley tried it. Duke tried it. In the interest of communicating their stricter system, these schools often included the mean for each course on the transcript.

Did it make students pay more attention to genuine learning?

******

Grading on a curve, or having grading distributions predetermined, is logically and pedagogically problematic.

Grading on a curve has been labeled “educational malpractice” by some STEM educators.

Instead of having students focus on learning, they will fixate on every tiny point. Already faculty experience what is often called, disparagingly, “grade grubbing” or more neutrally, “negotiating.”

Complaints will escalate up to the department chair, to the dean. Lawsuits will be filed.

Students will cheat more.

They will sabotage each other.

Faculty lives will get harder.

The Academic Hunger Games will leave a bloody mess, but they will not produce more academic excellence and deeper and more creative work.

The focus will not be mostly on points but entirely on points.

But the administration can say it is being tough, that it is upholding standards. (This is laughable when we have a federal administration completely disregarding not only norms but laws, such as self-dealing and violating the war powers act.)

I know that faculty voted to institute this change.

But I have to say that I am not predicting improved outcomes, only a bit of cover.

******

Until we have conversations about the meaning of higher education, until we improve the job market, until we have honest conversations about the failure of conventional grading systems to communicate meaningfully or to motivate authentically, measures such as this are going to continue to be tried, and they will continue to fail.

I wager that this will reemerge again in another decade. Sigh.

I’m all for deepening learning, having truly high standards, and focusing on the meaningful.

I fear that this approach will lead away from all that.

The saddest thing is that assessment is being questioned everywhere, often phrased as “alternative assessment,” and the drawbacks of our conventional systems are well recognized. Doubling down on a system that does not really work seems futile.

But we can watch this latest effort at insisting on the strictest of the conventional unfold before our eyes.

______

This was written without the use of Generative AI.

This may not be used to train artificial intelligence technologies, models, or systems.

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

I am so sad to hear the news today: the incomparable Hampshire College is closing.

As a philosopher-ethnographer of higher education, I have long looked to Hampshire as a model. Founded in 1965 after years of its founders studying learning, it broke the mold of conventional college. It was not alone. It was a period of intense fermentation, and quite a number of other institutions of higher education were founded at the time.

I read about it. I wrote about it. I used it as the first example that came to mind when I wrote and spoke about various alternative assessment approaches, with its sole use of narrative evaluations. Other notable institutions also used them, but I always mentioned Hampshire first.

I believe they claimed to be the first contemporary liberal arts college to have a farm. (In the olden days, they all had them, because they had to….um….raise food.) Quite a number have them now.

One of my children went there, and I was able to experience it as an ethnographer-parent.

It was not perfect. It never had enough funding. The older buildings were…in need of attention. The faculty were overworked. Many of the students struggled to finish, or they had various challenges. The students who chose Hampshire tended to have rebellious tendencies, and to have chafed against conventional school. It may be that the lack of strict control, which they sought, did not serve them all well.

But even so, their model of student-directed curricula, culminating in an independent creative or research project that occupied the entire fourth year (”Div III”), advised by at least two faculty, matched my vision of how to create meaningful learning experiences within a conventional four-year structure. Start with student interest. Add guidance. Add courses as needed. Stir, and taste the broth.

Twice in the last decade or so they’ve sought a new president, and twice I thought about what that job would be like: leading the vision of highly innovative higher education? Or overseeing restructuring, debt refinancing, and finally closing it entirely?

Dodged that bullet.

In today’s era of hypercompetition, credentialism and transactionalism, return-on-investment thinking, a gentle model like Hampshire’s may not, and clearly has not, attracted enough paying students and benefactors. It is also possible that students like those who attended Hampshire in the past are not in school, or are finding a way to muddle through even in the unfriendly confines of credit-point-credential learning-management industrial education. (Yes, there are many gentler and more student-centered options now, as well.) The attacks from people like Ron DeSantis who single-handedly dismantled the New College of Florida, a cousin institution, have corporate and conservative activist support.

Some new enterprises, like the University of Austin, are focusing on different values. They boast that your test score is the only credential for admission, to ensure the absolute objectivity of the “meritocracy.”

Higher education has many flaws: it is expensive. It is perhaps harkening back to old models of learning. Students do well in classes and have no “transfer.” It is “inefficient.” It is exclusive. Or too many people are engaged in it, so the credential is less valuable, leading to “credential inflation.” Maybe there’s “grade inflation” or “grade compression.” Students may be too stressed, or too distracted, or too transactional. There are plenty of complaints to go around (some of them perennial).

I have been a critic, too, at least in “I Love Learning; I Hate School”: An Anthropology of College and Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning.

But I also retain an idealistic belief in the value of a period when students can focus on growth in conversation with others, of deep and broad learning, of going beyond what they could do on their own even with all the online resources available so readily.

This vision is waning, in our society. The vocation-preparation focus makes sense when it’s hard to get a secure job and when most people are a paycheck away from a medical or financial disaster. Students in highly selective colleges gain networking and a quick link to security. Students in state universities and community colleges may for good reason enroll in classes that will lead them to their first-next job, with legible credentials. (It’s more complicated than that, of course.)

Maybe the dream of a student-centered education, freed from focus on points for every single action in order to pursue something bigger, more complicated, is not in sync with our Zeitgeist.

I do know that.

But I mourn the loss both of the dream and of the specific reality that Hampshire College tried to make possible for thousands of students over its half-century of understanding that “to know is not enough.”

I’m keeping the dream alive.

Where will it pop up next?

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

“Without continual reflection on aims, education becomes merely ‘what goes on in schools,’ and our only measure of success becomes how successful we are at what we think we are doing.”

Nel Noddings, Happiness and Education, p. 251

Teaching and learning are usually thought of as cognitive and psychological, and often social. School has economic, political, and vocational implications. This is all true.

But what if I tried to convince you that teaching and learning might also be considered moral, and even indeed theological, topics?

Two Catholic theologians, whom I know only through their writing and slightly through email, and last month through a marvelous zoom call with one, have been grappling with the question of pedagogy and in particular with the topic of grading and ungrading, in the context of moral theology.

In January 2026 they sent me a link to their just-published article which puts the topic of ungrading into the context of Catholic moral theology. It’s called “From Coercion to Fascination: Grades, Vulnerability, and Responsibility.” In it, Jason A. Heron and Alessandro Rovati argue for the importance of wonder, something I also aim to cultivate in my own courses. Not only in the education grounded in the Church, they state that “practices form persons because of the commitments they embody and foster” (p. 105; my emphasis). They argue, summarizing much research, that “traditional modes of grading are a mechanism whereby both teachers and students become invulnerable to the fascination essential for a good theological education”(p. 106)—or any good education. They emphasize, following Pope Francis, the need to empower people for “the adventure of freedom” and following a theologian named Luigi Giussani state that education should be conceived of as “taking a risk.”

Now, I’m not Catholic, but I have been teaching at a Catholic institution for a quarter century, and I deeply appreciate the serious engagement that so many of my colleagues have with questions of good and evil and how it is that one can navigate the world in a principled way. In the case of my university, this often means working on behalf of what Partners-in-Health physician and anthropologist Paul Farmer called “a preferential option for the poor.” (The term was first used in 1968 by the superior general of the Jesuits, Father Pedro Arrupe, and embraced in various settings, including in Liberation Theology, which was founded by my late colleague Gustavo Gutierrez.)

In this sense, Catholic Social Teaching is usually focused on justice, equality, and lovingkindness. I’m Jewish, but there is nothing in this, or indeed in the teachings that I understand from the Gospels, that I object to, if we are to take love and lovingkindness, recognizing the divine spark in every person, as the core.

But isn’t school about getting good grades? About dancing when the teacher says “dance” and sitting when the teacher says “sit”? Isn’t compliance the measure, and perfection the goal?

Not if you begin with respect for the autonomy of persons.

Not if you think about the power relations.

Not if you put forward dignity as a “learning outcome.”

Not if you think that wonder is one of our most miraculous human qualities.

The notion that education is moral is not new at all. It has deep roots in many traditions, both Judeo-Christian and Chinese, to mention the ones I know best. Teachers have great responsibility, and power.

What do we do with it?

How do our ideals match the actual effects of our large-scale educational systems?

Are all our students thriving?

Are all our students experiencing wonder, freedom, joy?

Professor of education Yong Zhao talks about the “side effects” of even the most benevolent intentions, when “what works” in terms of, for instance, increasing test scores, simultaneously “hurts.” He gives the example of interventions that raise test scores in reading but make students hate reading forever.

Students fail.

Students drop out, and are relegated to less socially valued employment.

Students compete and sabotage each other and resort to cheating (which makes sense, if the goals are purely instrumental).

Are these side effects trivial?

I would argue that some of what happens in business-as-usual grade-focused education is a waste, and worse. Some of the effects are immoral, if by that we mean conflicting with broad beliefs about the idealistic outcomes of education.

So if at an ideal level humans are precious and we should gently care for each of them, yet in fact so much of education is harmful, creating undesirable outcomes, then….then what?

Many teachers at all levels are despondent. From high stakes testing to AI and everything in between, schools are filled with alienating mandates and trends. Teachers experience moral injury, burnout, depression. Many leave the profession. In higher ed we also have precarity, as the majority of faculty are now contingent (without even the possibility of the security of tenure, and often very poorly compensated). Other than a few superstars, most educators in the US are paid far less than other professionals with the same training and experience.

Coaches and professional development people urge us to “remember your why,” to rediscover the passion and motivation that led us to become teachers in the first place.

Parker J. Palmer’s Center for Courage & Renewal offers workshops and other resources to promote “deep integrity and relational trust, building the foundation for a more loving, equitable, and healthy world.”

Nel Noddings writes of a care ethic, a moral dimension of schooling.

Yet the public conversation and the administrative discourse about teaching is almost entirely different: Prepare students for work and good jobs. Be rigorous. Give a lot of bad grades to raise standards. Cover the content. Stop indoctrinating our students. Make sure they aren’t cheating. Do more with less. Publish. Be a social worker. Differentiate the curriculum. Get good evaluations from all students. Fix everything.

It’s exhausting. It’s demoralizing.

Can we re-moralize the conversation but in terms of structure, not content? This is not to argue for teaching only the classical western canon, and is definitely not supporting Christian nationalist ideals. But it is to suggest that learners are precious—not necessarily delicate, though many are—and our relationships with them, and theirs with each other, should be helping to create the world we wish to bring about. Heron and Rovati call for “a pedagogy that lifts students and teachers up to their full stature as knowers and lovers destined for communication with each other and their Creator” (p. 111). Nontheists can take “Creator” as metaphor.

I’ve written about ideals in my 2024 book Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning and in a Substack post on democracy. Teaching democracy, in which all voices matter, is not only about lecturing and testing about administrative rules and voting policies. It might also be about experiencing a democratic classroom. John Dewey a hundred years ago wrote about it. But generally speaking, the voice of control and sorting, Edward Thorndike’s focus on sorting, competition, testing, and measuring has dominated our educational systems, but now with neoliberal fears of slipping down the economic ladder. Fear, control, eugenics, sorting, punishment, threats are familiar.

This does not seem like a context ripe for conveying the values of any religion or outlook that honors the human.

Nonreligious people might take inspiration from the language of spiritual commitment to the good world that we might dream of. We can’t just dream it. We can’t just speak about it. We must enact it, and we can’t do it alone, nor can we wait to start.

As always it’s helpful to remember the words of the Pirkei Avot, words of our ancestors: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”

So whether you take religious beliefs as metaphor or literal truth, the divine as idealism or actual incarnation of a deity, the notion of “education [as] a form of accompaniment” (p. 114), this vision of a better, humane, moral, principled world must inspire us to query our in-classroom practices.

Heron and Rovati state that, according to Giussani, “education requires respect, a sense of fear and trembling for the mystery that dwells in the other person….essential because another person’s life and destiny are sacred and beyond [the teacher’s] capacity to possess or fulfill” (p. 122). How different is that from the sliced-and-diced uniform “learning outcomes” that every student must demonstrate?

Given the realities of our educational system, with STEM mandates to demonstrate complete mastery and the linked curriculum, this might sound like pure pie-in-the-sky fantasy. For those teaching huge classes, it might be.

Yet those who teach wicked problems, design thinking, problem-based learning, who acknowledge that the world does not in fact come completely known, embrace just such an approach. I observed this in a three-year study of an engineering-based internship, where the outcomes were not predetermined but the learning was deep, robust, and often technical. In my own teaching, for more than a decade, like Heron and Rovati, I have shifted my focus “away from coercion and performance to the centrality of fascination and freedom, risk and responsibility” (p. 123). For me, as for them, ungrading has been a key necessity, but it alone is not enough. If we relinquish the coercion, the threats and the extrinsic rewards, then we might have to have more trust and more opportunities for playful discovery.

And though I teach anthropology, not Christian theology, I share their distaste for the behaviorist, and dehumanizing, relationship embodied in grades. I’ll end with their words: “We do not want to proselytize or coerce them into learning about the Chistian faith [or, for me, anthropology]. We prefer to take a risk on the encounter between their freedom and the fascination of truth [or insight] instead” (p. 128).

It might not be possible immediately, but surely we wish to strive for the right thing to do, whatever is in our limited individual power.

How do today’s activities, structure, relationships edge closer to the world we envision?

I don’t have all the answers, but I have so many questions! And so, if given the freedom, do our students.

Image from the Cascade Institute

I first encountered the term polycrisis through an article I can no longer track down, in the context of education and morality, though I have now learned that the term has been around since the 1970s. No surprise! So have the crises.

I feel so deeply that what we are facing is a polycrisis: of planetary survival. Of decency. Of democracy. Of hope. Of meaning. Of the relationship to technology. Of the future. Of our food, health, wellbeing and fears. Of our isolation and loneliness. Some of this is part of the human condition. Some comes from the capitalist structures that dominate our daily lives. Some comes from the nature of relatively recent (two-century-old) nationalism. Some is from colonialism. Some comes from the Great Acceleration, the convergence of agriculture and transportation and energy that has been accelerating since after the Second World War and is evident in our anthropocene. Some comes from increasing inequality, and the greed of the billionaire class with their mega yachts and tax havens. Some comes from recent (TV) and more recent (Internet, cell phones, social media, videos, algorithm) tech changes. And some comes from the US descent into fascism.

In other words, some of these challenges have been around a long time, and some are new.

But all are real.

We all see it converge in discourses about education: students don’t read; students use AI to do their work (because they don’t care and the stakes are high). Students are going through the motions. The public has lost confidence in education, and while K12 and higher ed have some differences (K12 is often mandatory and sometimes publicly, even if unevenly, funded), the multiple and sometimes contradictory aims of institutional schooling apply to both. (School is for democracy; school is for character development; school is for job preparation and social capital; school is for social mobility—for some.)

I’ve written about much of this.

And some of it is age-old laments, like the Socrates dialogue about the dangers of writing (it’s great stuff. Makes McLuhan look like a plagiarist lol).

This semester I’m teaching two apparently unrelated courses: What Should We Eat? and Zoom Text Talk Insta Sing Chat: Modalities and Media of Interaction. In both, the goal is to help students develop a deeper sense of analysis of and connection for things they usually take for granted: food and communication technology. (This holistic and systemic approach, with deep observation, is the superpower of anthropology, as I see it.)

I constantly fight against the schoolish expectations of my high-achieving students, who know the recipe for succeeding in school: Do whatever tasks Canvas says. Use the rubric for writing. Read what will be tested. Get the PowerPoints and read them. Memorize for tests. Go to class if it’s required. Shop or watch TikToks while the professor is lecturing. Save your energy for internships, service items on your resume, clubs, working out, social life. (This is an almost completely residential campus where almost no students fall outside the traditional age range of 18 to 22. Students at other types of institutions have different emphases, which usually include much employment and care responsibilities, as well as many worries about housing, food, health, money.) I do not blame the students at all. In fact, I feel deep concern and compassion for them. I blame the system.

But for whichever type of student, in 2026 there is widespread and deep anxiety and uncertainty about the world our students will continue to inhabit. I do not fault them for failing to come wholly ready to engage with my class, which is, after all, only one of about a dozen categories of activities that they are keeping track of.

I am at the very last day of our three-week winter break and I’m still not rested. I am exhausted after a personally very challenging year in addition to the national and global assaults on decency and order. How can I get myself to gear up for this coming term?

And what can my little courses contribute to the solving of the polycrisis?

In terms of my pedagogy, developed gradually over more than twenty years of research, writing, experimenting, and soul-searching, these are my general principles:

• My focus is on students’ learning, which also necessitates their wellbeing

• I aim to create a community of learners where students develop confidence at their ability to learn independently and also interdependently

• Nobody knows everything, other than relatively limited types of knowledge within a defined domain

• Students have different experiences entering the class and different goals after they leave the class. Shouldn’t they be allowed different experiences in the class?

• I never use grading to threaten or coerce

• I do not see myself primarily as a judge

• I see myself as a more experienced ally, mentor, coach, elder, helping to initiate my younger charges into the world, beyond the one they already know. For the younger ones, they scarcely have even outside their parental or familial cocoon. For the older ones, they have the university cocoon which has shown them a curated version of the world.

In the context of my anthropology courses, knowing that few students will ever become anthropologists, I hope to show them that…

• Everything connects

• There are moral and ethic concerns about everything

• We have tools for analyzing

• Things are not always what they seem

• Learning is an adventure

• There are lots of different ways to live. Our way is just one, and maybe not the best one

• Learning with others is exhilarating

• Not everything has to be part of competition

But this semester, beginning as I am, and as perhaps some of them are too, in a state of depletion, my goal is going to be to do as little as possible but to make everything count. This is fighting my tendencies of adding lots and lots of readings and activities; wish me luck.

If our students are distracted, well, so am I.

So we will focus through our in-person gathering, inspired by Priya Parker.

If there is too much to read, well, let’s find the single essential key to everything.

I have learned about the concept of threshold concepts, introduced by Jan Meyer and Ray Land in 2003, those transformative levers that make everything evermore different, as when people realize that conversations have structure, or that agriculture is not just plowing uniform crops onto empty fields plus fertilizer. Threshold concepts are transformative, irreversible, integrative, bounded, even troublesome. Students may need guidance to discover them and to really internalize them; a ChatGPT summary will not suffice.

My goal this semester is to focus on these threshold concepts. Of course specific facts and knowledge are needed, and they can be fascinating, but they are in the service of the big picture.

And the big picture is the polycrisis. Wicked problems. Holism. Deep structures.

Let’s go.

Students need to learn and practice the ability to disagree respectfully. Democracy requires disagreement, disagreement requires debate, and debate requires practice.

I’ve been teaching for decades and one of the strange things that has happened as I have become something of an educational radical (see this book and this) is that I am less and less attached to the so-called content of my courses. Almost none of my students will become anthropologists.

So what am I doing, trying to teach this field? Is it one of the “useless” liberal arts?

I think not.

In general we know that undergraduate education provides several benefits, including increasing or maintaining social capital, signaling students’ ability to complete difficult tasks, providing some kind of general introduction to some threshold concepts, and in some cases certifying job training, which might be vocational training, as is appropriate for a first job.

But I am committed to a bigger picture.

As I have become more critical of conventional education, I have become more committed to the project of education in general. For me this means that I have an opportunity, and an obligation, to do something amazing with the young people with whom I spend hours every semester.

What is that? If they are not going to become anthropologists, and they will certainly forget the technical terminology of, for instance, linguistic anthropology, what should the outcome be?

I have reached a number of conclusions, including one that feels particularly urgent right now, in December 2025, in fact on the first day of December 2025: students need to learn and practice the ability to disagree respectfully.

For thirty-five years or so I have been teaching a course on linguistic anthropology, and if you don’t know what that is, fear not. Even some of my departmental colleagues with whom I have been teaching at my current institution for twenty-five years, don’t know what it is. But one thing we know in linguistic anthropology is that interaction is in and of itself a form of action. And in my class for the last decade or so we have ended the semester not with term papers or with exams but with debates.

The students themselves choose the topics for debate through a vote on suggested topics that they themselves have generated. Once we have four topics, so that we can have eight teams, they choose their teams. Some of the topics do not seem particularly pressing to me, but they do to the students, and that is enough for me.

The important thing is that they have to prepare both sides of the debate. One year one student said that they were concerned that they were arguing disingenuously and that this felt false to them. But in the intervening years I have become committed to the idea that complicated topics deserve examination rather than simplistic solutions. And by preparing both sides, they have to acknowledge that there are reasonable arguments on both sides. When they show up for the debate, we flip a coin and the teams have a moment to collect their thoughts as they get ready to engage in the debate.

This year, today, I also showed them several videos making the case that democracy requires disagreement and that disagreement requires debate, and that this requires practice. All of the videos invoked ancient Greece, the Enlightenment in Europe, the early years of the US government, and the Civil Rights era when even people aligned in their goals disagreed about tactics. They emphasized that having a worthy opponent honed people’s thinking and also that debate requires a structure of listening. It’s not a shouting match. It’s a case of grappling with complexity, defining terms, understanding presuppositions, and amassing evidence.

The more of these videos I watched, and the more I compared them to our current shouting-over-other-people or insulting-the-other version of debate, the more urgent this felt, as a way to make our democracy survive.

As I despair on a bad day about the state of our disunion and our retreat into information spheres that echo our own views, I am more and more committed to welcoming multiple perspectives. It is not the case that having everyone agree with you is a sign of strength, but rather a sign of weakness.

As I said to the students today, I know that in this class we have people with varying political and economic and religious and moral perspectives, and that’s a good thing. I have colleagues at other universities with less diversity of political views, and they feel sorry for me that I have to contend with people who disagree with me. But I actually feel that this is a benefit. My own perspective is easy to support when I surround myself with like-minded people, but that is not the world I actually wish to inhabit. So on a good day—and today feels like a good day—I embrace the opportunity to share a commitment to finding answers and solutions to difficult but perhaps not insoluble problems.

And if I can do that in my class of thirty-two undergraduates and they can emerge with a sense that they have engaged seriously with questions such as “Students growing up with access to AI will not have as high quality educations as people had to learn without AI”—a pressing topic for them, inspired by our unit on new media—then they can carry this with them even after they forget what indexicality and diglossia and linguistic relativity are.

And perhaps our little semester together might contribute, just a little bit, to the embrace of democracy not as a completed set of structures but as a participatory sport, every bit as necessary as learning that linguistic diversity is a normal part of human society, even if we, with our standard language ideology, have never thought so.

One of my tasks as a professor is to introduce new ideas, new questions, new structures, into my fellow citizens’ consciousness, and to do it with respect and affection.

And if they emerge from my classroom just a little more curious, just a little more confident as they seek information, just a little more willing to entertain alternative views, then, maybe, I’ve made a little tiny contribution to the survival of this messy American experiment of multiplicity and multi-everything.

And on a good day, it feels like education as a shared project has essential value.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

In May 2025, I was part of a delightful plenary session at UM’s Provost’s Seminar on Teaching. The Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Angela Dillard, had sent potential questions out in advance. For good-sense reasons of timing, she ended up omitting my favorite question. (The whole event was superbly orchestrated by excellent pedagogues.) But Vice Provost Dillard and Matthew Kaplan, executive director of UM’s legendary CRLT, offered to publish my thoughts about the question. They published it here.

“If I gave you a magic wand, what opportunities would you wish for all of us to take advantage of?”

I love this question! It is not a tinkering-around-the-edges question, but a dream-big question.

Our educational missions promise the moon.

My ideal is that the experiences are all meaningful, joyful, and authentic, resulting in deep, lasting, transformative, and transferable learning (and knowledge creation), and the environment is healthy in all ways for everyone involved.

Students emerge eager, confident, independent, and cooperative learners, ready for a lifetime of ongoing learning in an ever-changing society.

But most people reading this would probably agree that school, whether K12 or higher ed, is not entirely producing this.

To approach the ideal, we need to get rid of the game of school and the grading game, and instead make time and space for discovery, wonder, and even mistakes.

Some of it is possible, right now, right here, and some would require deep transformation in classes, schools, and society itself.

So I would like to emphasize the idealistic. I know it’s tempting to be cynical. But the more I try to nurture my own students’ idealistic side, and nurture their long-buried-in-school curiosity, the happier I am, the more stress-free-but-engaged they report themselves, and the more successful their learning has been.

My ideal is that the experiences are all meaningful, joyful, and authentic, resulting in deep, lasting, transformative, and transferable learning (and knowledge creation), and the environment is healthy in all ways for everyone involved.

Students emerge eager, confident, independent, and cooperative learners, ready for a lifetime of ongoing learning in an ever-changing society.

Before college: School as a high-stress sorting game

Photo by Maxim Tolchinskiy on Unsplash

Students who enter highly selective universities arrive already shaped by their prior experiences, from the pressured situation middle-class students have experienced all their lives, in addition to the more generalized exam and test pressure that is a feature of the contemporary world with a zero-sum approach to economic success, under the name of both “democracy” and “meritocracy.”

One of the factors influencing this is the limitation on spots in highly coveted, high-prestige guarantee-a-successful-life universities. In the US the most prestigious institutions tend to be older private universities and the Ivy-like comprehensive public universities such as the University of Michigan. How perfect does a student have to be to be accepted into Cal Tech, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, or Stanford, all with 4 percent acceptance rates in 2025?

This scarcity has shaped our students even before we meet them, and they are generally excellent at the game of school and the grading game, which they expect to continue.

But we can do things differently.

So here we are, in college

Designed by macrovector / Freepik

It is in the academic realm of higher education where I am focusing my magic wand today, creating entirely different types of curriculum, motivation, pedagogy, activities, assessment, and relationships, not a game of school or grades.

It is essential to think about four interrelated dimensions, all of which have been extensively written about and have deep research and many practical suggestions going back a hundred years at least, to well-known education thinkers such as John Dewey and Maria Montessori, and fifty years, to Ivan Illich, John Holt, and Paulo Freire, and in the last thirty years to people like Alfie Kohn: 1) the curriculum and content, 2) motivation, 3) pedagogy, activities, and relationships, and 4) assessment.

1. Curriculum and Content

Paulo Freire described the “banking” method of stuffing students’ heads full of uninteresting information. It might have made sense to do this in medieval times when books and knowledge were scarce, where lecturing as the default method was reasonable. Of course, students still need some information without looking it up, but all the research shows that we should not begin there. One thing we know which is very doable now, at least in some situations, is that “covering the content” is not the optimal approach, but rather beginning with desired results or “backward design” [and place the hotlink here], which ideally include not only understanding the specific material but also developing wonder and questions and curiosity.

When we race through a long list of material that is largely factual and easily forgotten, the educational gains are often fleeting. It is far better to go in depth into fewer topics.

2. Flipping the motivation

The contrast between “extrinsic” motivation and “intrinsic” motivation is often drawn starkly, but to the extent that extrinsic motives are seen as ends in themselves—grades, points, credits, credentials—they at the least distract from a focus on learning, or what Deci and Ryan so helpfully point out as the three pillars of self-determination: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

All classes can include and draw more attention to meaningful learning, to authentic curiosity, to the fascination and importance of learning in the world, though not by lecturing about it, but rather by creating experiences in which students can themselves experience it, for example, by having students experience the practice of the discipline. Following the model of Carl Wieman’s Science Education Initiative, instructors can begin with hands-on work that mirrors what scientists actually do.

3. Pedagogy, Activities, and Relationships

Active learning, inquiry-based learning, problem-based learning, project-based learning, and cooperative relationships have all been shown to contribute enormously to both greater learning and a sense of authentic engagement than do conventional lecture courses. At the heart of these approaches is the principle that all learners engage in the activities of learning. This is well studied, and models are available everywhere: encouraging students to engage with curiosity, “flipping the classroom,” rethinking “time for telling,” rejecting the “banking model,” and instead focusing on constructivism. In this model, teachers are mentors, coaches, and facilitators.

Under this same principle, we might also include the kinds of activities expected of students to demonstrate—or as we often expect, to “prove”—their learning. There are countless examples of alternatives to tests and conventional essays: projects, unessays, presentations, and even actual work in the world. These sorts of activities are not only far more engaging for students, but they also lead to less “gaming the system,” they are more interesting for faculty, and—most importantly—they are themselves learning experiences rather than merely after-the-fact proofs of learning. We can do this; in fact, people are doing it everywhere all the time. It may be slightly less convenient to aggregate and to produce metrics, but if our goal is authentic evidence, then a portfolio would be far more useful than a reduced metric.

4. Assessment and Feedback

The final necessary but not sufficient dimension of the magical world created by my wand involves assessment.

On its own, high-stakes testing has harmful effects such as reducing time for more enriching but less educative activities, creating anxiety among students, teachers, parents, and administrators. They also largely replicate the amount of prior advantage. Even the New York Regents’ Exam, standard for all students since the mid-1800s, is being phased out and replaced by Portrait of a Graduate

Further, these foci also shape learning. Textbooks contain only excerpts of longer works, which students are trained to extract for tests. Reading becomes misery—boring, stressful, consequential work with purely extrinsic rewards. (Many college faculty have been complaining that “students can’t read anymore.” I’m writing a longer piece on that.) What is often lost in this model is curiosity: the focus on open exploration and the luxury of time, rather than scrambling for quick answers to alienated questions. In settings where testing looms so large, it is no surprise that genuine curiosity is neither cultivated nor rewarded.

Obviously I would get rid of oversimplification of metrics and assessment of learning, which lead inexorably to the grading game. Learning must be assessed to make sure it continues and is done well, but there are countless ways to assess it, from watching students’ faces to talking with them to having them do collective anonymous surveys.

I would shift the focus instead to assessment-for-learning, in other words, to assessment in the service of learning. For assessment to matter, learning must be meaningful, and that in turn makes students motivated to seek and use feedback. This kind of approach embraces revision, learning from mistakes, and trying again, all parts of the natural learning process that should not be penalized.

Another major change, then, lies in alternative assessment: indicating student learning not by a simplistic metric such as a number or a letter, but through a portfolio that demonstrates what students can do. Models already exist, such as the Mastery Transcript or the kinds of portfolios common in the arts, where evidence of growth and accomplishment is collected over time. For technical fields, this might also include skill-specific markers like digital badges. Portfolios and similar approaches do more than certify achievement; they provide authentic, holistic evidence of what students have learned to and are able to do.

Within that shift, one principle is clear: no grading on a curve. Curved grading is illogical and demotivating, and science educators have gone so far as to call it “malpractice.” If everyone learns well, they should all be recognized for their learning. If that makes it more difficult to sort them, then so be it.

Focus on assessment-for-learning rather than on sorting would also require a shift in responsibility, moving away from universities functioning primarily to provide sorting for the next gatekeepers—employers, graduate schools—and toward separating the educative and ranking functions. The good news is that in many settings, assessment is being reconsidered at a scale beyond that of the single instructor or single course.

My Own Attempts to Bring About the Dream, in Small Ways

I have been, in small ways, trying to use my privilege to aim for this magical world, both through my own courses and through my writing and speaking, where I also bear witness to magnificent examples of great learning.

As a white tenured professor at a well-resourced university, I am more able to take risks than many colleagues elsewhere. I push pretty far to use my freedom and privilege: no grades until the end, projects, public-facing writing, self-directed learning, teams, responsibility, self-assessment, and reflection. My students report that they love learning in my classes, and indeed learn for themselves for the first time.

But for such approaches to become widespread, certain prior conditions must be met. First, faculty employment itself must be structured in ways that treat all faculty with dignity, ensuring manageable workloads along with livable wages and benefits. Without these conditions, the risk-taking and experimentation that meaningful teaching requires remain out of reach for many instructors.

Second, faculty evaluation must also be rethought. Simplistic Student Evaluations of Teaching should be abandoned, since they are known to contain biases related to gender, disability, race, nationality, and more. Moreover, they tend to reward faculty who teach in conventional, schoolish ways, because those approaches feel more aligned with the familiar game of school and therefore more likely to guarantee students a good grade. Truly supporting authentic learning requires evaluating faculty in ways that recognize support for diverse student growth rather than compliance with outdated norms.

Clearly this is not a set of practical improvements that could be implemented overnight. But each of these dreams exists somewhere. Sometimes in smaller pockets, several of them may be found together.

The Power of a Dream

Photo by Gerhard Kupfer on Unsplash

Dreams may not get us to where we’re going, but without even imagining a better version, we will certainly not get anywhere different.

I invite you to share your dream of what you would do with a magic wand. It might be helpful to begin with these questions:

1) What is the ideal situation you would wish for?

2) What are the problems we are trying to solve?

3) What are the solutions others have already discovered?

4) What might you give a try, even without that wand?

I spend a lot of time criticizing conventional education, among other things for failing to live up to its potential and its promises. But this week, I have also been reminded of some of the pleasures of a college campus, because a university is in some sense a universe. (The religious origins of western universities are not incidental.)

I mean that not quite in the way that Clark Kerr meant it in the 1960s when he named the idea of a “multiversity,” an institution that was all things to all people. And I don’t necessarily mean football or gyms, places where individuals can find entertainment or self-care. The “total institution” that Erving Goffman defined, as applied to residential campuses, must include clinics and dining, housing and bureaucracy. But that's not what especially struck me this week.

What I mean, instead, is that we can treat a university, to whatever degree it is self-contained, as a microcosm of society. And like all human societies, perhaps only nascent in foraging societies, it has a multitude of types of inhabitants who often interact.

We can trace their networks or identify roles and org charts, but there’s something else: They can teach us to practice gathering.

A conceptual framework

Sociologists and anthropologists have spoken about “communitas” (Victor Turner), “collective effervescence” (Emile Durkheim), a “division of labor in society” (also Durkheim), and all these other ways we have tried to indicate that human settlements and organizations have “organic solidarity,” the way organelles in a cell come together to function for the greater good of the hole. Alone, none of them could possibly survive. Sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies contrasted Gesellschaft (community, sameness) and Gemeinschaft (society, order via laws), and these concepts are useful.

Humans are certainly, necessarily, interdependent and differentiated. This is true of our species. We are born helpless and have a long period of dependency, the longest of all mammals. And even adults, however hermetic they wish to be, generally in all healthy societies that we know, rely on others. We exchange, we depend, and at any moment, any of us may be giving more than we receive, or receiving more than we give, and this kind of moral sharing is the backbone of all functioning communities and societies.

One of the insights here is that societies are made up of individuals with multiple and interlocking interests. The larger the society, the more necessary are norms of behavior. There can be free riders, and there can be inequalities that lead to misbehavior. And individuals, of course, can have their own idiosyncratic challenges. But in general, all human groups intertwine out of necessity.

Universities often talk about community, emphasizing the shared identification with the institution, with school colors, with values and teams. But they might also talk about society, where differentiation-and-interaction is the norm. A little while ago I read Eugene Matusov’s article rejecting the concept of a (self-directed) classroom as a community and instead arguing that it should be a society. I did not truly appreciate the power of this contrast until….just now!

Universities and growth

When universities began in the medieval period in Europe (though some versions of institutions of higher learning existed prior to this period and elsewhere) they were sanctuaries and refugees from the broader society, and they were quite exclusive in their membership.

Some contemporary universities maintain that exclusivity to this day through highly competitive admissions procedures, choosing their learners, while other institutions of higher learning, such as the miraculous community colleges in the United States, with their open embrace of all, are not claiming to be exclusive at all.

Many have spoken about administrative creep or blight and the focus on ballooning lavish facilities, and many, including myself, have criticized the outsized role of sport in American higher education, in contrast to most other international universities.

But participating in the life of my institution this week, admittedly, one of the more exclusive ones, I realized that one of the other real opportunities is the possibility of surprise and delight, because a university is a universe, a society. And one of the ways we do the work of being in a society is to gather, and as Priya Parker puts it so beautifully, to do so with art and purpose and intention.

Not just watching

Last Thursday night, on my campus, there was a performance of a remarkable play, called Every Brilliant Thing, an essentially one-person performance but with audience participation. If you have a chance to see this, you should. It was an amazing experience all the way around. The play is by Duncan Macmillan, with Jonny Donahoe, and has been performed all over the world.

I often like to have no knowledge of what I am going to experience, so that I can come to it simply as I am and let the work of art do its magic. And in this case, it certainly did.

The topic is mental health, but art is of course more than just a list of topics. The primary actor selected members of the audience who received certain roles, and the nonce actors really embraced those roles. After the show, which lasted slightly over an hour, there was a post-performance talking session. And it became a kind of therapy session in which people offered something of their own experience.

One person mentioned having at one point been nearly homeless, and had at one low point considered giving up on life. Another person mentioned having had a devastating contrast in their life between the “book version” and the actual version of their life because of an unstable mother, and how this led that person to also nearly give up. One of the people in the audience was a first-year student, on campus only for two weeks, and confessed to having had a little bit of discomfort sitting alone in the front row because none of their friends were willing to come, even though the posters were all over the campus and their dining hall.

We were old and young, Black and white, members of the university and just townies. There was a psychologist, and a pastor, and as I walked out, I learned that one of the chosen actors is actually an actor, and their sibling is a psychologist.

And this struck me—granted it was a self-selected audience, with the means to purchase a ticket and find their way to this location—that it contained quite a variety of people, and in the process of seeing this play, we formed our own mini-society, and in the course of two hours, we truly learned something about and began to care for one another. After the formal post-play conversation, which lasted nearly another hour, ended, many of us went on to talk further, to inquire or comfort or generally learn from others.

This is the power of art.

This is the power of copresence.

This is the power of interacting in a space with all of our diverse preoccupations, and yet showing up to earnestly understand something. We didn’t share an identification with a team; we didn’t sign up to become a club or to undertake a task.

We just arrived, from wherever, and were vividly there for two hours.

The lessons of gathering

Campuses are filled with opportunities like this. Clubs and performances and competitions and demonstrations and lectures and meetings, are advertised everywhere. It is tempting to stick with what we know, which is comfortable. And certainly, the larger the institution, the more necessary it may be to find one’s own people. But given the plenitudes of interests and opportunities, not all of which require financial means—though they do tend to require time—it strikes me that we could do worse than to take this as a call to action:

• Check out something new. With others you don't know. But really focus.

• Go somewhere you haven’t been before.

• Sit next to someone who doesn’t look like you.

• Do this in the context of a shared focus and a shared temporal envelope.

• And see what happens.

• Not selected, not special, just there

Our society as a whole, which shares many of the characteristics of the mini-society, that is any school campus, could also listen to this.

I try to create this in my own courses, with differentiated “jobs” and multiple pathways to learning.

At the end of most semesters, the students in my classes say, just as I did last Thursday night, that the people in the class were really special, and they felt so lucky.

But I’ll tell you a secret: I don't really think they are special.

I think it’s just that we saw each other’s humanity.

Each other’s beautiful personhood.

If you want to call this “souls,” I won’t argue.

At a moment when our notion of “society” is being challenged—from Margaret Thatcher who famously stated in 1987 that there is no such thing (though some argue that her words were taken out of context; here’s the whole transcript), to those destroying any sense of other-regard and shared responsibility and respect—it might be helpful to practice all this in our classes and on our campuses.

If that is the purpose of education, as John Dewey suggested a century ago, in its support for democracy, well then, I’m all in.

We almost always think about education as benefiting the individual students, and it can and must, but it can do more: We can also draw lessons about the nature of the gatherings, which at their best can offer a glimpse of what a world would look like in which we appreciate our interdependence and varied contributions, knowing that without each other, individuals’ lives would be much less magical.

I’m grateful to have spent nearly all my adult life on college campuses, enriched without always knowing why.

(But I’ll continue to be critical, where warranted.)

With the arrival of August, fall 2025 is upon most college faculty. My classes begin in three weeks. But fall 2025 feels different from my previous thirty-five years of teaching.

It feels essential to state the stakes.

We are at a dire moment. I don’t feel I can just do what I’ve always been doing, drifting along, incrementally adding new tools, moving the blocks around.

It feels bigger than this.

As Zak Stein and others point out: education is the metacrisis. Will Richardson despairs that “Our narratives of education are…on the brink of collapse. Schools as we know them were created for a time that no longer exists.”

John Dewey, a hundred years ago, pointed out that democracy and education are intertwined. Under certain conditions,

the school becomes itself a form of social life, a miniature community and one in close interaction with other modes of associated experience beyond school walls. All education which develops power to share effectively”—not contained within purely schoolish walls—”in social life is moral….Interest in learning from all the contacts of life is the essential moral interest (John Dewey, Democracy and Education, p. 360).

Goodness knows we need more morality in our collective life.

*

Democracy is in peril in the US and globally. Oligarchs control strongmen, who control courts, who bow and scrape to maintain favor, while the people are rounded up by lawless masked thugs, and the sick wander the streets, vulnerable and alone.

The planet is heating, heaving. Burning, crying, swirling with lightning and heat and wind and water out of place, or at least out of the places we want it.

Students face the consequential judgment of their teachers, tests, systems, parents, and anticipated employers, and are desperate for all possible methods of keeping themselves from failure and shame. They feel that their futures and survival lie in the balance. They are on edge, overwhelmed, afraid.

Teachers are offered untried magical solutions that will make our lives simpler, more efficient, convenient. “Seamless integration” between one product created by an educational technology company married to a newer one, AI tools that will design classes, grade papers, summarize discussions: what’s not to like? (Students are offered a huge number of tools, too.)

I like none of it.

*

So what is a professor to do?

What I'm going to do is refuse. [***I recognize and risk all my privilege in enjoying this freedom.]

I’m going to refuse the handed-down structures that serve everything, anything, other than my students’ humanity. This includes both my pedagogical structures and the tools I incorporate in my classes.

For a long time I’ve rejected conventional schoolish structures, which I’ve written about at length here and here, especially.

• I invite students’ attention, their relationships, their participation. I don’t demand it.

• I don’t demand attention, compliance, attendance.

• I refuse to treat all the students in my classes as uniform cogs.

• I honor their choices.

• I don’t judge their interests, and I don’t create incentives that force them to pretend to inauthentic interest in me or my course.

• I’m not going to force my students to produce pretend questions.

• I’m not going to dictate how their curiosity should be corralled.

• I make time for students to develop curiosity and to know each other.

• I don’t grade individual work throughout the semester, though I do give feedback and foster both peer feedback and self-reflection. (I do have to submit a grade at the end of the semester, but I have no interest in this.)

I’ll keep doing all that.

But this semester, after trying it for over a year, I’m also rejecting the use of Canvas, which I wrote about just about exactly a year ago. I’m not going to have students submit their work into this “seamless integration” of a “Learning Management System” and a “Large Language Model.” I’m not using either of them, at least as much as I can avoid them.

All summer I've been reading about AI, and as new “opportunities” and “tools” are breathlessly offered, new questions keep arising, such as: What happens to students’ and faculty intellectual property? To their private information?

Nobody quite knows. (Shoshana Zuboff warned us in 2019 about surveillance capitalism, and that was before the surge in LLMs.)

*

What I am going to do is to be present as a human being, who is delighted to meet dozens of younger people, with their energy, their stories, their selves. They don’t have to reveal those selves to me, but if they care to, I’ll cherish them.

I am going to be honest with them: I know a bunch of things but not everything. I’m intensely curious. I’m concerned about the world at large. I think my field (anthropology) allows us to notice things about the human world that might otherwise be taken-for-granted. I'm excited to share this with them.

Our bodies and attention are resources. 

The reading, viewing, activities, projects are means to the end, which is nothing short of a new way of noticing.

I'm going to emphasize “threshold concepts,” the transformative, irreversible, integrative lenses that disciplinary expertise builds on, and to do so within an environment of cooperation and calm interaction.

We are not going to cram in as much content as possible.

We are not going to speed through everything. In fact, I'm deliberately embracing the power of slow learning, but it will be hard—the hardest thing—because I have decades of practice going fast.

We're going to be as analog as possible. Whenever I decide to use a technological tool, I am going to interrogate it:

• Who owns it?

• Who profits from it?

• Who pays for it?

• What are the environmental effects? Energy? Cooling? Rare earth minerals?

• What happens to the data once we use it? Student writing, intellectual property? Privacy?

• What are the labor conditions behind it?

• What are the relational effects? Sharing? Learning? Avoidance?

• Do we need it?

• What is it pushing us to do?

• Who has access?

• Where does it go after it is used?

• Does it feel good? Is it beautiful? Does it bring joy, or dread?

I am going to continue to use sticky notes on boards, index cards, pieces of paper, pens. I am going to encourage my students to order physical books, though I know they find ebooks more “efficient.”

I’m going to be wondering with them about this promised new world of virtually effortless—and thus learningless—college.

*

I'm reminded of Wendell Berry’s brief but powerful article, published in Harper’s in 1988, called “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.” He did an interview three decades later, in 2019, with Travis Kitchens of the Christian Science Monitor, ending with this thought:

The only motive that’s worth anything is love. If you don’t do the work that you love, and if you don’t do it for love, your artistry is not informed by love. It can’t be any good….You can’t make a robot that will work from love. It doesn’t work from anything; it doesn’t have any motives. Or its motive is electricity, you could say…So my little essay about…why I’m not going to buy a computer…was just a part of my strategy to try to keep myself whole as a human being. I don’t want my life to be lived for me by a machine. (Wendell Berry, 2019)

Berry’s human and humane motive of love is not what we usually hear. Far more common is to hear tools promoted for the benefit of profit, return on investment, efficiency, speed, power, promotion, competition, status, prestige, success. I understand that students live in a world where their attention is payment for everything that is “free,” where they are cynically manipulated to consume, where school feels like drudgery and miraculous tools can liberate them, so they can have success without the effort.

But after teaching so long, I also know that every human has a spark of curiosity, even, dare I say, a spark of a soul. It’s that that I’m going to be keeping in mind.

I am going to begin my course revisions with a reminder that what matters is the fully human, fully relational, dignity of the humans who appear in my classes, and if I occasionally invoke the motive of “love,” and shock them, well then, I guess shock is better than cynicism.

And we have enough of that.

If my class can be a little oasis, showing students that they don’t have to give up all belief in the world that could be, the world of a beautiful planet where people live in dignity and security, then I will have done my job just a little better.

The LLMs might imitate it. But I don’t think they can achieve it.

I gave a talk in summer 2024 at The Grading Conference called “Ungrading Four Years On: A Movement, A Backlash, A Rebranding, A Story.” It was a chance for me to think back about what had happened since the appearance in the world of a book I edited, Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What To Do Instead), which was published in 2020.

The book had gotten a lot of attention, in the world of pedagogy.

I gave a lot of talks and workshops, participated in a lot of podcasts.

There was a lot of enthusiasm, and some resistance.

The talk allowed me to catch up a bit on what had been happening and to put it into a broader context, both of progressive pedagogy and more generally of the nature of educational change.

I present here a PDF of what I’m thinking of as an e-book.

Enjoy!

As I was recently posting student-generated public-facing writing, I remembered a class project that students did in 2004 in my linguistic anthropology course, Doing Things With Words. We had spent the semester thinking about language as social action, focusing on the functions of language, as Roman Jakobson analyzed them in his foundational article, "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics” (Jakobson 1960). But what students were especially absorbed, indeed obsessed, by was the then-new application, Instant Messaging.

The class had only eight students. They worked together to design, implement, and analyze a survey, which had more than six hundred responses. They contextualized the topic theoretically and historically. Using insights from Conversation Analysis, pragmatics, and other concepts from linguistic anthropology, the thirty-three-page document provides a glimpse into several things: the new technologies (“away messages,” "buddy lists”), “abbrevs” current at the time, in a pre-iPhone era when this technology was available only on computers, and student writing in 2004. They even had double spaces between sentences, to show how much has changed in twenty years!

This project got some attention from my discipline and was described in Anthropology News in 2005: Buzzing and Writing the Day Away Instant Messaging: Studying a New Form of Communication.

But I couldn't find the original document.

So I asked our OIT if they could help, and with the magic of the Wayback Machine, through the Internet Archive, I was able to find the old manuscript.

They did find it. And it provides a shocking view into the past, going way, way back more than two decades into an older era of education and of communication.

Here it is: “Instant Messaging: Functions of a New Communicative Tool.”

*

Source Cited

Jakobson, Roman. 1960. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” In Style in Language, Thomas A. Sebeok, ed. Pp. 350-377. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.