For Teachers

Perspective and Reassurance

I've been teaching writing since 2008.  When I first started, I thought I knew what I was doing.  I walked into my classroom convinced that I was going to help my students become incredible writers.  In subsequent years, I've learned a few humbling facts:

1. Teaching is harder than it looks.

2. Every student is unique.

3. Between lesson planning, grading, and feedback, you can't possibly accomplish everything.

But with those humbling facts came a few realizations:

1. Teaching can and should be enjoyable . . . but not every situation allows that opportunity.

2. It helps when you care more about your students than the lesson plan.

3. You don't need to teach everything.

My first few years teaching, it would've helped having someone there to reassure me that I was "doing it right."  But as a grad student, I didn't receive much training in teaching.  Yes, I enjoyed some amazing workshops with my own professors, and we did have annual orientations, and I took a number of pedagogy courses, but none of them really taught me how to teach.  For most of those years, it felt like I was feeling my way forward each semester, trying new assignments and lesson plans without a full sense of what would work.

Teaching got easier with time, of course.  But I still don't have all the answers.  I'm still revising my lesson plans — because it never feels like I'm teaching enough.

Why I'm Writing This: A Story of My Classroom After Covid

If you were a teacher during Covid, you remember the relative insanity of adapting lesson plans for lockdowns and remote learning.  If you were a student, you certainly experienced the uncertainties of classroom closures, mask debates, and shifting expectations of what you should be learning.  Regardless of how old you were or what your job, you faced the anxiety of being in a classroom without knowing whether someone might give you Covid.  Or maybe you caught Covid.  Or you may have experienced tremendous personal loss.

It was a difficult time.  I felt okay because I could teach over Zoom while my son took his online classes and played with his Legos.  Most of my students weren't so fortunate.  Many were essential workers — they continued working in grocery stores, nursing homes, and other businesses that simply could not close.  Many others took on new family responsibilities, whether watching children who couldn't go to school or finding jobs to replace the income their parents and siblings had lost through lockdowns.  Many of my students needed extensions.  Almost half took incompletes — I was accepting late work well past the end of the semester.

But then came the return to in-person teaching.  Mostly in-person.  I showed up at class wearing an N95 mask — many of my students chose to remain home on Zoom.  I actually encouraged this — fewer students in the classroom allowed for more spacing between the seats.  Sometimes I'd have a classroom with eight students present and another eight appearing as thumbnails on my tablet.  And our college had mask mandates and weekly testing requirements, plus the constant fear that class might be sent remote for two weeks because someone had tested positive.

In this environment, I did what I swore to never do — I cut back on my "standards."  I removed about half the rhetorical concepts from my lesson plan.  I cut all the group work requirements.  Most one-on-one meetings took place over Zoom — if they happened at all.

As a teacher, I felt inadequate.  My students were struggling with life, and I felt I couldn't place the same high demands on their time.  So I struggled with my syllabus.  I debated which assignments to keep and which to toss.  I had to prioritize what mattered most.  Teaching English 101, I felt that writing was the skill that mattered — and so I cut most of the readings.  I cut a lot of the concept lessons.  When I had my students in class, I focused on coaching them through their research papers — and sometimes life.  Some days, it was just going student-to-student, asking each student to describe their work and their plans — and also their struggles.  "Pair up," I'd tell my students, as they sat six feet from each other, "and talk about how your day's been."  I'd offer my suggestions for sources and perspectives to consider for their papers — and we'd spend entire class periods discussing how to schedule "fake it till you make it" with a research paper.  I told my students to turn in messy drafts.  I told them not to worry about grammar or syntax or typos — "Just get it written," I'd tell them.  There was no talk of rhetorical concepts.  There were no tutorials on comma placement.  And forget thesis statements — I never even mentioned them.

For me, the course was on life support.  I told my students how to find sources, I offered them advice on how to schedule their homework around work and childcare, and then I required them to write their 2,500-word research projects.  It didn't feel like enough.  It still doesn't.

But a strange happened.  One night, about midway through the semester, one of my students mentioned that she was learning more from my class than any of her other classes.  And then a few others chimed in with their agreement.  That seemed very, very strange.  This was post-lockdown, but we were still wearing masks — and I told them that I'd cut half the material from my pre-Covid syllabus.  But they insisted they were learning a lot from my course.  And how could I question them?  My students know their own lives better than I ever will.

Looking back at that moment, I have a theory about what was actually going on.  I don't believe I was teaching more material than my colleagues — I don't have nearly enough readings on my syllabus for that to be true.  And sure, I'm a decent teacher — but I am a very slow grader.  I don't give nearly enough feedback to make up for what I've removed from the syllabus.  And I don't spend all of my class time teaching course material.

So why did students feel that my class taught them more?  I think it's that they felt they were retaining more information.  I don't know whether or not they actually retained more information from my course than others — students often learn more than they realize from their courses.  But for my course, they felt the rewards of learning — and that was a new experience for me.  Sure, my students typically enjoyed my classes and learned something, but that was the first time a group of students had spontaneously indicated they found my course an exceptional learning experience.

So what happened?  Why did they feel this?  I believe it came down to three things:

• Personalized Teaching Connection: During class, I regularly talked with each student individually.  I gave them in-person feedback on their ideas, and I think this compensated for my slow grading.  I literally went down the list to make sure I personally checked on every single student, whether they were present face-to-face or on Zoom.  And I often adjusted assignments or feedback to meet the individual needs of each student.  I kept the same standards for everyone, but sometimes that meant a student was handwriting a draft rather than typing it, or maybe a student was using a few sources in their native language.

• Task-Focused Learning:  I gave my students two major research projects, and then focused every single lesson around the skills and concepts needed for each specific stage of the paper.  If I didn't grade for it, I didn't teach it.  Students knew that if I brought up something in class, it was important for their papers, and so important enough to learn.  Also, I let my students choose their topics — and no matter the topic, my role was to help my students write the best possible paper for that topic.  And I openly tell students that it's my goal for everyone to earn an A.  So everyone knows I have an expectation, and that I'll help them reach that expectation on their own terms.

• Peer Connections: I regularly set aside five, ten, or even fifteen minutes for students to just talk to each other.  Not just about class, but about life outside.  I'd give them prompts like "talk about how life's going" or "talk about how your weekend went" or "what's a good movie you've seen lately?"  By the end of the semester, students knew each other — and in the world after lockdown, my class probably became one of the more social activities they experienced from day to day.

That all said . . . that's just my best guess.  I don't have any direct, reliable research on what my students experienced.  Yes, everything I've stated will fit with "common sense" and "best practices" for teaching, but actual research would require interviewing students, evaluating their writing, and then comparing those results across multiple courses and teaching styles.  I don't currently have the resources to conduct that research — lately, I haven't even had the time to read the existing research by other scholars.  And even if I did that research today, it wouldn't fully account for the effect of Covid.  Back then, Covid clouded everything.

But why do I share this story?  Because that situation inspired me to compose Practical Digital Rhetoric.  I knew I needed to add readings back into my course post-Covid, but I struggled to find the ones I wanted.   I needed something simple and direct — readings that would convey information without boring my students.  But the information I want to convey isn't exactly exciting.  Sure, I'm fascinated by the conceptial applications of ethos to understanding contemporary influencer culture — but my students have entirely different ways of discussing their favorite TikTok trends.  So how do I help my students see that the "dull" and "boring" rhetorical concepts have real-world applications for how they take in new information?

Primarily, it's about classroom strategy — no textbook can ever replace a teacher.  But this guide can hopefully offer you support as you engage with your own students.