Next Semester: Do Less That Matters More

When I was teaching, I always thought of this time on the calendar as the “postexhale” period.

The end of the semester is a headlong sprint to the finish, which, unlike a race where you get to break the tape and coast to a stop, is more like hitting a wall and collapsing on the spot. At least that’s how it always felt to me, at least until I started ending the semester at week 13 (of 15) and using the last two weeks for wind-down and reflection on what we’d all learned.

In the immediate aftermath of the semester, particularly spring semester, I couldn’t be bothered with any thinking or planning for the next semester. The next scheduled activity, usually something I started around the first week of August, would be the specific planning for the forthcoming semester, but there is also this postexhale period where no work needs to be done, conditions that are fertile for thinking and dreaming before the planning.

The postexhale period is the spot where you’re likely to gestate your best ideas, because at least for the next month or so, you don’t have to do anything with them.

I want to plant a seed of thought for anyone who is confronting having to or wanting to make changes to their course in order to accommodate the reality of generative AI technology being in the world.

Here it is: Next semester, do less that means more.

As I’ve been traveling around talking to people about how we can (and should) adjust how we think about teaching writing, one of the persistent worries is that introducing some AI-related content or experiences around ethics or safe use or whatever requires layering something new on what’s already happening. For many instructors, it’s an uninvited and therefore unwelcome burden.

I get it. We can never cover everything to begin with. Here’s one more thing to cover.

But what if we can use this as an opportunity to rethink what learning looks like? As we move through this period where we can reflect and reconsider, we can think about how to boil the experiences in the classroom down to an essence that can be reflected in learning experiences.

Consider the learning that has proved most enduring from the full trajectory of your education and I think you’ll find that it clusters around essential, deep lessons. What has mattered are the moments where we have learned how to learn and think and act inside a particular domain. It is this learning that allows us to go forth and continue to learn eagerly, ceaselessly.

Even as a decidedly and well-documented overall mediocre student, there are numerous learning experiences (in and out of class) that I can point to as inflection points that made a significant difference in the overall trajectory of my life because they provided something essential to my journey forward.

One moment I invoke frequently is when my third-grade teacher asked us to write instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and then had us try to make the sandwiches following the instructions to the letter. Because I forgot to say that you should use a knife to spread the peanut butter on the bread, I ended up sticking my hand in the jar of peanut butter to fulfill my own directive. I have a picture memorializing the occasion.

That moment introduced me to the rhetorical situation and the fact that writing has a purpose and an audience—and careless writing has consequences. I’m sure I learned all kinds of other things in third grade and maybe some of them were important, but only one moment was indelible, and that’s all I needed.

In high school, excited about the subject matter for my junior-year English term paper (the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe), while being not enthused about the parameters of what I was supposed to do with that subject matter, I decided to write my term paper in the style of Tom Wolfe, earning a not-so-great grade from my teacher, but a meaningful lesson in how to keep myself interested with a task. (I wrote in more detail about this previously.)

Some reflection unearths other moments. A college nonfiction writing class had us pretending we were writing for specific publications and producing columns that could fit under the editorial banner. I chose Esquire, imagining myself a sophisticated male, I guess. We were required to understand how to write for very specific audiences with very specific aims, excellent practice for all kinds of different futures. At the end of the semester, we had a competition where we voted for the “best” columns across a number of different categories. I was a finalist in several but won zero, losing out to one specific classmate’s work every time.

In a conference with the instructor, I must’ve expressed some kind of disappointment, and he said something that stuck with me: “X’s stuff sounds like themselves writing for a publication. You sound like someone doing an imitation of someone writing for a publication.” I walked away believing that authenticity was ultimately the differentiator in connecting with readers.

I could name more moments. My first semester of grad school, my professor, Robert Olen Butler, had us do an in-class writing exercise based in sense memory (which can be found in his book From Where You Dream), and I experienced what it was like to tap into my artistic subconscious for an extended, focused period. Bob was not the most engaged of mentors, but I’m not sure I’d still be writing if I hadn’t had that experience.

When I started teaching, the indelible lessons delivered by my students came even more often, possibly because I recognized my responsibility over the work in ways I hadn’t achieved as a student.

All these moments are rooted in very specific and specifically designed experiences. These kinds of experiences are not threatened by the existence of large language models, because it was clear to me that the point of the exercise is to have the experience.

Of course, generative AI tools could be present as part of an important learning experience, but when generative AI is used by students as a substitute for the experience, the learning is obviously deformed. Injecting LLMs into our courses simply because it seems like something we have to be doing is not a great recipe for learning.

There are some, perhaps many, places where it is not and should not be welcome because it is not conducive to the experience of learning we’re trying to instantiate.

As I think about these experiences, what I learned was really contained in a crystallizing moment made possible by the earlier experience of that class, or even before that class. This is not necessarily predicated on the amount of material covered or the volume of what students are exposed to.

As you enjoy this exhale period, maybe spend some time thinking how little you could do in your course and still have students walk away with something that will be meaningful years down the road. That may be the core of your course when you come back and start thinking about it for real in a month.