Merry Winter Solstice from Once More, With Feeling

Welcome to Week Fifteen of Once More, With Feeling.

A theme of my 2022 was viruses canceling plans. A spring romantic overnight was canceled by a health issue. My Thanksgiving was wiped clear by COVID in the family. My extended family’s annual Christmas-shopping-in-Boston was cut short by a flu-related incident. And now my beloved “Friend Christmas” has fallen too, to yet more fevers and coughs.

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It is probably the inevitable growing pains of rejoining together after several years of distancing and masks, and thankfully everyone is doing fine, but it sure is not a ton of fun.

I hope that you, your friends, and your families stay well through this next stretch of holidays. And hopefully this turning of the year, the flux from dark to growing light, this readjustment to social living, will mark some fresh new beginnings of health and growth in 2023.

BE THE SPARK - Thoughts on Teaching and Learning

I’m in the throes of regretting certain decisions I made about my ungrading/ specifications grading approach to my fall course in Motivation & Emotion, and thinking ahead to coming semesters and how I can do things better and be kinder to both myself and my students.

I was thus delighted to encounter this article by Robert Talbert about how to build a semester around 12 weeks of content. You save one week in the beginning for “onboarding” and community-building. (This also makes some of the bumpiness of add/drop period better - those adding the course a little late in the game don’t start already behind). The last two weeks are reserved for meaning-making, students catching up on missed assignments and/or revisions of previous work, and instructor grading. The time for revisions piece is especially critical to those using ungrading or other progressive approaches to encouraging more revisions of student work.

What are other ways we could be more intentional about the process of learning while also being kinder to everyone involved?

OUR MONSTERS, OURSELVES - Uncertainty, Challenges, Mental Health

Blurbs are coming in for my new book Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge, available for pre-order now, and it is both humbling and exciting. They’re updating on Amazon as they come in (and you can find an early set on my website here), but as a treat I can share with you this secret “extra” blurb from the wonderful Kevin Gannon:

EMOTION & MOTIVATION - Feeling and Striving

I was delighted to recently join up with OneHE to create a series of freely open videos, references, and infographics on the science of motivation applied to teaching. You can find all of those resources here. It is intentionally geared to be a pretty basic introduction, but I’m hoping those with greater expertise will find some riches in the references sections.

Also, my co-authored textbook on Emotion & Motivation with the brilliant Lani Shiota (I joined in the 4th edition) has a final cover, and we couldn’t be happier. Thanks to all who provided feedback in various social media polls!

INCIDENTALLY - Goodbye Twitter, Good Luck, Good Night

As someone who included Twitter in her recent book acknowledgements and whose bio over the last few years has ended “She is also on Twitter (too much) @SaRoseCav,” the seeming death knell of Twitter has been pretty hard to take. The fact that it seems maliciously done and entirely unnecessary doesn’t help. Despite its many, many flaws, Twitter has been for me not just my primary social media outlet but my main access point for new scholarly articles in my fields of research, a rich treasure trove of teaching ideas and inspiration, and a significant outlet for finding and maintaining scholarly subcommunities. Also, it has @darth, Blair Braverman, and @thereisnocatinthisimage.

One of the best things I’ve read on The End of Twitter is this essay by my book sibling (we share a wonderful literary agent) Brandy Schillace: Big Platforms are Dying. That’s a Good Thing. Here’s Why. If you like this essay, check out her books here. I’ll be mentally chewing on the ideas for a while I think.

In the meantime, things over in fuzzy ancient elephant land seem to be really picking up pace. It’s cute-animal-videos ratio is even improving. Maybe it will be a better, safer, more welcoming version of what Twitter was.

Time will tell.

Happy turning of the year, newsletter friends.

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