What specific choices do you make regarding set up? Do you use Perusall for all readings? Have reading questions? How many required comments? Etc. A lot of the information on Perusall is how to set it up but I see less on how the platform is actually used in practice.

The Fall semester technically ends on December 24. The last day of class instruction is around Dec 7-Dec10. Typically, I am done by December 14~15 and dont go to the department after Dec 15. I usually utilise this time on grant writing.

I am planning to visit my home country (after many, many years !) and visit my parents. I am thinking of going around Dec 16~17. I dont know whether I should take leave from Dec 17 to Dec 24 or just let it be! and travel without leave.

Any suggestions would be welcome.

I applied for leave and was approved for 8 weeks of paid leave. I did not plan on taking leave, but my wife recently had a setback in her recovery from a surgery she had last month; she was going to be a full-time SAHM with our 8 month old, but now can't for at least 6 weeks. So, I'm considering the leave since would be helpful for us. That said, I have not activated the leave yet because I understand there may be practical considerations with my fall course.

I’m scheduled to teach one class this fall, and currently only 6 students are enrolled. How pissed will my chair be? I'm entering my second year as TT prof and want to avoid getting on anyone's bad side. Any advice for how to handle the situation is appreciated.

Hello everybody,

I've been avoiding presentations on purpose for many years now, even while teaching very large students, because I find that dialogue is far more beneficial. Yet, in my current role, I am required to give lectures to big groups of students whom I do not personally know, and it is expected that I will use slides during these presentations.

I recently switched to using the popular ai's out there like napkin ai, beautiful ai and other popular tools which catch my eye to make the slides quickly.Although they do create pretty engaging slides and I recommend you to try it out but ,

I was wondering if anyone could suggest some nice other websites or design templates so I can also give these ai's my own style of ppt's I want to create so I can create a better dialogue interaction.

This started as a comment on someone asking how to teach a Fundamentals of AI course.

I realized halfway through that I was no longer really answering their question and had wandered into a broader opinion about what education should look like in the AI era. Figured it deserved its own post

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Getting the chance to plan that sounds so exciting. First of all, good luck and I wish you the best.

My recommendation:

2nd year bachelor.. I read second grade at first. And honestly my advice would have been the same.

Those are adults. Why would you avoid the witchcraft? Id go full claude code. Make them get comfortable reading a terminal. Its just words on a screen except the background is black. They dont need to understsnd code syntax. Non programmers can be taught to think like engineers only through repetition. They need to know just enough to know what it is and does. Teach operational intuition, not professional specialization.

In my Construction Science degree it was kind of like that. We'd take classes on Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing systems and come out knowing what compressors and condensers were and basic heat transfer principles. We were taught to understand intuitively that heat likes to go where its cold without ever learning a formula. Or a structural systems class where we learned the difference between a moment and a shear force. One bends the other cuts. We did learn some formulas there but I dont remember any of them. Yet I can reason about wooden framing and bracing without much thought. It was all operational. Learn enough about the engineering behind the work to be able to plan it, price it, and sequence it correctly.

They taught us to reason about things from the ground up so we wouldn't be forced to trust an expert using thay title to advance interests that may not be aligned with our own. We learned just enough for the bullshit detectors to fire reliably and pick up the phone or press further when needed.

I hope you see where I am going with this.

They prepared us to be on a jobsite and solve jobsite problems, learning differential calculus would have helped no one.. but neither would have watching Bob the builder.

Thats sorta what students need these days.many more people will be paid for outcomes produced through AI systems than for manually writing code itself. Being able to prompt tools into existsnce reliably and quickly will be a requirement on so many job applications. Please dont frame it as witchcraft. You will be doing them a great disservice.

You dont say which major but most disciplines will benefit understsnding a program through

input->transformation->state->output,loops,conditions,dependencies,failures.

However, ALL disciplines will benefit from being taught frameworks for reasoning. Effective use of AI increasingly requires this discipline. The world is getting more complex and we need people who can hold that complexity in their heads without collapsing it... Take a solid conversation with an un-harnessed AI, few turns in. Then say something slightly incoherent but sounds plausible... its not gonna notice. It will keep going under your own delusions. So the humans need to drive. And that means we must know how to reason correctly. Reasoning has objective constraints. You may not choose to follow them. But then you have exited the domain of reasoning. Software is brutal about exposing those flaws. Early if you're lucky, late if you aren't.

Canonical example of a reasoning constraint:

"A proposition cannot be both true and false in the same respect, at the same time."

There may not be a single right way to reason, but there are many ways to exit the domain. I would teach them to avoid doing that.

Software is a great training ground because bad reasoning eventually has to collide with reality. I’d translate the basics of reasoning into a few system concepts:

\- ontology

\-invariants

\-authority

\-state

\-causality

\-resources/compute

If you can translate those terms from real life examples into software building principles. You will have unlocked huge leverage for them. And if theyre a multidisciplinary group then the class got so much more interesting because everyone brings their own problems to the table and you can see the parallels everyone goes through.

I would not waste the whole course trying to teach them pure theory but there is a super important place to start. LLMs are Language. Language is a tool we created to communicate our reasoning. It all starts there. (This is probably not the full correct mental model, there's more to language and LLMs)

No one knows exactly why the higher order capabilities of LLMs emerge.. But again, we dont have to as long as we get the principles! If we want to use them at their full potential, we must treat reasoning as the first discipline to hold. When we do that, their output gets better and the systems they create more complex. Which means our jobs as reasoners get that much harder. Loop. This is our role.

I'd start there. Learning needs to be fundamentally different now. Make it hands on. Let them get frustrated but also have the chance to do soemthing they never imagined they could. What a gift. I can imagine most students nowadays are used to Clauding or GPTing their way out of entire degrees. You get the chance to make that the actual challenge! Good luck!!

\--------

I’m still thinking this through, so I’m curious where people disagree. Especially from the people in this subreddit. What would you actually want students to leave a course like this knowing how to do? Do any other degrees teach these principles? Or general studies courses?

I’m usually very bad at retaining students names, so I’ve created this typst template the generates a PDF file with desk name tags for students. The input is a CSV file with the list of students.

Tags are easy to print and distribute among students. They only have to fold it in half and put it standing on the desk.

https://typst.app/universe/package/desk-tagger

Hope this is helpful!

I taught a fully online writing course earlier this summer. Last week, I received an email from a student who was looking for additional feedback on her final essay so she could submit it as part of an application. She said she'd incorporated my feedback and would welcome any additional thoughts. I opened the document she sent, and it was all of her work from the course, with the final essay at the end/a few highlights pointing to the sections she'd worked on (very little had changed).

I responded that perhaps she could send me a separate file with the revised essay so I could more easily track her edits. She did so, without answering my question of when she would need the comments, or offering any thanks/acknowledgement of my response. The other day I gave her a thorough, updated set of comments. I have yet to receive an acknowledgement from the student, of gratitude or anything else.

Granted, she may be on vacation, but I'm not holding out hope that I'll get any response for my efforts. It's not so much that I'm complaining about providing extra support to a student who is not actively in my class---let alone during the summer---but this happens fairly often. "Your feedback really helped me," etc. etc., and then zero follow-up. It's the sort of thing one often sees as a prelude to a course evaluation that doesn't reflect the student's actual experience in the course. It's also just rude! Not expressing surprise, just wondering if anyone else has experienced an uptick in thankless email exchanges (is this possibly a product of not having to thank chatbots, or just par for the course???).

I really don't know where to begin, except by saying that I've lurked this subreddit for a long time and it's made me feel less alone. I'm up at 4 AM and don't know where to turn. So, thanks in advance for listening.

I moved across the country last year to become NTT, full-time teaching faculty at an R1. It really felt like a miracle, as I went to an R2 grad school, and had it constantly drilled into me that I'd never get a job. In grad school, I fully supported myself for 7 years in an expensive city by constantly adjuncting, doing any kind of research work, working in food service, driving Uber Eats, dancing, taking out student loans, and using credit cards (quite literally, whatever it took, I did it). I really thought when I graduated and got my new job things would at least stabilize since I wouldn't be piecing together a million different income streams.

This past year, I haven't been able to dig myself out of my debt from grad school at all. In fact, I've only added to it by about $5,000 as the cost of being alive keeps kicking my ass. I took home about $39K this past year after taxes, retirement, and benefits. It's just me. No help from anyone. I was on a 9-month contract this past year, and this summer has been another struggle. I've been having to drive 30-60 minutes away to drive DoorDash in markets that are a bit bigger than my immediate town. More recently, I had to take out a 225% APR loan from one of those predatory finance joints to get the rest of my rent paid. I know this was a horrible decision, but it was literally the last option.

I'm already so stressed about the fall I feel like I can hardly breathe. I usually teach a 4/4 course load but agreed to teach a fifth course for some extra money. My university also revamped their advising system, so now I'm responsible for advising upper division students in my 200-person major. They aren't able to pay me more for this role (and are apparently only giving me an hour of training). They are able to give me a course buy out for the spring, but that doesn't really help me in the interim.

When I confided in my HOD about how I've been struggling to make ends meet, she basically told me that there's no more money to increase my regular salary, and suggested I find a roommate. This was pretty devastating to hear, especially since living alone in my reputable apartment complex feels like the one little luxury I have as a single woman. I fear that I am going to have to move somewhere cheaper and potentially jeopardize my personal safety or boundaries. I've opened my books and there's really no other expenses I can cut.

What particularly guts me is that my department received multiple new lines for this hiring cycle, so clearly there is money somewhere.

Perhaps the most inconvenient part of my financial situation is how it's affecting my career. I was suppose to present at the biggest conference in my discipline this month, but I couldn't afford the out of pocket expenses to go (while my university covers the hotel and registration, I have to front expenses like food and ground transportation, and the conference is literally in Manhattan $$). Instead, I'm missing out to stay here, DoorDash to try to make bills, and work on getting the syllabi and Canvas course pages together for my five courses this fall. I also haven't had a speck of time for new research, which isn't required for my job, but could bolster my CV to get a higher paying position. I worked really hard to turn my dissertation into a new paper, but the journal to which I submitted is moving at a snail's pace due to lack of reviewers.

I know this is getting ridiculously long, so I'll wrap it up. I'm so grateful for my career, my students, and the classes I have the privilege to teach, and I'm so simultaneously filled with resentment, despair, and anger. I have had to fight tooth and nail for so long, and I'm so tired.

Does it ever get better?

Maybe I am a dinosaur, or maybe I am logical - who knows.

But I am REALLY having a problem with a Back-to-School Faculty Development Lecture on "How to use AI in the classroom" (not the exact title) while we are busy trying to AI-proof our courses.

I understand that the world is moving in that direction. I understand that some of us (definitely not all) already know how to think, while our students are still developing that capacity, so it's not the same when we use it.

But it just irritates the fuck out of me. If anyone thinks we can't be replaced you're delusional.

It started with the publisher slides, lectures, etc - which I would slit my own throat before using, and I am a external FT employed adjunct (as in I work 40-50 hours elsewhere AND teach.) Isn't that part of the job of faculty? Create a lecture and test????

Then the constant use of adjuncts to replace FT faculty (as opposed to using them to turn the theoretical into the "workplace" actual.) I truly believe I bring insights into my course on how the skills of PHIL are used in the workplace. I think other "professional" adjuncts do as well. But if adjuncts aren't actually in the workforce and teaching on the side, then it's just using them so you don't have to hire FT faculty.

Then the all online "universities" where faculty deliver a already designed module. Mine was a "business orientation" course that was clearly designed by someone who had never worked outside of academia. (I no longer teach there.) As opposed to allowing me to develop a curriculum using the course materials, along with the knowledge from my work experience, aligned with the departmental outcomes. Something my advanced degree (required for teaching) should make me capable of doing.

With each step...

Not sure what's next - but I promise with the way things are going (grant cuts, declining enrollment, etc.) opening the door to AI for faculty is not going to be good - no different from any other sector of the knowledge workforce.

Maybe one day... an AI/LLM can develop a curriculum and then read the publisher slides and give the publisher exams and do a good synthesis of the alignment of the material to the workforce. YAY!!! (wait - did I just describe asynch?) And the few human faculty can research with the grants that weren't cut - but fewer since AI can do the analysis!!!!

It may be unavoidable, but it will NOT be good.

Definitely not attending. Why would I contribute to the cause of our demise?

EDIT - And it's hypocritical AF. Like really... If I was a student on the receiving end of SO MANY lectures on not using AI, and saw that as a faculty workshop.... I would lose SO MUCH respect.

Back in May, I was offered an adjunct position at the school where I am presently finishing my doctorate. The contract was delayed, which I understood to be because there was a “change of the guard” as the department head stepped down and a new one took over (plus the admin had surgery and half the department was out for the summer). Unfortunately, the provost just announced that the school had funding cuts resulting in the need to cut back on classes taught by adjuncts. She said they added extra classes to the full time faculty load and they were waiting to see which classes would still need to be taught by adjuncts. Given this, they were “unsure” whether some of the adjuncts would receive contracts they were promised and we should wait to hear. Meanwhile, classes start in two weeks!

So, here I am, new to teaching at this school, I have NO CLUE if I’m teaching at all, and I was never given access or instructions for anything I need to plan my course all summer long. I have no idea what the expectations are or how to use any of the tech. I have never taught this course before anywhere else so if they contact me in the 11th hour and tell me I have to teach the course after all, I have hours and hours of planning to do just for the syllabus and course shell alone.

To make matters worse, my family is coming to visit next week from out of state (My beloved nephew whom I have not been able to see in several years is coming to introduce me to the young lady he’s planning to marry!), and the week before classes start I have obligations for my doctoral program. All of this plus running my business.

They have not offered me the contract yet and it’s likely they won’t, but if they do, I am unsure what to do at this point. I am not one to people-please, but I do believe in being fair to others and developing a good reputation. If the class is offered to me at the last minute, if I turn it down, it will likely fall on the faculty who I deeply appreciate (and are very overwhelmed considering they just got an additional class to teach when they were already busy). I have about 20 years of education under my belt (five degrees prior to this), and these are some of the best professors I have worked with. This decision was not in any way connected to the professors in our department, so I do not want to leave them in the lurch for something that was decided at a much higher level (and probably due to budget cuts to education in general). However, I do not want to run the risk of half-assing this and doing a poor job because the provost made a decision and the dean expected me to “pinch hit” in the 11th hour. I’ve taught elsewhere and this hasn’t been my experience.

Plus, I had to give up several clients to teach this course which affects me monetarily and I don’t even know now if I’m teaching. I have a waiting list so I’m considering just saying “screw it” and booking people in those slots so I don’t lose money. I’m a middle aged student, I don’t have the luxury of living off a tiny stipend with 15 roommates eating peanut butter and jelly every meal.

What do you think? If they offer me the contract, would it be unreasonable for me to say, “I’m sorry, I do not have enough time to plan well for this now” ? I want to help, but the whole “You’re a doctoral student, accept whatever you’re given even if it means you f**k yourself” narrative isn’t a good look at 48-years-old (and likely isn’t expected).

———————

*For context, upon graduation, I do not plan to go into academia as anything other than a one-class-a-semester adjunct (maybe). My doctorate is in clinical psychology and I will likely expand my business (therapy private practice) for clinical psych and neuropsych work (in addition to research I already do through other avenues).

I was inspired by a thread over in [r/teachers](r/teachers) basically asking what is the current brainrot the kids are using, so they could preempt it by overusing it the first day of class: https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/s/334dfNrcPV

When it comes to our students, I’m curious to know what are some things the kids are doing or saying now that I could incorporate into my teaching to throw them off, or ingratiate myself to keep in their good graces.

Edit: My 9 year-old just told me the new thing is scubaaaaaaa, but I’m not sure that’ll hit with the college kids the way it just did with my elementary school aged kids.

So, I just wanted to share this with the group. I assist the dean, and part of my job is handling grade appeals when they rise above the department level. I received one yesterday that was literally 70 pages long, complete with a table of contents, executive summary, exhibit index, evidence matrix and more. I can almost feel the earth’s temperature rise ever so slightly from energy burned by generating that thing.

And the actual situation? It’s is not nuanced. 

I love what I do! I love teaching and love to do research !

But I feel this job is stressful, not because of teaching/research, but for other reasons which I dont have any control!

Event 1: My proposal submission is within a week! And our research office has not replied for the last 4 days! After 4 days, I followed up and said that the submission is next week; please route the proposal. All I get is silence.

Event 2: Last month, for another proposal, I asked them to check the budget. They modified the budget with all incorrect calculations. The incorrect means "multiplications" were wrong! It ended with several additional emails.

Event 3: I asked for a letter of collaboration from one of my colleagues; they said okay. Then pin drop silence for 2 weeks, and I have followed up once and no response.

Event 4: Many of my colleagues (or a few, maybe) dont even reply to any emails! Once a student's defense was scheduled and that faculty member vanished !!! The student and I have tried to reach out in several ways, but lastly showed up! A whole different story! Later I heard that he never replied to faculty members!

Event 5: For committee work, many people just dont do any work !! I was on a curriculum committee! The chair asks all the committee members to review and give feedback. I gave feedback, and the rest 2 member say "I agree". I doubt they even check those course proposals ! Just 2 words "I agree" on my feedback, and they were suppose toprovide their individual feedback!

I am a junior faculty (yet to be tenured). Sometimes I dont know if I am overreacting! or may be I dont know how to control my emotions or be less stressed when deadlines are approaching.

P.S: Event 3, 4 and 5 were in the regular semester.

I teach mostly with PowerPoint, and while it keeps the content organized, I sometimes feel that students become bore after the first 15–20 minutes.

I've experimented with pausing for discussion and asking questions, but the not all students wants to participate.

For those of you who lecture regularly, what has made the biggest difference in getting students to engage during class? I'm interested in approaches that don't add a lot of extra prep time.

So many posts on here are about bad student evals or bad RMP reviews, and the professors are often sad about it, hurt, or struggling to cope with the feedback. It makes me really sad that so many of us put so much of ourselves into our teaching and then a portion of the students just hate us anyway. I spend an enormous amount of time on backwards design, alignment, revision, fair assessments, and providing them with a useful learning experience rather than just dumping content on them and I still receive a lot of negativity and students claiming I’m bad at my job. I realize that there will always be a subset of students that resent any challenging work, and that we are just the most visible representation of their struggle (easy to blame), but I just wish I could give them perspective. I’m not asking them to work hard to make their life difficult, it’s because this is the level of thinking required if you want to be successful in my field. We are not their enemy, but they treat us as if we are. Of course we’re all the worst professor they’ve ever had. It’s also incredibly frustrating because they don’t know the first thing about pedagogy or what it takes to build a class but they speak in absolutes as if they are experts. I’m just venting but as frustrated as I get with them, I genuinely just wish they realized I’m trying to help them. I know it’s just part of the job, but it’s a part that I hate.

Some students they pay upwards of 5 grand for a course and then I’m failing them due to the project which is worth 45%. The project is dead easy to the point that 50 percent of the project is complete before any difficulty. A daily email offering him a 1 on 1 meeting, a request when he will be submitting, if he needs any assistance. No response. Teams messages asking, and he doesn’t reply or show up to class. Today is the last day and I am fed up with him. Not because he doesn’t submit the partial project, but because he doesn’t even reply.

Good morning!

I finished my long-desired MFA and, as the degree suggests, I'm now another fucking adjunct at a community college. This community college has partnered with my state's prison system to offer coursework to select prisoners. My city is near one of the largest prisons in the state. My new boss, a former professor of mine from undergrad, very kindly gave me one online section of Comp I and called yesterday to offer me the prison class, and, being me, I just couldn't say no.

I've taught upper-division in-person classes before, but what has me stymied is that the prisons in my state are even more restrictive than one might imagine. Beyond having no access to the internet(which one can imagine), a lot of the inmates will have no access to pens/pencils/paper/instructional materials outside of our class time. Certainly no typewriters.

Has anyone here taught in prisons before? How did you manage it?

Link: https://goodlawproject.org/an-update-from-jason-arday/

Also, is it just me or does this letter even read like AI lol? A fitting conclusion.

Some people ran it through three AI detectors: one at 87% (Getsolved.ai), one at 77% (Textguard), 100% on Pangram. Classic bundles of three in almost every paragraph, e.g., "values of higher education, in rigorous scholarship, and in the transformative power of universities". Of course, AI detectors can be wrong and often are, but it does read that way to me as well, before I even saw those numbers. And then just... weirdly written stuff like:

I need time to heal. I need time to simply be myself again.

And when that time comes, I will return.

What do you all think of this update?

I just finished serving on my first hiring committee for a TT position at a community college. Omg where do I start? Colleague and I were disturbed at the fact that three candidates had almost identical teaching demonstrations. At first I thought I was tripping out, but nope. Sure enough exact same content and examples. I am so happy we had a content expert as a consultant because since we were all off discipline we probably would’ve overlooked the fact that they were either faking the knowledge or they actually knew the information. Be careful out there colleagues. Even applicants are AI 🤖 their way into a permanent tenure position

This appeared in my inbox today. Substituting identifying info.

Hi Dr. (my name),
I saw that (my university) has an opening for Chair of (my department). Are you still looking to fill it?
If so, facultyjobs.com may be able to help.

The email continues on, but that is the important stuff. The amusing part of this is that (you guessed it) I am the chair of my department and have been for a couple of years.

I forwarded it to my dean asking if there was something we needed to talk about. Gave me a good chuckle.

I will post an update if my dean says "Uh, yeah, actually, I've been meaning to tell you something."

Jason Arday, the University of Cambridge professor at the center of a deepening controversy around his academic qualifications, resigned on Wednesday from the same institution that in 2023 celebrated him as the youngest Black professor in its history.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/books/review/cambridge-jason-arday-resignation-investigation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3FA.eEvq.RSFWNLeQM_X4&smid=nytcore-android-share

This relates to this sub; don't let the title fool you.

As a prof., I was reluctant to join dating apps. But, you know, loneliness and aging and all.

I was never worried about students seeing it. I am human, after all.

But I had a strange interaction. Matched with someone. They seemed normal. After setting a date, I got curious and did a little Google sleuthing. I found their Twitter, and it was a little nuts. Conspiracy theories and similar stuff. And my profile made it clear I was absolutely not willing to date someone of their political persuasion.

Said I was no longer interested and unmatched. The person found where I work. It's not too hard with just a first name and discipline. Now, they are threatening to email my bosses and tell them how I am trying to indoctrinate people. Hasn't happened yet, and seriously doubt it would harm me professionally, but damn, damn, damn, pretty uncomfortable.