Not all of us who teach first-year college writing are using AI detectors or policing cheating. In fact, AI can be a matter of equity. Most students do not have English professors for parents like my kids had. Or have the money to pay someone to write or proofread papers for them.
The only answer I have is a kind of "ungrading." If students are worried about maintaining high grades, then I take that worry away as best I can. I've stopped using rubrics. I've mostly stopped requiring assignments to be a certain number of pages. I make intensive comments on what they write so they see I am making an effort to teach them. I tell them when I like a sentence they wrote. It's not easy to do when class sizes are increasing, but I do my best and I ask them to give me a chance to teach them something.
I enjoyed this. I'm seeing at least one other category, though. You refer to Facebook Moms, but I think there is a subset of married women who adopt MAGA because their husbands do, mainly out of a need to keep their husbands calm and feeling supported. It's just easier to go along with it, to believe in it. They're women who don't think they (or any women, actually) matter. I know too many of these women, "radicalized" by their husbands, or to be more specific, by their husbands' need for MAGA. (I am so thankful that my sisters have escaped this and simply live in "mixed" marriages. I credit our parents for being caring people and for teaching us it's ok to have different opinions. I often tell my students that they shouldn't be afraid to express disagreement with me in the classroom because in my house growing up, argument was a love language.)
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Mostly agree
Not all of us who teach first-year college writing are using AI detectors or policing cheating. In fact, AI can be a matter of equity. Most students do not have English professors for parents like my kids had. Or have the money to pay someone to write or proofread papers for them. The only answer I have is a kind of "ungrading." If students are worried about maintaining high grades, then I take that worry away as best I can. I've stopped using rubrics. I've mostly stopped requiring assignments to be a certain number of pages. I make intensive comments on what they write so they see I am making an effort to teach them. I tell them when I like a sentence they wrote. It's not easy to do when class sizes are increasing, but I do my best and I ask them to give me a chance to teach them something.
I enjoyed this. I'm seeing at least one other category, though. You refer to Facebook Moms, but I think there is a subset of married women who adopt MAGA because their husbands do, mainly out of a need to keep their husbands calm and feeling supported. It's just easier to go along with it, to believe in it. They're women who don't think they (or any women, actually) matter. I know too many of these women, "radicalized" by their husbands, or to be more specific, by their husbands' need for MAGA. (I am so thankful that my sisters have escaped this and simply live in "mixed" marriages. I credit our parents for being caring people and for teaching us it's ok to have different opinions. I often tell my students that they shouldn't be afraid to express disagreement with me in the classroom because in my house growing up, argument was a love language.)