After a very productive and thoroughly refreshing sabbatical, I’m back at Hartwick College this spring teaching two courses (and two of my favorite to teach!). Here are the syllabi: ENGL 220 Introduction to Textual Analysis and ENGL 352 Critical Game Studies.

Most notably, after twenty years of teaching predominantly writing-intensive courses in which I assigned essays, poems, and stories to be composed outside of class, in response to the frustration the sheer amount of student work I have seen generated by artificial intelligence (AI) has caused me and the more general neofeudal edtechification of higher education, I made the decision this spring to make my courses (almost) completely analog in terms of assignments, materials, and expectations. Students write all their papers in class. Students are required to have print books, and I print out all PDFs for them to read and annotate. No one has a smart phone or a laptop anywhere in sight. It’s glorious, old school, amazingly analog. And it is working.[1]

I am calling this teaching without computers, and it has been revolutionary for my pedagogy and peace of mind, revitalizing the classroom as a space of human connection, energy, communication, thinking, and poiesis while also assuaging my own considerable frustrations with and despair about my job over the past few years, a job that at some point seemed destined to be little more than that of plagiarism detective. All my previous engagement with students’ ideas and their attempts to express those ideas were slowly and almost completely strained away over the past three-odd years with nothing left but policing, constantly on the lookout for evidence of now seemingly ubiquitous large-language model (LLM) use infecting and subverting the reading, writing, and thinking of our students, of an entire generation of young people, of, really, everyone, compromising our very humanity with its tepid, dumb slop. Though I am only six weeks into the semester, the transformation teaching without computers has wrought upon my classroom has been remarkable. My students have, to a large degree, embraced my new pedagogy, as I suspect it has given them back something that I perhaps only now realize had been lost in classrooms years before LLMs had emerged. I cannot recommend this (and other) kind(s) of AI-resistant pedagogy enough for other people teaching in the critical humanities. I am a convert. Fully. And I expect that, whatever comes next for me as a teacher, a big part of it will be proselytizing for the new good news: teaching and learning without computers.

For more resources on resisting AI in our teaching, see Anna Kornbluh, Eric Hayot, Krista Muratore, and Gina Stinnett’s Against AI.

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[1] That said, there are still some digital elements in my classes. For example, obviously I still require that students play video games in ENGL 352 Critical Game Studies, and I do make available the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary and a thesaurus during in-class writing assignments. Of course, I also happily approve whatever digital accommodations students might need—they just need to ask (and regardless of whether or not they have any documented need for such accommodation).