Should "They Say" What "I Say"?

In my research writing class, I draw a bit on the textbook They Say / I Say* by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, especially when it comes to teaching students how to respond to sources. My main textbook for that course is Craft of Research, but I find it doesn't say a lot about how to read sources, synthesize sources, and come up with your own argument. TS/IS, awkward title aside, has parts where it does a good job of both highlighting 1) what your sources are doing, and 2) how you might do it too. (Students, I think, often conceptualize what they're doing as distinct from their sources, not as part of it.)

I don't teach the whole book, but I do assign chapters 1-2, 4-5, and 14. The other day (as of this writing; I'm typing this up a couple weeks in advance) I was teaching chapters 4-5. These cover the "three ways" of responding to sources and how to distinguish what they say from what you say. 

As someone who was an English ed major in college and then has taught writing for eighteen years now, I have read a lot of writing textbooks in my time. Most of the time I don't like them. What I don't like is when they seem to describe something alien to me and my process. If I can't identify what they discuss with my own writing process, how can I go on to recommend that my students do it in their own process? (I still remember this book I hated as an undergraduate called Writing and Being.) So what I look out for in writing textbooks is when they describe something I already do, but in putting a name on it, help me to understand it better. I feel like no textbook I have ever read is consistently good in this regard, but you can piece together a solid writing curriculum out of various bits and pieces of Booth et al.'s Craft of Research, Rosenwasser and Stephen's Writing Analytically, Harris's Rewriting, and TS/IS.

One of the parts that really resonated for me in TS/IS is the chapters I'm talking about here, when they discuss how to 1) recognize when sources are agreeing and disagreeing with each other, and 2) how to do that yourself. Graff and Birkenstein love templates, their whole deal is both telling you the intellectual moves that academic writing typically makes and giving you specific words to accomplish it with. I didn't read TS/IS until after I wrote it... but my article on Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science uses their templates several times! (For example, their "However... / ...overlooks" template: "However, this focus on the pleasures of the interior self overlooks Mrs. Gallilee’s consistent concern with her own social standing, especially display of success.") Not because I actually used their templates, but because their templates offer very clear ways to disagree with sources that I arrived at independently.

So when I teach these chapters, I show students some examples from my own work and ask them if the writer (whoever he is) is agreeing or disagreeing with the sources. Then I reveal that 1) I wrote it all, and 2) before I ever read TS/IS, trying to make the point that this is what they should do because this is simply what writers do.

Anyway, all of this is to set up me teaching the chapters this time, this semester. I had just showed how the examples I was giving were from own work and encouraged the students to be doing this themselves.

One of my students raises his hand: "So back at the beginning of the semester, you told us all that one of the things you didn't like about AI was how it makes everything sound the same, but now you're all telling us to write the same way?" I think you could read it as confrontational or as a "gotcha" moment now that I type it out, but it didn't sound that way, it sounded like genuine curiosity about a perceived contradiction.

I often think students don't ask enough questions about why we instructors do what we do. I for one am generally happen to explain my rationales, and I try to do so in class, but I can't explain everything (I am already something of an overexplainer I feel), but then you get comments on your evals that indicate students don't understand that you had very good reasons for something, or any reasons at all. So I appreciated this question even as it knocked me for a bit of a loop. Why did I decry the sameness of LLM-generated writing even as I asked my students to use similar wording in their own writing? Could I adopt a consistent answer?

What I said is that actually I am not a huge fan of templates—there's a reason I assign just a couple chapters of TS/IS and not the whole book. I find them constrictive; I struggle with the same thing when it comes to providing examples in class. I know any writer benefits from looking at how other people have done something, but it also means that students will often mimic the thing you give them too much. What I try to teach with examples—and with templates, when I give them—is the underlying intellectual task. I actually am not a big fan of mimicking exact wording, it's more that I want them to do a certain thing, and following a template is a possible way to accomplish it... but there might be others!

That seemed to satisfy him. It was a striking moment; one always wonders how much students are actually thinking about what you say, but it seemed like he actually was!

* Officially "They Say / I Say" for some reason, but that looks stupid. If there are going to be quotation marks in the title, surely "They Say"/"I Say" would be better.

Teaching Activities: Evaluating Sources

I have two simple but I think fairly effective activities I do in my "Writing and Research" classes. A key part of these classes is less the writing itself per se and more teaching the students how to consider sources. A bit point of emphasis for me is to try to teach the students not just what they should be doing, but what principles underlie it. With that in mind, I have two things I do every semester.

Primary, Secondary, Tertiary

I use Craft of Research from University of Chicago Press in my research class. One of the things I like about it is that it make a distinction between "secondary" and "tertiary" sources—secondary sources are by scholars aimed at scholars, tertiary sources have a more general audience and don't communicate original research, and, perhaps most importantly, go through peer review. Good examples would be textbooks, web sites with general readerships, encyclopedias, and so on. I don't think people always make this distinction, but it helps drive students to what you kinds of sources you want.

I also like to emphasize that we approach primary sources differently than other sources: a TikTok video about how the COVID vaccine will kill you but at least you'll get into heaven is certainly not a secondary source, and for a project about vaccines would be a terrible tertiary source, but for a project about vaccine hesitancy would be an excellent primary source.

Once I teach this, I give the students some grids of sources, and I have them evaluate if they are primary, secondary, or tertiary. These are all based on real student projects I have received. I start easy, but I throw in some curveballs, and we talk through how in many cases, the tertiary sources were good sources in that there was no better source for the information out there.

Source Reliability 

This is just half of them!

Another thing I like in Craft of Research is its discussion of how to evaluate sources for reliability. It gives you a series of questions to ask: is the source by a reputable press? is it by a reputable scholar? how current is it? does it have notes and bibliography? how many people have cited it?

I like to concretize this by bringing in a bag of actual books from my office. I break the class up into pairs and give each pair three books. (It's a hefty bag!) We then work through the questions one by one, with me explaining what they mean and then having them apply them to their three books. It's simple enough, but I like the hands-on aspect of it, with them looking at copyright pages and author blurbs and flipping through looking for footnotes and such. Again, I try to highlight potential issues: sure, this person doesn't have a Ph.D. or an academic appointment and their book was published by a trade press, but they're a science fiction author and their book about science fiction has a detailed bibliography, so maybe we can trust it anyway... although it came out forty years ago, so maybe there's a better option!

Science, Clarity, and Infidelity in Arrowsmith

I teach Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith in medical humanities course. This is a bildungsroman about a young medical scientist who tries to fight a plague, along with various other public health undertakings, and partially my teaching emphasizes those public health angles.

But that's not all that's going on in Arrowsmith. One things my students struggle with is an infidelity subplot: during his time as a public health officer, Martin Arrowsmith has a bit of a thing with Orchid, the daughter of his boss, even though he is married. They only share a single kiss, but definitely have an inappropriate emotional intimacy. (And I'm not denying that even a single kiss is very much inappropriate!) Students don't like reading about this, I find, and react strongly against it.

Fair enough, you probably should react strongly against infidelity in your daily life. But in fiction, I think you need to think about why it's there. Why include this infidelity subplot in a novel largely about public health and what it means to have a scientific mindset? 

Though it's a late example, I would classify Arrowsmith as a realist novel. The realist novel is, I would argue, about testing and exploring systems of knowing the world. (As is the bildungsroman, in a somewhat different way.) In claiming this, I draw on both George Eliot, one of the original practitioners of the genre, and George Levine, my academic grandfather. Specifically, Eliot lays out her manifesto for realism in Adam Bede, saying we need to remember regular people that that we do not "leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes." Similarly, Levine says that realist novels "turn on the power of protagonists to develop the proper temper and state of mind to allow realistic confrontation with the 'object'—what one might see as acquisition the proper 'method.'" What makes this difficult, Levine goes on to say, is "the problems caused by the body and the passions in gaining access to the truth... as novels, they can never dismiss the body as trivial or irrelevant." The realist novel is about testing theories and methods of accessing knowledge by putting them into the context of people's actual lived experiences. (This sounds very dry, I think, but of course Adam Bede and Arrowsmith are anything but dry.)

The theory being put to the test in Arrowsmith is the vision of the scientist. This is laid out very well by Martin's mentor, Gottlieb, who has a very long speech about what a scientist thinks and how. Here's some of it:

To be a scientist—it is not just a different job, so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer.... [I]t makes its victim different from the good normal man. The normal man, he does not care much what he does except he should eat and sleep and make love. But the scientist is intensely religious—he is so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, be cause they are an insult to faith.... He lives in a cold, clear light.

So, if we believe the two Georges, the point of the novel is to put that philosophy to the test. Is thinking scientifically something that will work in the real world, among real people who have real bodies? The novel's climax, which is about Martin trying to see if he can implement a controlled scientific experiment in the middle of a plague, is all about this.

But this semester, I realized that it was also true of the infidelity subplot. I have a friend who's a marriage therapist, and he once told me there's two things you have to work on to recover from infidelity: there's the person who did it, and the relationship.

So I asked my students this semester: why was Martin unfaithful? what was up with him? They gave some pretty good answers: he has this need for approval, probably stemming from being an orphan, he likes to be seen as right and Orchid never disagrees with him. I also asked them what was wrong with the marriage: Martin's wife, Leora, isn't always a good communicator herself even though she is devoted to Martin.

Something we've talked about in class is that Martin is bad at people. The thing about public health is that it unites scientific knowledge with political acumen. Martin's boss has no scientific knowledge but lots of political acumen; Martin, on the other hand, has lots of political knowledge but no political acumen. Each man is a disaster of a public health official in his own way. Martin is good at accessing scientific truth, but bad at accessing emotional truth.

What infidelity is rooted in, I would claim, is a lack of understanding of the self. There's something in yourself in that you're afraid of, or unable to acknowledge, or simply unwilling. Martin's inability to access emotional truth isn't just about other people, it's also about himself. He doesn't understand himself. If he did, this wouldn't happen.

Thus, to cycle back around to realism, what we see is that when it comes to himself, Martin is willing to accept quarter-truths, he does not live in a cold, clear light. So is he religiously devoted to truth, is he different to other men? No, he's not. Martin's scientific perceptions do a lot of good, he saves a lot of lives. But he very much falls victim to "the problems caused by the body and the passions in gaining access to the truth." I have a lot of sympathy for Martin, but his system of knowledge fails the test that Levine articulates. The reason for the infidelity subplot in the novel is to show how Martin doesn't live up to his own aspirations when it comes to the self.

We Are Now Firmly in the ChatGPT Era of Academic Writing

It seems unlikely that if you teach college writing, that you haven't been dealing with the impact of ChatGPT and other LLMs. I of course have had students using this next technology since Spring 2023. But the impact it's had on me and and my teaching is probably most starkly represented by this chart:

According to my syllabus policies, as well as our program policies, use of ChatGPT or similar technology is prohibited. Though I guess I can see how it might be useful in other courses, I don't see how it's useful in a writing course; my class (I would argue) is trying to use writing as a mode of thinking. We don't write to record what we already know, we write to come into the knowing of something.

The thing about ChatGPT use is that it's difficult to "prove" in some kind of "objective" sense—and this is the kind of thing academic integrity panels supposedly want. But the whole reason I am a professor of academic writing is that I supposedly have some kind of expertise in academic writing, and I do. It's an expertise honed by reading student writing for years, almost decades. I first taught an academic writing course in Fall 2008. Without methodically counting it all up, I would estimate that in that time I've taught sixty-five sections of first-year writing course, which means I've read the work of approximately thirteen hundred students, each of whom ought to write at a minimum of ten pages per semester, if we're going to be conservative. That means I've read at least (and certainly much more than) thirteen thousand pages of college-student papers in my life.

image generated, of course, by ChatGPT

You read a genre that much, you get to know it. I know what college students write like. What I'm reading now isn't it. But frustratingly, I don't know how much the academic integrity panel goes for "it just doesn't sound right" as evidence. A colleague of mine has suggested we should file more charges on this basis, though, and see what happens. Another colleague of mine has suggested that how college students write may be shifting as a result of ChatGPT, in that even if they're not actually using it your class, they read its output so much that it's influencing how they write. Now that's scary.

But anyway, clearly lots of them are using it. (Though, admittedly, some are clearly not! I have a lot of fondness for the crappy C paper now.)

The thing you can actually prove, though, is the veracity of sources. That is the basis on which all of my charges were filed this semester. Of my fourteen cases, I think three were about sources that did not exist. This, for me, means failure of the course. If you don't see that a basic part of research writing is that the sources you cite have to actually exist, then I don't know that you really belong in my class at all. I can't teach you this. Sure, use ChatGPT to find sources (in my personal experiments I have not found it to be very good at this, but I am sure it could be), but then make sure they are real! And of course, if you're summarizing fabricated sources on, say, an annotated bibliography, you are lying, because how could you have read a source that doesn't exist?

All of my other charges were about fabricated quotations from real sources, students claiming that direct quotations existed that did not actually exist. My institution requires that all academic integrity filings be accompanied by a formal meeting that is witness by a neutral faculty member; to make up for all the colleagues that had to witness mine, I witness a lot of other people's. This was the thing most of them saw as well. Frustratingly, a lot of students had this weird defense: that they didn't know quotation marks were reserved for direct quotations. One might tempted to believe this, except that very few students were making this mistake over a year ago, and though I think that the teaching of writing at the pre-college level has probably got worse since I started teaching in 2008, I don't believe that just a couple years ago, teachers stopped explaining what quotations marks are for.

So, the only explanation is that they are using ChatGPT to "find quotations"... but again, not confirming the existence of the quotations. Some of my students have admitted this when confronted, others have come up with not very compelling explanations. I have seen this across the board, in both my research writing class and in my text-based humanities course. (I can see why students might think I might not know that they made up a quotation from a source they found that I've never read; I don't see why they don't realize I won't catch them when they make up quotes from stories we all read together!)

Thankfully (I guess) it doesn't matter. At my institution, fabricated quotations or sources fall under the category of Deception and misrepresentation; I don't have to prove the fabrications come from anywhere in particular, I just have to prove they don't exist.

In my research writing course, fabrications in the final paper mean failing the final paper. It seems to me there's a basic parameter of the assignment you've failed to reach. And failing the final paper means failing the course. It seems to me there's something this course was supposed to teach you that you just didn't learn, and thus you need to take it again, if you can't write at least a D-level research paper by the end of an entire semester. In the past, I haven't had to enforce this policy very much, but I did at least three or four times this semester.

On top of all this, one has to remember—these are just the students I caught fabricating. There are also all the students using LLMs that I recognized but couldn't "prove," and thus just dinged them on points (I have become fond of marking assignments with a "0" and writing, "This is so vague an AI could have written it"), and then all the students who are actually "good" at using LLMs to write and turning in work that seems human-written... even when it's not. 

Even though ChatGPT has been around a couple years, it's clear that something is shifting in the way students use it. You can see that even just last semester, I only filed one charge (though I didn't teach research writing that time.) Many of my colleagues had similar experiences this semester in particular (though I don't think anyone filed as many charges as I did). As one of my colleagues has said, it seems like there's a shared ethos we used to assume the existence of that just doesn't exist anymore. And how can you teach people if that's the case? I can't teach someone that they want to be ethical.

So anyway, it's been a depressing semester. I even had two students file appeals that persisted beyond the end of the semester (and another just not respond to my communication attempts, which is for some reason an automatic appeal), which meant that it didn't stop even when the semester was over! But finally about two weeks ago, I heard about my last outstanding appeal.

I can't just keep doing everything the same way, clearly. But more on that in another post. 

Teaching the Medical Humanities: Short Science Fiction

Previously I posted about designing my "Medical Humanties" course, which was themed around science fiction stories focusing on the future of medicine. Today, I want to talk about the sf stories I taught and what I did with them.

• 
  Daniel Keyes, "Flowers for Algeron" (1959). When I was prepping the class last summer, I also happened to read the 1966 novel Flowers for Algernon, which made me remember the original short story from 1959. About a low-IQ adult who goes through an experimental surgery to elevate his IQ, it is quite obviously all about the ethics of medicine! My first time teaching the class, I used it in my genetic engineering unit as a sort of metaphor for the issues of consent and identity raised by genetic engineering. But when I later read the papers by students who wrote about it, I felt I had really done the story a disservice by not actually meaningfully discussing disability! So I created a disability unit the following semester, and used the medical, social, and human rights models of disability as a way of discussing the story.
• 
  Sarah Pinsker, "Pay Attention" (2015). Expanding the disability unit meant I needed a second example of disability-focused piece of sf, otherwise I didn't have much of a unit! One thing I toyed with going from my first semester to my second was dropping Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith as my novel and replacing it with Sarah Pinsker's We Are Satellites (2021). This novel is about a brain implant called the "Pilot" that people can get to help them multitask more effectively; I decided not to make the change (I already had a bunch of Arrowsmith lesson plans, of course), but it did cause me to remember that Pinsker also wrote a couple short stories set in the world of We Are Satellites. "Pay Attention" is about a young woman with a mental disability whose Pilot enables her to obtain a military and medical career... but then one day it stops working. Like most of Pinsker's work, a great little story, and it let us talk about different aspects of disability than "Flowers."
• 
  Nancy Kress, "Invisible People" (2020). Moving "Flowers for Algernon" out of the genetic engineering unit meant I needed a second genetic engineering story as well. Looking backward through old blog posts, I found one I made about this story by Nancy Kress, where some parents who used a surrogate discover that their daughter was actually a victim of illegal genetic engineering. I think Kress's story is super clever, raising some interesting issues about less obvious uses of genetic engineering than "would you create a super-genius?", and focusing on some issues of identity and consent that were central to our class. The story ends in a debate that translated well to the classroom, and the story is thematically quite clever.
• Manjula Padmanabhan, "Essence of Gandhi" (1997). As soon as I knew I was doing genetic engineering, I knew I wanted to do this story, which is about Western corporations exploiting the DNA of colonized peoples—I had, after all, published an article on it! Neither semester did my students enjoy it; even though it's just four pages, they found it confusing and alienating. Their loss, I guess. I still think it's clever! (Probably they didn't like it because the story is almost totally unmentioned on the Internet, and thus ChatGPT can't summarize it.)
• 
  Channing Ren, "Resurrection" (2020). I will admit to cheating: this is the first of four short stories I recycled from my life-extension class. Hey, it gave me over a week's worth of lesson plans! What is technological immortality, arguably, other than medicine taken to its utmost? In my second iteration of the course, I moved this to be the first one we read, as it's a useful story for discussing the project of science fiction (it's very easy to get), and it has the most kneejerk negative depiction of immortality.
• Vanessa Fogg, "Traces of Us" (2018). This makes a good second immortality story, because like "Resurrection" it's about consciousness uploading, but it's much more positive, so it works against your assumptions. I will probably import this resequencing back into my immortality course. It also let me discuss "hard sf," of which I would argue it's the only example I taught in this course.
• Will McIntosh, "Bridesicle" (2009). This story is about issues relating to a different technology of immortality, cryonics. Students this semester got very into my explanation of what's really going on with cryonics.
• Paolo Bacigalupi, "Pop Squad" (2006). Lastly, we did genetic life extension. This semester, thanks to an episode of Radiolab I had coincidentally heard a week before teaching it, I leaned into some real issues of population explosion and decline; again, I'd like to import these concepts back into my immortality class. They really illuminated for me what I think Bacigalupi is up to in this story; it's about be estranged from the natural process of reproduction.
• Sarah Pinsker, "Escape from Caring Seasons" (2018). The first time I taught the class, a couple students brought up AI as the technology they were most interesting in when it comes to the future of medicine, which made me belatedly think of this story from Pinsker's book Lost Places, where algorithms supercede doctors in a nursing home... not because AI has gone horribly wrong, though, but because it's working exactly as intended. I added the story to my syllabus the second time around. Pinsker thus became my only repeat author.
• Cory Doctorow, "Radicalized" (2019). Right around the time I finished teaching the class for the first time, Luigi Mangione shot a health insurance executive; this caused someone to post on the printSF subreddit that "Cory Doctorow's story from Radicalized has come true," alerting me to the existence of this story, about how men whose loved ones have died because of denied insurance claims get radicalized in online forums and begin executing health insurance executives. I added it to the course pretty belatedly (after I had ordered my course packet!) for my second go run. It's a clever story, and let me talk about some important issues affecting American healthcare; students of course had lots of opinions about Luigi, so it taught well. Doctorow's blog post about the story is good reading.
• Samantha Mills, "Rabbit Test" (2022). This Hugo Award–winning story is about medical implants being used by the state to monitor if women are pregnant. Popular with my students, especially the women, and I like Mills's point that any technology that allows you to better understand your own body also allows others to better control your own body. She powerfully links her future technology to the history of birth control and abortion. I taught it as a good example of China Miéville's dictum that sf isn't really about the future but the present.
• Meg Elison, "The Pill" (2020). This is a disturbing novelette about a pill that makes you skinny... but has a 10% chance of killing you! Good for discussing if people's aversion to fatness is really about health; I paired it with concepts and background from Joan Jacobs Brumberg's The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls and Jeffrey Sobal's "The Medicalization and Demedicalization of Obesity" to discuss how obesity is viewed as either a medical issue one or an ethical one. (Thanks to my friend Christiana for her help.)

That's it! It was a fun class. I make the students take a survey ranking the stories, but thus far I've been too lazy to actually work up the data, so I'll be interested to see what they liked best when I get around to it all.

Teaching the Medical Humanities: General Course Design

This is the first in a series of (probably) two posts about a class I taught last semester and this. This one covers my general approach to the course.

My university has recently implemented a new general education program; faculty members design and propose courses in various areas that students can take to fulfill distribution requirements. For obvious reasons, here in the Department of English and Writing, we offer a lot of courses that fulfill the "text-based humanities" requirement. My colleague Claire proposed one called "Global Medical Stories," where the idea was that students would read different kinds of medical narratives, engaging in the "medical humanities." Classes in our gen ed program have to be able to be taught by a variety of faculty—they can't be classes just one person can teach—so I was asked if I was interested in the class when it was under development, and my name put down on the application. This mean that when a section came open in Fall 2024, I was asked if I wanted to teach it, and I said sure; I then taught another section in Spring 2025. 

Going in I was a bit worried. I'd said "yes" on the basis that a lot of my scholarship ends up discussing medical issues, particularly my work on vivisection, public health, and biocracy. But was I going to teach Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science or Charles Kingsley's Two Years Ago or Fergus Hume's The Year of Miracle in a 200-level gen-ed class? It seemed unlikely. So what would I teach?

Eventually I decided I could probably find a bunch of medical science fiction. That would allow me to discuss interesting issues but also play to my strengths. I will always have plenty to say in a class on sf!

I plotted out a bunch of short stories (more on that in post #2), but felt like I was coming up short of enough to fill up a whole semester; in an act of desperation, I asked the bookstore to order Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith. I'd taught it a decade ago and it had worked well, and now, post-COVID, it was even more relevant.

Arrowsmith got me thinking about some episodes of Radiolab I had enjoyed, particularly "Every Day Is Ignaz Semmelweis Day" and "The Great Vaccinator," both of which I thought really explicated some issues the novel raised in a more nonfictional way. When I looked at my colleagues' syllabus, she had a lot of nonfiction about medical topics, but that's not an era I know a lot about... but Radiolab podcasts... now there I'm an expert! (And podcasts are obviously not fiction, but they are stories about medicine, so they fit the class anyway.) I decided to pair a number of course texts with podcasts as a way of showing that the issues in the science fiction stories were issues in the real world as well. Some I was able to come up with myself; a request for suggestions on r/Radiolab also jogged some others in my memory.

Here are the podcasts I ended up doing, organized by what unit I used them in:

1. Public Health
• "The Great Vaccinator": the development of the mumps vaccine
• "Every Day Is Ignaz Semmelweis Day": the invention of handwashing
• "Playing God": ethical issues around who to prioritize when medical resources are scarce 
2. Disability
• "Unfit": people with low IQs and sterilization
3. Genetic Engineering
• "CRISPR": what CRISPR is and how it works
• "Seeking Patterns": how a medication changed someone's whole identity
4. Life Extension
• "The Bitter End": what lengths doctors would not go to to save their own lives

So, I had a class. Open with Arrowsmith, taking breaks for podcasts, and then do sf in the second half of the course, also with some podcasts. I think the first semester went pretty well, but I refined my approach for the second semester, which I think went even better.

The class requires three "Signature Assignments": two papers and a presentation. It was pretty obvious to make the first paper about Arrowsmith and the second about the sf. The first time, I had the students do video presentations about the topic of their second paper. I don't really enjoy watching video presentations, to be honest, and this seemed to add a lot of work for both me and the students in the last couple weeks of the course. 

Inspired by what my colleague Nicole was doing for presentations in her text-based humanities course, the biggest change I made going into the second semester was to the presentations. This time, I had them pick a podcast I hadn't assigned (Radiolab episodes I hadn't taught, but also some others I knew as well as suggestions solicited on Facebook). I had students present on whatever one they chose, providing a summary of key points and a connection to a text from the class. (Students were allowed to present on ones not on the list as long as they got preapproval from me, but no one did.) I don't know what the students though, but I found them fun and interesting, though I think my prompt needs some slight refinement.

Like many classes, I think the first time went okay and the second time went quite well; I think the exams and papers reflect much more this time out that students are thinking about the kind of things I want them to think. But more when I wrap up my thoughts next time!

Teaching Notes: Public Health in Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith

I'm currently teaching a general education course here at UT, one focused on the medical humanities. That course and its design will probably merit its own post at some point (maybe not until next semester, though, after I reteach it), but for now I want to discuss the novel I assigned.

Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

Originally published: 1924
First read: January 2013
Acquired: June 2014
Previously taught: September 2014
Retaught: September 2024

Originally my thought was to play to my strengths by doing short science fiction about medicine. But as things were getting down to the wire, I wasn't sure if I would have enough short stories to teach without having to do a lot of research to prep the class... research I honestly didn't have time to do. But then I cast my mind back and remembered Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith, a novel I taught a decade ago in a class on the novel post-1900. A whole 450-page novel about a doctor trying to find his way in the world! What could be better for using up a month of course time? But also giving us a lot of very relevant things to discuss.

So I put in my book order, and when the semester rolled around, I taught the book. In my link above, you can get a sense of the kind of things I was interested in last time around, and I did do some of that this time, too: Arrowsmith as bildungsroman, Arrowsmith as exemplar for the realist project.

But the big change in the world since the last time I taught Arrowsmith (other than the fact that college students can't cope with a 450-page book anymore, even across three weeks) is, of course, that we have all lived through a major public health crisis... and Arrowsmith is all about public health. Martin Arrowsmith spends a lot of time working in a public health department, trying to convince people to behave rationally in the face of scientific evidence... a struggle we have all now witnessed firsthand. 

I remember making jokes to my class in 2014 about the inanity of the songs Martin's boss at the public health department comes up with to communicate public health messages. At the time, these seemed like goofy 1920s nonsense. But in the 2020s, we did all this! Martin's struggle to get people to put aside their petty prejudices in favor of collective action is something we all saw in real time. I realize now, of course, that Lewis must have been thinking (at least in part) of the Spanish flu, and a student pointed out to me that he was probably also inspired by "Typhoid Mary."

So there was a lot of fruitful material for discussion here. I paired a lot of our course texts with episodes of Radiolab as a way of letting my class get to interesting issues in detail without forcing me to assign a bunch of other reading. I paired Arrowsmith with three:

• "The Great Vaccinator" (3 Dec. 2020). This episode is about Maurice Hilleman and the creation of the mumps vaccine, the quickest created vaccine prior to COVID, as well as seven others routinely given to children today. I thought of Arrowsmith as soon as I first heard this episode back when it came out because it discusses some of the ethical issues of double-blind testing. When Hilleman did polio vaccine testing, he had to do so in the knowledge that he was letting some kids suffer who might have not suffered if they hadn't been given the placebo—the exact dilemma Martin faces at the climax of Arrowsmith when he can only give half the inhabitants of St. Hubert the bacteriophage that will save them from the plague.
• "Every Day Is Ignaz Semmelweis Day" (1 Apr. 2020). This episode is about Ignaz Semmelweis, who invented handwashing in a maternity ward in nineteenth-century Vienna. It's a neat episode about the development of something so commonplace now that most people know little about. Semmelweis reminds me a lot of Martin, in that I would argue the personality attributes that make him good at science are also the same attributes that made him bad at convincing other people to use his discoveries. Semmelweis alienated a lot of people when he tried to get them to adopt handwashing... but if he hadn't had that drive and arrogance, could he have discovered it to begin with?
• "Playing God" (21 Aug. 2016). This episode is about triage, going through three main stories: 1) the way triage decisions were made in a New Orleans hospital during Katrina, 2) an attempt to devise triage guidelines using citizen input, and 3) a medical reporter's failure to adhere to the guidelines. Arrowsmith isn't really about triage per se, but both triage and medical testing on humans (I would argue) come down to something Robert Krulwich says at the end of the episode: "what you've hit upon here is an impossible piece of human business. Rationing, triage, whatever you call it, is an inhuman act which humans are trying to do, but the fact of their humanity makes it impossible. We have a God role and nobody fits it." Arrowsmith is all about Martin's attempt to deny his humanity so he can fit that God role. This is both necessary to providing medical care (as "Playing God" highlights)... and utterly impossible.

I don't know that my students loved Arrowsmith, but I think it teaches very well in that it's got a lot of great medical issues in it that are very teachable. I don't know that I would teach the book every time I teach this class (I am toying with an alternative), but I definitely will reteach it when I teach the class again next semester at least.

Technologies of Immortality: Course Assignments and Critical Texts

With this post, I wanted to talk a bit more about my immortality-focused team-taught Honors course. Specifically, I want to talk about two readings that I assigned that were not science fiction, but rather about it. (My previous post about the precise stories we assigned may be of use.)

For Honors students here at UT, these "Dialectics" courses replace their usual general education requirements. Thus it was important to me that I just not assign literature, but also that I assign something about fiction, to expose the students to literary criticism. I ended up deciding that the two most useful pieces would be two pieces that have been influential on my understanding of science fiction, though neither is a traditional work of literary criticism. I paired each one with one of our groups of sf texts and thus one of our assignments.

Isaac Asimov: "Social Science Fiction"

I've posted here in the past about Isaac Asimov's three-part typology of science fiction: adventure-dominant, technology-dominant, and sociology-dominant. These he articulated in his introductions to the 1962 anthologies Soviet Science Fiction and More Soviet Science Fiction. What I only recently learned (thanks to a query on Reddit) is that he originally discussed the three types of sf in somewhat different terms in a 1952 essay called "Social Science Fiction"; I don't know why this essay wasn't reprinted in Asimov on Science Fiction along with the two Soviet ones, but it has been reprinted a number of other places, including Damon Knight's 1977 anthology Turning Points: Essays on the Art of Science Fiction.

In this essay, he calls the three categories "adventure," "gadget," and "social," and I like how he articulates the differences through a series of examples about how you'd write a story about the automobile if it was sf. An adventure story about the car would use it in a thrilling chase, a gadget story about the car would focus on how internal combustion engines work in exhaustive detail, and a social story about the car would have it already having been invented and focus on the question of "what do we do about automobile accidents? Men, women, and children are being killed by automobiles faster than by artillery shells or airplane bombs. What can be done?" (41).

As you might guess from the essay's title, he's mostly concerned with what social science fiction is and how it works, giving definitions and examples. It's got its weird parts (there's a long digression about the "chess game" of history I don't care for at all) but overall it's a strong definition of sf that gives student writers a lot to work with. I particularly like his statement, "It is easy to predict an automobile in 1880; it is very hard to predict a traffic problem" (41). What social sf tries to do, though, is predict those traffic problems.

Social Science Fiction Paper

What my first paper assignment for the students asked, then, is that they look at one or two stories from the course and think about how it was exploring what you might called the "traffic problem" of immortality. It's easy to predict cryonics, consciousness uploading, or genetic life extension in the 2020s; what's harder to predict is what the implications for society are. They could look at one story in detail, or they could compare two; they could explicitly bring in Asimov if they wanted, or an essay from the MIT Technology Review we had assigned about genetic life extension. (I also said they could cite some stuff I had referred to in class and linked to on Canvas, but not assigned as reading: a New York Times article about cryonics, an MIT Technology Review article about mind uploading, a Jo Walton blog post about "incluing," an essay by Patrick Parrinder about scientists in sf, and some other stuff.)

Here's the prompt:

Overall I was happy with how these came out. Lots of good insights and connections. Perhaps most extraordinarily, the texts the students selected were basically evenly balanced! If you are a writing instructor, you will know how rarely this happens when you give options; everyone will gravitate towards one or two texts. But in this case, every text was chosen by several students.

Grading sixty four-page papers isn't great, especially when you're also teaching two sections of a writing course, but I was able to make it work by just stretching the grading out across an entire month.

China Miéville: "Science, Fiction and Science Fiction"

I find the Asimov piece very useful as a teacher and a thinker—I even cite it in my never-complete book. But it represents a view of sf I don't totally agree with, and in the essay, even Asimov admits it's not quite the full picture, as he struggles to place Ray Bradbury in any of his three categories. So it was important to me that we also talk about how I primarily view science fiction, what I sometimes think of as the doubling effect. This is described really well by China Miéville in his introduction to H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon, and I'm forever quoting it to people.

Basically, Miéville's argument is that sf uses "rationalized alienation" to present other worlds to the reader: this isn't the world you live in, but it's different along rational lines. However, sf isn't really about science or the future, no matter what some people (like Asimov) might say. It's about now, using metaphors.

This is definitely true of a lot of the works we read in this course. Is Will McIntosh's "Bridesicle" about a possible future for cryonics? Sure. But it's really about now, about how men treat women as lifeless bodies that solely exist for their own pleasure... even when their intentions are ostensibly good! Is José Pablo Iriarte's "Proof by Induction" about a technology that lets us access the memories of the deceased? Sure. But it's really about now, about how we're unable to let go of the dead even when that's the healthy thing for us to do. Is Ren Qing's "Resurrection" about a soldier brought back to life? Sure. But it's really about now, about how you might be "dead," but it doesn't matter, the government needs you to go back out to the front line. Each of these sf stories takes a metaphor and makes it literal.

Nicely, Sam "qntm" Hughes made this point about his own story "Lena," one of the ones I assigned: 

Quite a lot of science fiction isn't about what it's about.

"Lena" is about uploading, but uploading isn't real. It doesn't exist.

...

The reason "Lena" is a concerning story isn't that one day we may be able to upload one another and when that happens we will do terrible things to those uploads. This isn't a discussion about what if, about whether an upload is a human being or should have rights. (I want to be abundantly clear: within the fictional context of "Lena", uploads definitely are human beings, and therefore automatically, inalienably, have rights.) This is about appetites which, as we are all uncomfortably aware, already exist within human nature. Upload technology is not the last missing piece of this.

Miéville argues that the appeal is that it's not just metaphor, you get the metaphor but also the literal truth. As he says of Gulliver's Travels, "Gulliver's journey to Brobdingnag... clearly casts a remorseless light on Swift's own society; it also, however, features a sword fight with a giant wasp, a passage the enjoyment of which depends on the specific uncanny/​estranging impact of literalizing the impossible: simply, it is a great, weird idea. Weirdness is good to think with, and is also its own end" (xviii). If it was just metaphor, you wouldn't get the sword fight, and that's what makes the story awesome!

This was particularly why I assigned Joe Haldeman's "Four Short Novels," which I think has absolutely no value if you think of sf in an Asimovian sense; he doesn't want to tell us anything about what the year 3001 might be like. Rather, he wants us to reflect on the society we live in now—it's a purely Miévillian piece of sf. 

Final Reflective Paper

I did want there to some kind of writing assignment tied to the readings from the last two weeks of class; I also wanted there to be an assignment that explicitly brought together the different strands of the course, which we didn't otherwise have. But this had to be manageable for both the students and for me. They were doing big group research papers for Cragun, and I would have less than a week to grade whatever I assigned, so it couldn't be a big paper.

I ended up assigning a 1½-page paper that only had to be three paragraphs long. My thought was that the paper would have to be about just one story from the second half of the course, and that it would have to make one concrete, specific connection to something from the sociology or science components of the course.

Here's the prompt:

I'm only halfway through reading these as I write this up back on May 3rd, but overall I am enjoying them so far. They're easy reads, easy to grade, and the students are making solid connections.

Unlike the previous paper, though, there's a clear clustering: a huge plurality of papers about Paolo Bacigalupi's "Pop Squad," tying it to something Professor Cragun taught them about overpopulation. The runner up is Orson Scott Card's "Skipping Stones" and income inequality.

But even in just half the submissions, every story has been represented once. A few about Haldeman's "Four Short Novels," a couple about "Lena," one about Greg Egan's "Border Guards" and religion, and one about Ken Liu's "Staying Behind" and religion. And some of the angles on "Pop Squad" have been unique; in particular, I got a couple good papers about aspects of gender I hadn't thought about. Additionally, I was worried about the students only picking sociology as the thing to connect to, but I did thus far get a couple about science: one about how what they learned about neurons is oversimplified in "Staying Behind" and "The Gods Have Not Died in Vain" and another about the issues of preserving bodies in liquid nitrogen, which was briefly mentioned in "Four Short Novels."

No one is directly citing Asimov or Miéville, but most are clearly thinking about their sociological issue in either an Asimovian or Miévillian sense, either arguing these stories show us something about the future, or that they show us something about our own society through the lens of sf.

As is often the case in teaching, I don't know if they had fun, but I did, and that's what matters to me.

Technologies of Immortality: Reading List

This is a sequel to last week's post; I wanted to provide my reading list (with commentary) for my co-taught "Technologies of Immortality" course.

illustration by Galen Dara for Joe Haldeman's "Four Short Novels"

I divided the readings into two halves. The ones from the first half of the course focused on technologies of immortality being in their early stages, societies where they were just being invented or had only recently come into use. In the second half, I wanted societies much further on, where the technologies were commonplace and the long-term ramifications of the technologies on society could be explored. As I said in the previous post, we usually focused on three specific technologies: digital consciousness uploading, cryonics, and genetic modification to extend life.

If the stories are freely and legally available on the Internet, I've linked to them below. We did a reading ranking on the last day of class, where I had the students sort all of the stories they'd read from 1st (best) to 13th (worst); at the end of each paragraph, I've given how the story ranked by mean and median, and how many students ranked it first or last. Every story was some student's favorite... except two.

Prologue

• Will McIntosh, "Bridesicle" (2009). This is a disturbing story about both cryonics and consciousness uploading; it's about a woman named Mira who dies in a car accident and wakes up in a cryonics facility centuries later. The problem with cryonics has turned out to be that revival is expensive, so the dead don't have the money to be revived... but it turns out that men will pay to revive women who are frozen if the women will sign a marriage contract. The story also incorporates elements of consciousness uploading; people can have mental copies of loved ones called "hitchers" stored in their minds. I liked it a lot as a way to begin; it's a good story, well told, but also works well to grab the attention of students as to the purpose of the course. I think this was Professor Cragun's favorite, and it was something both we and the students referred back to a lot. The story was later expanded into a novel (Love Minus Eighty, 2013), and at first I was skeptical of this, but the students raised a lot of interesting questions about the world in class I'd like to see fleshed out. A student also told me they heard an interview with McIntosh where it was originally written about the man doing the revival; I am curious about this because the story would have nowhere near its power in that format! [ranked 1st by mean, 1st by median, 1st by 18 students, last by 1 student]
  

Part I

• Vanessa Fogg, "Traces of Us" (2018). We began part I of the course with this, because it's actually about the development process for consciousness uploading; it follows a pair of graduate students (later, postdocs) who are working on different aspects of consciousness uploading. It's very cute, a bit sad, and Fogg did some solid research on the science here; Professor Evans-Nguyen was impressed by the rigor and specificity. Fogg's blog post here gives good insight into her inspirations. [ranked 2nd by mean, 3rd by median, 1st by 1 student]
  
• José Pablo Iriarte, "Proof by Induction" (2021). This is also about a nascent version of consciousness uploading; a technology called the "coda" has just come into existence, which captures a digital snapshot of consciousness at the moment of death. This consciousness can't evolve or change, but you can interact with a deceased love one to obtain closure (or ask questions like, "where is the will?"). The main character is a math professor interacting with his father, another math professor, as they try to solve a proof together. The story explores the process of grief and dealing with the fact that your loved one will never change. [ranked 4th by mean, 4th by median, 1st by 1 student]
  
• Greg Egan, "Learning to Be Me" (1990). A very weird but very good story about a technology called the Ndoli jewel, an implant in your brain that records your neural processes with the eventual goal of taking over for them. The narrator has a series of existential freakouts over the fact that even if his jewel lives forever, it's not him living forever. [ranked 5th by mean, 6th by median, 1st by 2 students, last by 2 students]
  
• Channing Ren, "Resurrection" (2020). This is a Chinese sf story, again about consciousness uploading. A military engineer dies in battle, but his duplicated consciousness was copied into an artificial body, and then the body dumped on the doorstep of his grieving mother, who is now very confused—and only has a couple weeks with him before he gets sent back to the front. This one began to shift into looking at the social consequences of the technology; Cragun set up in an earlier class that one way sociologists like to look at situations is to as cui bono?—who benefits? And here we see that; it's not the resurrected who benefits from this technology, but those who already have political and economic power. [ranked 5th by mean, 6th by median, 1st by 1 student, last by 1 student]
  
• Ken Liu, "The Gods Will Not Be Chained" and "The Gods Will Not Be Slain" (2014). These are two linked short stories about a girl named Maddie, who (spoilers) discovers that her dead dad isn't actually dead, but that his consciousness has been uploaded to the Internet. I will admit to finding Liu a bit hit or miss, but it is a very accessible story, and again, we get a shift into the social implications of this technology, as Liu explores both who the actual beneficiaries of consciousness uploading would be, what they would use it for, and what the long term consequences would be. [ranked 8th by mean, 8th by median, 1st by 6 students, last by 4 students]
  

Interlude

• qntm [Sam Hughes], "Lena" (2021). This is a hermit-crab story, told in the form of a Wikipedia article about the first digital consciousness. The story explores the dark implications of such a technology, how it would lead to exploitation; the story is named for a famous test image, and HeLa cells are another inspiration. (I taught it in the middle of the course, alongside The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.) What rights do we have to these products of ourselves—our images, our cells, our consciousnesses—that are not ourselves? The story explores these questions in a stripped back, kind of casually horrifying way. I think a couple students really liked it, but most struggled with the unusual conceit. One thing I really liked is this rant from the author: "'Lena' is a true story. You knew it was when you read it." [ranked last by mean, last by median, last by 7 students]
  

Part II

• Greg Egan, "Border Guards" (1999). I opened the "consequences" part of the course with a couple sequels to stories from the earlier parts of the class. This is a sequel to "Learning to Be Me"; it has no characters in common, but instead jumps centuries into the future to see what kind of society might result from the Ndoli jewel being commonplace. How would people treat relationships? What kind of problems would they have? It's a very optimistic story and too much detail about quantum soccer aside, has some beautiful imagery. It's easy to kneejerk reject these technologies, but I liked how this one not only challenges our preconceptions about the necessity of death, but explicitly calls out other fiction that argues for the necessity of death for being intellectually lazy. [ranked 11th by mean, 11th by median, last by 9 students]
  
• Ken Liu, "The Gods Have Not Died in Vain" (2015) and "Staying Behind" (2011). These two follow up the Liu stories from the first half. The first is the third Maddie story; the other takes place in the same world, looking at those people still living physical existences after the majority of humankind has been uploaded. The final Maddie story kind of fizzles out, but that's the point, I would argue: Maddie reaches no clear decision about whether it's better to live a physical existence or be uploaded, because Liu wants the reader to explore it for themselves. "Staying Behind" picks right up from the end of the previous story (despite being written first), and like Egan's "Border Guards," it pushes against our preconceptions—the story is told from the perspective of someone resisting this technology, and he's clearly wrong to do so. So... are we? I can find Liu a bit schmaltzy sometimes, but here he's at his best. Really well put together, clever connections, unsettling conclusion. ["Gods Have Not Died..." ranked 12th by mean, last by median, 1st by 1 student, last by 5 students; "Staying Behind" ranked 10th by mean, 9th by median, 1st by 1 student]
  
• Paolo Bacigalupi, "Pop Squad" (2006). In a world where everyone lives forever, wouldn't overpopulation be a problem? Especially if climate change continues unabated, and the amount of resources available to support humanity keeps dwindling. The story follows a police officer on the "pop squad"—he kills illegal babies and arrests their mothers. It's vividly, gruesomely told... but that's the point, as Bacigalupi is actually confronting you with something that happens everyday. Everyday the United States turns away immigrants with children, and those children suffer because we won't share our resources, and we want to continue to live in our current lifestyle, we do exactly what the characters in this story do, we just don't have to see it. [ranked 3rd by mean, 2nd by median, 1st by 8 students, last by 7 students]
  
• Orson Scott Card, "Skipping Stones" (1979). From the moment I knew I was teaching this class, I knew wanted to track this story down and read it, which I read in Card's collection The Worthing Saga. It's about a world where people can use a drug called somec to enter suspended animation; the rich get more than the poor, and it's about a rich boy and poor boy who start out friends but grow apart as one ages years while the other ages decades. Not a very complicated story, to be honest, but a good example of how social class dynamics will impact these kind of technologies. (A student pointed out that as technologies of immortality go, it was "stupid": you don't actually live longer. But as long as people have inequal access to the technology, there is a benefit. The inequality is the point.) [ranked 7th by mean, 5th by median, 1st by 3 students, last by 3 students]
  
• Joe Haldeman, "Four Short Novels" (2000). A weird story, but I knew I wanted to end on it: it's four sketches of "novels" about living forever, each with a different conceit: "Eventually it came to pass that no one ever had to die, unless they ran out of money" or "...unless they were so horrible that society had to dispose of them" or "...unless they wanted to, or could be talked into it," and so on. They are funny and have some neat ideas in them... but not really about immortality at all. It was important for me to end with a story that demonstrated China Miéville's claim that sf isn't actually about science or the future. But more on that next time! [ranked 9th by mean, 10th by median, 1st by 3 students, last by 6 students]
  

[Incidentally, "Pop Squad" had the highest standard deviation, and "Traces of Us" the lowest.]

Overall, I was really happy about the collection of stories we read. They were largely high quality tales, and not a single one of them was a dud in the classroom; I was able to get something interesting out of everyone of them. I do wish there were more stories that were more optimistic about these technologies, but I was limited by what sf authors are actually writing! (Later I should do a post on stories I rejected.)

Technologies of Immortality: Team Teaching

I've mentioned it a few times around here, but this semester I've been team-teaching an Honors course. Our Honors program made some big changes over the last few years; one of them was that Honors students would take classes called "Dialectics," where professors from three different colleges would teach a course on a common topic; these could be called "Where Did We Come From?", "Where Are We Now?", and "Where Are We Going?"

I applied to become an Honors fellow back in Spring 2020; the Honors program then arranged a big Zoom meeting where accepted faculty gave quick verbal indications of what they might be interested in. I was interested in science fiction, of course; my argument was that I could basically pair with any science professor, because no matter what science you talk about, there are science fiction stories about it.

I ended up paired with Ryan Cragun, a professor of sociology, and Kenyon Evans-Nguyen, a professor of forensic science who specializes in neurochemistry. We kibbitzed and eventually came up with a "Where Are We Going?" class about what I came to call "technologies of immortality": attempts to lengthen the human lifespan. Our three big examples were consciousness uploading, cryonics, and genetic life extension. I could talk about how such technologies had been depicted in sf, Cragun could talk about the real people trying to do this and the sociological implications of doing it, and Kenyon could talk about the actual science of it.

Like I said, this was Spring 2020... we ended up being scheduled to teach the class in Spring 2024, so I had quite a lot of time to prepare! I've chronicled some of that process here on my blog. In next week's post, I'll talk about my specific stories, but here I wanted to talk about the big picture of how we organized the course.

We bookended the course with the science fiction; the first three weeks were largely mine. Aside from the syllabus day, we began with the story "Bridesicle" by Will McIntosh, as a way of capturing students' attention with the course topic; the story features both cryonics and consciousness uploading. We then did one day on real attempts to extend life, to show this was something really happening, and then went back into the sf.

After that, we shifted to the sociology and the science. The students started learning about how neurons actually worked from Kenyon and about the sociological issues from Cragun. These Dialectics classes have sixty students, and you can't really take sixty students into the lab. So what we would sometimes do is split the class up into thirds: one third would go into the lab, one third would attend a sociology lecture, and one third would conference with me about papers. Across a M/W/F week, students would rotate through all three.

In the lab, they did things like:

• measure electrical activity in crickets
• drug crickets and see how that affected their electrical activity
• measure electrical activity in worms
  
• cool worms and see how that affected their electrical activity
• freeze onion slices in liquid nitrogen

"Dad, why are you a scientist?" asked my five-year-old.

I didn't always get to go (sometimes I had to conference), but I did do three of the labs.

We did a week on HeLa cells, where we had students watch The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and then Cragun talked about the racial issues, Kenyon talked about using HeLa cells during his postdoc (before the book came out, so he didn't know the significance), and I assigned an sf short story that riffed on them.

We also had them read a bit of Gregory Benford's cryonics thriller Chiller, specifically the afterword, where he discusses if he thinks cryonics will work, and we had them research and present on his assumptions.

Finally, at the end of the semester, we circled back to science fiction with two final weeks.

Some Dialectics faculty have the student do common assignments; we broke the grade into four categories, each worth 25%:

• Literature Assignments. I assigned a four-page literary analysis paper near the beginning of the semester, and a 1½-page "reflective" paper near the end, where they had to connect the sf to something from the sociology or science portions of the course.
• Lab Assignments. Kenyon assigned five lab write-ups to go with his five labs.
• Sociology Assignments. Cragun assigned a cumulative sociology research project, where they gathered survey data about attitudes toward immortality, and contextualized it in terms of a literature review they did.
  
• Quizzes and Presentations. I did random reading quizzes, and Kenyon assigned pre-lab quizzes.

I'll talk more about some of this in a future post, too.

---

Overall, I liked it a lot. If nothing else, Honors students are engaged and thoughtful, and I got to discuss literature as literature, not as a thing to write about in an AWR course.

Plus, it's fun to learn things! I wouldn't be in this job if I didn't believe that, and for a few weeks, I got to be a student again, learning about neurons and macromolecules and the history of religion and income inequality. I made some neat connections between my work and their work.

But I also really liked working with both Ryan Cragun and Kenyon Evans-Nguyen; I think we have similar dispositions and worked well as co-teachers. They are, like me, nerdy middle-aged dads! I am trying to convince them both to join my Star Trek Adventures campaign. I can imagine there would be some people you would be miserable team teaching with, but I really enjoyed working with the two of them. (Which is good, because we will do it two more times!)

Teaching Notes: Landscape with Invisible Hand by M. T. Anderson

Landscape with Invisible Hand by M. T. Anderson

For the past couple years, I've based my AWR 101 class here at the University of Tampa around the "theme" of science fiction. That is to say, we practice our skills of analysis on some common science fiction text, and I also provide them with some "lens" essays about science fiction, before then opening it up so that they can select their own science fiction texts. But each semester, I adjust what texts I use in combination with what. I particularly struggled to pick good focal texts for my lens unit; I really wanted something that embodies China Miéville's idea of sf-as-metaphor-and-literal and also complicated Isaac Asimov's categories of science fiction, but over the years I tried various combinations of Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain," Ted Chiang's "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," and Sarah Pinsker's "And Then There Were (N-One)," but for first-year non-majors they were too long or too confusing or too both. (One that did work reliably well was Fonda Lee's "I (28M) created a deepfake girlfriend and now my parents think we're getting married.")

Originally published: 2017
Acquired: September 2022
Reread: October 2022

Eventually, this popped into my head: M. T. Anderson's short YA novel Landscape with Invisible Hand. A few years ago, I presented about it at the Science Fiction Research Association conference, arguing that was like H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds: what if the aliens did to our country what we were doing to the rest of the world? It seemed a particularly apt example of sf-as-metaphor, because it is a very heavy-handed one. The rich live in floating houses, so the rich literally look down on regular people! It's also pretty short, and very accessible, as the world it depicts is just like our contemporary world, but with aliens. And I realized it would pair well with a podcast I was thinking of teaching, "The Science Fiction Origins of the Metaverse" from WNYC's On the Media. So I dropped two short stories from my syllabus and replaced them with Landscape, stretched out across three days of class.

It was a hit. Not in the sense that a parade of students came up to me and told me that they loved it (though a few of them seemed to like it, at least), but in that it did exactly what it needed to. I had many students pair it with Miéville and discuss its metaphorical depiction of things like class issues and social media influencers and healthcare. These are a bit obvious, to be honest, but the kind of obvious that works well for a college freshman. If you want to be able to say, "A key tool of analysis is pairing two texts together, and using one as a lens," obvious connections are often what you need.

But it made some unexpected good connections with my other lenses too. When I was teaching Asimov's introductions to Soviet Science Fiction and More Soviet Science Fiction, it was a good example of his Stage Three-C story, the "if this goes on—" anti-utopia. Last semester I switched to a different Asimov essay, "Social Science Fiction," but it worked well with that too, being a good example of how Asimov argues social sf depicts futures to show the way things should or should not be. Some particularly strong papers argued it wasn't really like Asimov's definition of "social science fiction" but rather his definition of "social fiction" because it wasn't really interested in the future at all, just holding up a mirror to the present. Another student argued that the novel seems like it ought to be an example of Asimov's adventure science fiction, but it's actually social science fiction, which I thought was an insightful point.

It also paired well with the On the Media podcast; in some obvious ways (the podcast discusses how sf isn't really about the future, just commentary about the present) but also in ways where students surprised me. The podcast talks about how it's easy for sf to give us nothing but despair, but at its best, it gives us hope too, and that turned out to be a nice lens for discussing the end of the novel, which (I think) struggles to find grounds for hope in the face of despair at a social catastrophe. The novel spends its whole time demonstrating a widespread social problem, but then I think it wants you to be happy when the protagonist's immediate issues are resolved... even though the social inequalities that caused them remain in place. I think the best lens texts resolve something confusing or difficult about a text but also open up new possibilities, and I find the ending of Landscape particularly frustrating, and I got some good papers looking at that.

In the fall, I think I'll be switching "themes" again, so this will be my last time teaching Landscape with Invisible Hand for the foreseeable, but I think it allowed me to perfect my science fiction theme in its  last year.