In Like A Lion
Gnomology is a fun word I learned this week. It means the study of gnomes (not the garden kind), but rather the study of proverbs, adages, wise sayings, etc. The description of March, "In like a lion and out like a lamb," is a gnome dating back to the 1700's and in my childhood in the years before Kindergarten became College Prep, we spent the month of March making lion and lamb masks with paper plates, yarn, and cotton balls. This last day of March in New York feels like the lamb we have been awaiting after the most precipitous winter in recent memory. It's the same with my writing.
The first few weeks of March were a fierce dash to finish the restructuring of my miscarried manuscript into a full length essay. It's ready to send off for submission and rejection or acceptance or revise and resubmit or whatever the next stage might be. I don't control that next stage, but I am embracing the lamb of being on the other side of it. It exists in the world in a form I like. It lives. And that, my friend, is the greatest gift. It's been reborn.
Although I am not a big fan of his fiction, I adore George Saunders as a thinker, a teacher, and an armchair philosopher. I often come come back to this line from his viral commencement speech from 2013.
“Succeeding, whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that succeeding will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended."
Saunders was recently interviewed in the NY Times to discuss his latest novella and he said he wished he could tell his younger self during the chaotic early days of parenthood that if this is all there is, this is more than enough. It's a sentiment that might be easier to share in hindsight, after you have won a MacArthur Genius Grant and are one of the most decorated living writers of the 21st Century, but I appreciate his statement.
I know that for myself the greatest challenge is to focus on doing the work that I believe is important and not be distracted by writing for external metrics that are constantly shifting and too often in the literary world, financially evaporating.
The AI Roadshow
I'm heading out on the road to share some of my preliminary research on AI and Companionship and to network with colleagues on strategies to improve the teaching of reading and writing in the age of AI.
Molloy University Senior Scholars (April)
SUNY CIT at Stony Brook University (May)
New York University Faculty Network AI Summit (June)
I'll share recordings and slides where possible.
Last week I was fortunate to lead our Accessibility and Inclusion: The Other AI conference at my college and our team secured a grant to bring Tina Austin, Susan Ray, and Michelle Kassorla to present on curriculum redesign for AI. Most professional development session are pretty awful, but they were stellar.
In 20 yrs of organizing, attending, and participating in professional development, they were the best. I've never been to a PD, that was not required, that was so well attended, and where a significant number of participants stayed after the event to keep the conversation going.
And it's all thanks to LinkedIN.
LinkedIN has become the new academic Twitter aka PLN for teaching and learning and it's where I discovered their pedagogical reflections in posts, discussion threads, and Substacks. I have redesigned my curriculum and assessments to integrate #GenerativeAI and I'm poised for the next pivot toward #AgenticAI because of what I learned from then on LinkedIn.
When you hire any of them, you are getting a motivational speaker who understands educational theory and can demonstrate how a variety of LLMs and AI tools work in practice to support student persistence, learning, retention, graduation, and professional success.
They do this so well, in part, because they are still in the classroom.
A Few Fun Things
There was a terrific article on how secret sections with the Minecraft universe have have created a global federated library of books.
I did not write, but wish I did, this hilarious post on lurking from McSweeney's.
I was a Subject Matter Expert in The Herald this week.
Thanks for walking beside me,
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