End of Semester (Blues)

Notes from the classroom, plus book club on Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon

My class! I love their expressions. Roughly two-thirds is Taiwanese, and the rest come from Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, India, South Korea, France, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, the U.S., Paraguay, Mongolia, and Hungary.

Michelle and Albert here. We just finished a semester of teaching, phew! I taught two courses this semester, one on creative expression, at a women’s juvenile detention center in Taipei and the other, on storytelling and the law, at National Chengchi University, where I teach at the International College of Innovation. (I hope to write about the former, but I need to sort out my thoughts about it.) Albert taught a course called “Radical European Thought,” which was basically a modern intellectual history class. (“It was a mistake to end on Freud,” he told me, shaking his head sadly, when he came home from the last day of the semester. “Freud’s too pessimistic.”) We have been thinking a lot about Freud and how his insights take on a new resonance in middle age—a time when, as he might put it, our bodies rush towards the inescapable end of organic decay. But we’ll save that cheerful topic for another post!

We’re both doing these courses on top of our full-time jobs, while keeping our cheeky five-year-old alive and dealing with family health issues… so it’s been a lot!

Like everyone else, we’ve been forced to reflect on the guiding principles of our teaching during the age of ChatGPT. The new technology has driven home—but also made more difficult—the essential values of the classroom: mutual exchange, generosity, honest struggle, and good citizenship.

A group of students’ mind map from Albert’s class “Radical European Thought.”

Michelle here. (For Albert’s reflections, scroll down to the bottom.) After four years of teaching in Taiwan, I think I’ve found my rhythm in the classroom—though I don’t want to jinx myself. I’ve always been a strict no-cell phone, no computers sort of teacher, and I’ve never been big on testing, favoring instead papers, creative projects, script-writing, oral history, and role-plays. This was the first year I vacillated on testing. Given the much-reported ubiquity of AI-assisted cheating, I was tempted to introduce reading quizzes. But ultimately, I chose against this temptation, realizing that it harbored a desire to punish—specifically, the laggards who are using AI to write their reading responses.

My lovely teaching assistant, Naadam, a senior from Mongolia who is wise beyond his years, told me no, no, no quizzes, they suffer enough already. College students in Taiwan take seven or eight courses, and Taiwanese people have been tested all their lives, accustomed to being ranked. (I said to a friend who grew up in Taipei, “You’re so smart!” She replied, “I’m not smart! I was ranked 24th in my high school.” She told me she’d been ranked from elementary school, adding that she’d once been “number four.” At this she smiled ambiguously—suggesting that she thinks four is pretty good.)

I’m not categorically against tests, but for the past twenty years now (has it been that long!), my pedagogical priority has been to nurture readerly and writerly souls. This work has grown even more urgent in the midst of a dramatic decline of reading across generations. In my experience, conventional quizzes and tests are not well suited to cultivating literary devotion. In fact, after some reflection, I realize that I’ve never found a way to give a reading quiz that didn’t degrade me, the student, or the text itself. I remember what it was like when, on the rare occasion, I gave a quiz at my previous university; the students shut down after turning it in, slumping back or looking relieved, as if the “most important” part of the class were already over. Meanwhile, the most mysterious aspect of reading lay unexcavated: the private inward memories it sparked, the idiosyncratic connections, and most of all, the impulse to create.

There was not a single test in my class, and yet a few students told me that it was one the most challenging courses they’d ever taken. I realized that my fear of being made a fool—of which the desire to punish is a preemptive response—was unfounded. In fact, the hardest (but most rewarding) thing you can be asked to do is to interact deeply with others. This is because, as Sartre says, “Hell is other people”—ha, ha—but also because you might discover you really like some of your classmates, and it’s scary not to be liked back. Even though there were inevitable tensions, students made real friendships, connecting over music, history, politics, poetry, and books. I can’t really ask for anything more than that!

I do fear now that AI will lead to an increase in testing, which remains the most efficient way to ensure students do their reading. This will be one of many AI-related tragedies. (The biggest one, of course, being that the robots will eventually kill us, but never mind.) Still, as I’ve grow older, I’ve gained clarity about what I can give students—and what I owe them—regardless of the crises and temptations of any given moment. My role is to provide a place where one discovers one’s creativity. A place where we feel like we’re not alone but part of a collective. A place where we identify our moral instincts and are honest about our contradictions. Most of all, in the words of Simone Weil, a place where we learn how to ask another, with the fullness of concentration, “What are you going through?”

Below I include some images of their final work, which they showcased at a university-wide exhibit organized by Professor Tzu-Chi Ou, alongside the classes of professors Hungying Chen and Gina Tsai, showcased their final projects. Enjoy!

These two women created a gorgeous music video in Taiwanese and Hakka and illustrated a storybook. They were inspired by movements in Taiwan to preserve mother tongues and the suppression of minority languages under martial law. All the artwork, lyrics, and music are original. (Shout-out to friends Ho Chie Tsai and Leona Chen at TaiwaneseAmerican.org for watching and resharing!)

Board Game: Life of a Chicken

Students designed an ingenious board game where you’re a chicken traveling through the world. You get a trigger warning before you start playing, because life will be brutal. (Gotta love Gen Z!) The rules are simple: roll the dice and land on a country whose laws spell your fate. This game was a hit, partly because you learn a lot quickly—such as how male chicks are mass slaughtered at one day old, and how in some countries including parts of the U.S., stunning methods aren’t used, leading to extremely painful deaths. Europe has the world’s strongest protections for chickens, while Japan’s standards are surprisingly poor, with severe overcrowding in battery cages the size of an A4 piece of paper.

Students researched the endangered leopard cat in Taiwan and illustrated a beautiful storybook for children. They created an interactive quiz comparing conditions for animals in their respective countries, India, Denmark, and Taiwan.

Students created a 11-minute film about police violence and restorative justice in France. The first half is an edited collage of interviews and images, while the second imagines a scene of restorative justice; the students role play an officer and protester. They were inspired in part by their own experiences in France, the remarkable film All Your Faces (trailer here; it’s about restorative justice), and the anthropologist Didier Fassin’s work.

Transitional Justice in Paraguay and Taiwan

Students from Paraguay and Taiwan compared their countries’ eras of martial law and created collages depicting those periods. Each drew from a rich trove of oral histories and prison letters. Both talked about how their schools had not taught much about martial law, and I loved that my Paraguayan student even called home to share everything she had discovered with her mother.

Board Game on Restorative Justice Across the World

These students created a board game comparing restorative justice practices in Taiwan, Norway, Canada, and Bolivia. It was packed with information, and students learn that Bolivia, Taiwan, and Canada are similar—all have indigenous justice communities that emphasize reintegration over punishment. I learned so much!

These students wrote scripts for two-person plays exploring themes of migration. If you show up at their table, you’re asked to choose a topic—such as climate change refugees or gender-based violence—and read from the script, which might, for example, have you impersonate an asylum officer or a migrant getting interrogated. The plays were partly inspired by our mock asylum trials.

These students created an exhibit on the harmful effects of animal captivity; there’s a strong interactive element, as you can see.

These students created a children’s storybook about wrongful conviction, exploring how the issue is addressed in Indonesia, the United States, and Taiwan.

This student from Switzerland drew figures relevant to the struggle for justice—among them the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, whose poem “To My Mother” is excerpted. He also draws Israeli figures whose quotes provide evidence of genocidal intent.

Students created a song about wrongful conviction and could write messages to Lu Cheng’s sisters, who are seeking to exonerate his name after he was executed 24 years ago. (For more information on Lu Cheng’s case, see this fantastic TaiwanPlus video on it.)

These students explored restorative justice practices across the world, creating interactive exercises where you learn about school discipline, post-war practices in Rwanda, and more.

Over the semester, my students also wrote ten-page poems imagining the lives of migrants and citizens. We’d spent a month reading legal judgments, watching the mesmerizing film Io Capitano (trailer), talking about techniques in free verse, and reading Violaine Schwartz’s Papers (tr. Christine Gutman) and Tears of Salt (tr. Chenxin Jiang). I asked students to write in free verse in the style of Papers, and to include at least one encounter with the law and one encounter with beauty.

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Albert’s Notes on Teaching

Albert here. Unlike Michelle, I definitely did not find my rhythm teaching this semester. I was unsettled the entire semester, and almost every session was filled with moments of crippling self-doubt. This was my first time teaching undergraduates at NCCU, my first time teaching a lecture course since 2021. My biggest challenge was timing and rhythm. I hadn’t expected this to be hard; before coming here, I’d spent close to a decade teaching two-80 minute sessions. By the end of my time at the American University of Paris, I felt that I had a handle on the 80-minute class session: a short opening lecture, a close-reading, an active-learning exercise, and voila! Survival. 

At NCCU, on the other hand, class sessions are organized into weekly three hour sections. How to fill the time? I couldn’t imagine myself lecturing for more than half of the time—I would be so bored. I’d never run an hour-long active learning exercise. What this meant was that I over-prepared, and the lesson almost never went to plan. Each class felt hit or miss. 

A bit more context on timing and rhythm: Taiwan has long semesters, running to 18 weeks. In the past couple of years, some colleges have pushed to shorten the semester. But this has caused a public uproar: parents and even students feel that 18 weeks is too short, because they believe they should get their money’s worth of classes. I even spoke to a random cashier on the campus of NCCU, who turned out to be a parent who wanted 20-week semesters. (“We pay the same amount as before, why should we get fewer weeks of instruction?”)

On the students: as they like to say, the kids are alright. Actually, they’re more than alright. Ever since we returned to Taiwan, we’ve heard a lot of doom and gloom about the state of higher education. Students don’t want to read English, they don’t work hard, they’re disengaged, blah blah blah.

But I couldn’t have found this to be more untrue. I wasn’t as hardline as Michelle on the technology issue, mainly because I assigned a lot of readings that would have been cumbersome to print out (although I’m rethinking this). Sure, sometimes people could occasionally be checked out during my lectures—but hey, even I was getting bored by my own lectures! Overall, the majority of the students were engaged and attentive when we worked through the texts. They wanted to know what was in them and why these texts were considered worth reading. They were quite active and engaged. And a good number of the students had that spark; they got lit up by the ideas. One student, who works two cashier jobs on top of being a full-time student and told me that he never could have dreamed of getting into a school like NCCU, would pepper me with questions after class. He said he felt lucky to be at university at all. Another student produced some of the most brilliant weekly annotations I’ve ever received, and was clearly working through the texts at a high level. 

Around the midpoint of the semester, the viral New York Magazine piece, “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College”  on the rampant use of AI dropped. I spent quite some time reading up on AI use in classrooms, and I still remain fundamentally conflicted over how to think about how to craft an AI policy if I have the chance to teach again in the future. 

I keep vacillating between the different positions. On the one hand, my sense is that an outright ban won’t work: they’re adults, they have access to these tools, and if they want to use them, that’s their prerogative. My ego isn’t that tied to my authority; I’m not even sure I’m explaining a lot of these ideas well, though I do believe I’m helping them to contextualize these sources in interesting ways that AI can’t.

And just to be completely transparent, I’ve been using AI to help me with tasks, such as optical character recognition of documents, or quick translations of documents. So if I’ve found AI helpful, wouldn’t it be hypocritical for me to announce an outright ban? (I do make a pretty hard line of not having it generate material for me though. But as somebody asked me, why stop there? What’s the line?)   

I talked to one very bright and hard-working student who is going to study in the US for a master’s degree. She says she uses AI as an English tutor. So in that way, part of me thinks, what’s the difference between AI and people who previously had access to tutors or other outside help? Or the difference between AI and people who purchased SparkNotes instead of doing the reading?

But something about this AI moment does feel different. Michelle and I were talking to somebody we respect enormously yesterday, and we both agreed that biggest effect on me was how AI broke trust in the classroom. It felt awful to come across a pretty brilliant insight into a text and constantly ask: Was this generated by AI? Similarly, students are probably wondering—am I being taught by AI? 

What also feels different about AI from previous study tools is the experience of the writing process itself—it bypasses the struggle and tedium that is central to it. I found this article in The Point by Megan Fritts poignant and compelling. In it, she argues that the use of AI is fundamentally an anti-human act: “From this perspective, language-generating AI, whether it is utilized to write emails or dissertations, stands as an enemy to the human form of life by coming between the individual and her words.” The same goes with reading: I also vividly remembered the moment a text clicked with me, the magic of feeling the struggle through a difficult. The power of AI is that it generates everything so quickly. The struggle, the tedium, the difficulty of putting thought to words. They’re not cheating me—they’re cheating themselves out of that potentially transformative experience. 

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A few words

We’ve been following closely the news on protests in Los Angeles, the violence of ICE, Israel’s strikes on Iran, and continued starvation of Palestine. It’s been hard to sleep this week. Still, an estimated 5 million people protested this weekend against Trump. We’re thinking of all of you in the U.S. We wish we could be there to protect undocumented immigrants and to march at the No Kings protest.

Thanks to Kerim Friedman for posting this pic of a protest in L.A. It reads “No Ice”—a common phrase you’ll hear in Taiwan when people order boba or other cold drinks.

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Book Club: Karissa Chen’s Homeseeking and Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon

We’re grateful to all our awesome book club members for showing up on a Friday night/Saturday morning to talk about Karissa Chen’s wonderful novel Homeseeking. I also had a very fun in-person convo with Karissa at Bookman Books. (Me: How do you write about sex? I’m such a prude. Karissa: I took Garth Greenwell’s workshop on writing about sex. Me: How do you write about food so well? I’m known to eat stale bread and not realize it, this drives Albert nuts. Karissa: Easy—I love food, I think about food all the time. If I had to give up sex for food, I would. Me: How do you write about elderly people so well? Karissa: Elderly people are people!) Anyways, thank you to everyone who came out. Our next book is Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon, and we'll meet Friday, July 25th 7 PM ET / Saturday, July 26th 7 AM Taiwan time. Reply here for the zoom link.