They Tried to Justify Me

For their final, my Intro to Academic Writing students had to do one simple thing; argue for or against the existence of my job. Either individually, as in I shouldn’t be teaching, or institutionally, as in first-year composition courses shouldn’t exist at all. They’ve got some good ideas (and ideas that are less good, but still probably valid in some way) and I am in a mood to respond.

Just to set the stage here, I’ve been teaching first-year composition courses of some variety for four years now and it’s been the bulk of my course load in my academic “career.” There are people who have been teaching longer than I, there are people who are better teachers than I, there are people who think they are better teachers than I. Make sure your salt is handy as I’ll most likely summon a few ghouls and you’ll need at least a grain to take me at face value.

For the lazy among you I’m going to list the key findings at the top here and you can read them, express some form of interest, give me the engagement, and then slink away. But after that I’ll actually give my thoughts on everything.

• writing courses should be offered, but optional
• writing courses should be major specific
• writing courses should not be taught by me specifically (one person said this)
• writing courses should be more willing to engage with modern genres like Twitter and TikTok
• writing courses should only be taught by me
• the course is too hard
• the course is just review of high school and too easy
• students really liked me doing a literary analysis of the Bad Bunny half time show
• Large Language Models (gesturing at all of it)

Still here? I love you, let’s dig into these potatoes.

Optional writing courses and major-specific writing courses

I don’t expect the average fellow to know what a faculty meeting looks like as I barely know what one looks like. Adjuncts like me aren’t usually invited, but I’m barely invited to life as a whole so I tend to sneak into those meetings anyway. Recently they’re filled with doom. Heaps of it, a whole catering table of self-served doom in any flavour one could want. There’s no money, there’re no students, shit’s fucked. And A.I. oooooooooo. Scary stuff.

Stuck in-between those nasty gnashing teeth is the humble writing program. A few years ago the general script saw other departments asking the writing program to churn out students who are better at writing and reading and thinking. We teach those things, should be easy! But in the same breath those departments slash our budget. It is no longer easy. With a slashed budget there is less money to pay the tenured folks who are teaching in their specific field, even less to hire adjuncts to teach the first-year writing courses. Class sizes go up, faculty work load goes up, morale goes down. Adjuncts like me aren’t paid enough to truly innovate in the space and students grow ever more indifferent to the course with each passing semester.

So make it optional then! I’ll let everyone in on a little secret: if we make first-year writing optional, then no one will take it. English majors will skip it because they want to move on to their workshops and advanced writing/literature courses while saving some money. Everyone else will skip it because they are deluded into thinking that they don’t need writing in their career and it saves them a bit of money. The general sentiment I gather from most student evaluation reports is that they would have never taken the course but started to enjoy it after a week or two.

So long as higher education is an extremely expensive capitalistic transaction students will excise anything labelled “optional.” It is fucking expensive to take first-year writing and there is little incentive to do so. An underrated lesson that the course teaches is the reality of doing shit you don’t want to do and trying to find value or enjoyment in it anyway.

I combined this with “major specific” versions of first-year writing because we run into some similar issues. Who’s going to teach those? Are we going to teach already underpaid writing teachers the nuances of technical genres of writing? Or are we going to teach non-writing teachers the nuances of writing? Or are we going to constantly hope for unicorns to show up? Folks with cross-department writing knowledge exist, I’ve met them and they’re great. But they’re usually out making money. It’s still a leapable hurdle though and many colleges do offer courses like this. CU – Denver had technical writing, business writing, documentation writing, writing for the sciences and staffed those positions with interdisciplinary experts. UWS has a similar set up.

They’re just optional. We could make them required for their corresponding major, but then we run into the problem that I consider most impactful here.

What writing is more important? Will an engineer only ever have to interact with technical writing and never have to touch propaganda? Never want to admire poetry? Never have to write a convincing email to a colleague? Have to sit in an uncomfortable and boring situation while still paying attention?

Will the nurse never read a book? Or watch a movie? Or have to understand an advertisement?

Will the writing major never have to write a resume? Or make an infographic?

By slicing writing up into these discrete, genre-specific categories we are essentially making decisions on what is and isn’t important to know and writing knowledge should start at a painfully general foundation. You can’t teach technical writing without first knowing basic citation styles, without first knowing how to make subjects and verbs agree. Students across majors need to learn writing across genres. This lesson is only hard to swallow because we have commodified education and classes are no longer seen as opportunities to learn something new, interesting, and probably important, but are seen now as dollar sign-shaped stepping stones to get to paper that promises a large return on investment.

It’s a fallacy, I know, I know, but if we start slashing foundational courses then why don’t we just sell the diploma? When we start evaluating course loads on whether or not students will find every lesson, lecture, and assignment to be worthy of their time then we essentially start a race to the bottom where students will never learn how to be bored, uncomfortable, or be exposed to anything new. Which is tragic.

Should and should not be taught by me specifically

To briefly give a glimpse into the numbers: three people out of about sixty (this semester) said that I, specifically, was not a good teacher to them. For my own ego (and in fairness to their arguments), none of them said I was a bad teacher, just not a good teacher for them. Six our of those same sixty said that I, superficially, should just teach every first-year writing course in the world.

At the beginning of every semester I beg, almost on my hands and fucking knees, my students to drop my course if they don’t like me. I tell them that I will direct them to a teacher that matches their preferred learning method, that they don’t have to take this course right now, and I demonstrate my teaching style early. I tell them how I teach, how I approach grading, how I approach assignments. Every school I have ever taught at (which is four) has a period lasting about two or three weeks where students can swap, drop, and add courses without financial repercussions. The last day to do so is usually called “census day” and I remind students of this day almost every class period until it happens.

One bad teacher can ruin an entire subject.

Sometimes students don’t have a choice; a lack of teachers in a given department, schedule requirements, looming graduation. As I mentioned before, sometimes students will have to suck it up and learn how to deal with someone they just don’t vibe with. Happens to me all the time and it’s a valuable lesson to learn early and in a mostly safe environment. But when you get a perfect pedagogical fit, shit that seemed miserable a year ago can become divine. I added a STEM degree to my undergraduate coursework (before dropping out) because of one amazing geography professor. I have several students every semester tell me, unprompted, that they didn’t understand writing until I was the one to teach it to them.

On the flip side of that I do have students who learn nothing from me. As one of them so eloquently put it, I serve the “medicine” with so much cheese and fanfare that they weren’t able to digest the medicine. They were too hooked on cheese and “backflips.” Fair point. I tend to treat my lectures like a performance and while many students think I do it to emulate some popular Robin Williams film or to ensure I get everyone’s attention, the truth is I just like doing it. The fact that there is pedagogical value in my moment to moment teaching style is a happy accident. But not everyone likes that and many folks do thrive under conditions more akin to those traditional mid-twentieth century lecturers. More power to them!

I’m also not a fan of rubrics and steady requirements for assignments, and really anything for that matter. I teach to create conditions that I would personally thrive in because that’s what I know how to teach, but many folks really need and crave a more structured approach. They want to be told what to write about, who to write it to, how to write it, what the strict expectations are, and be given a formula for success. Personally, I do think that sets folks up for failure as those conditions immediately cease upon walking outside the college, but I do respect that some students need that at first. I will never be that kind of teacher though. I would tear my finger prints off.

There needs to be a better culture surrounding dropping and swapping courses because of an incompatible teacher, but to get there we need more teachers. If I am the only person that teaches first-year writing in the mornings, then I’m the only one students with mandatory afternoon classes can take. That’s lame for them and lame for me. For them due to reasons above, for me because now I have a student that will be struggling to no real fault of their own, and underneath all of the blasé devil may cry shit, I do care about almost all of my students.

Expansion of genre consideration

I actually have little to say about this because I do try to do this. Sometimes when I read a critique about the genres involved in my writing classes I have to wonder if they were really paying attention. This semester alone I had students write Tweets, advertisements, Superbowl Halftime shows, short stories, research essays, personal essays, music, poetry, threats and blackmail, philosophical treatises, speeches, and an entire assignment where they could write five things in ANY genre or format they want. (Some students used that opportunity to make rock operas, Braille-embroidered blankets, and sunglasses.) Most other writing teachers do the same.

There might be a disconnect somewhere in the haze of dressing these things up as academic expectations, where students don’t realise that they are writing a Tweet because they get a letter grade on it a week after it’s done and they have to consider rhetorical implications of Twitter and 250 character communication styles. Not to blame students, but sometimes a critique falls on my grimaced face because, well, I did the things they requested, and this is one of them. That being said, the entire semester can’t be Tweets and TikToks. I do have to teach an essay, I do have to teach research methodology, and I do have to correct inappropriately abbreviated words.

Modern composition considerations should be made, yes, and in my upcoming professional writing course there will be an entire “section” on writing emails (something that is always requested). But, and I frequently have to parrot this, we teach traditional writing genres for a reason and I can’t slash those in lieu of “how to write chronically online 101.” Even if that would be a fun as fuck elective.

Difficulty of course and it’s content

The middle ground here is healthy and thriving. The vast majority of students say that the course difficulty is appropriate and there is an appreciable blend of review and the new. But the extreme ends have urgent needs that strike at the heart of my own misgivings with the current state of education as a whole. Some folks think the entire class is just review of concepts they learned in high school and other folks are just totally lost regardless of how elementary I think I concept it.

At face value, there is way too much inconsistency between the quality of high schools and the education they offer. Not just between states and countries, but between neighbourhoods. Some folks who’ve been in the game longer than I can accurately predict how a student will perform based solely on their high school. Others who are even deeper in have a mental list of deficiencies coming fro specific schools. “This school doesn’t teach citation methods, that one doesn’t teach the rhetorical appeals, another one has a teacher that won’t correct sentence fragments.” It’s impressive to watch until you think about it at night. But blaming the high schools is foolish, as it’s hardly their fault.

Education, even higher education, is governed by the states in the United States. The federal government, in years past, could issue some direction and require a few standards and dictate funding (Donald made sure even that bare minimum is dead), but ultimately whether or not you are taught that humans are the product of millions of years of evolution is up to Mississippi. Histories surrounding civil rights and the folks that fought for them are up to Florida. A student’s ability to participate in a self-reported tax system is dictated by Vermont.

The disparity grows larger the smaller the scale. Schools in nice neighbourhoods get heaps of money and generally are afforded a quality education. Schools in impoverished areas, especially marginalised communities, get scraps for funding and scrape by with the education they can. The teachers at all levels do, generally speaking, everything in their power to ensure their students are as prepared as they can be. But Adam Smith has ensured that money dictates the quality of our lives, not effort.

Enough about all of that, let’s talk about me again. I will be the first to admit that I am teaching high school writing 2.0, and I have no fear admitting this as UWS told all of us that that’s what we should be doing in a faculty meeting I attended in January of 2026. Some students notice that and grow bored and frustrated and while I can try and hold them to a higher standard and complicate assignments for them, logos, ethos, and pathos can only be so interesting to someone who’s heard about them for years. Friends of mine teaching high school tell me they’re teaching what used to be elementary school writing and I am loathe to consider what elementary writing teachers are teaching any more.

Taking on the risk of sounding far too old for my own good, I can recall fourth grade where I was required to hand write, in a single class period, several pages of writing. The next day I had to revise someone else’s essay and then write a final draft of my own with meaningful revisions. I give my students a month to write 1500 words and I still get submissions in the 600 word range. A month. The current word count of this document is 2,695 and I’ve written this within the span of one or two sittings (so far) interrupted only by taking my dogs on a walk and making a baked bean (Heinz from Costco) and vegan chicken burrito. It was fucking DELICIOUS.

I’m not saying I need my students to write nearly 3,000 words in a sitting, but I am saying that when I give them a month to do something I should see a month’s worth of effort. Sometimes I do. Mostly I don’t.

This is all to say that I am just as frustrated as my students. I want to teach college writing. That is presumably what I was hired to do. But I can’t do that when I have to spend a week going over the basics of citation. I can’t do that when students can’t even read five pages over a weekend (usually longer). But those students who went to a high school that didn’t teach them shit also need a place. The incredibly harsh reality is that not everyone is ready for college and that is not always their fault. Our system, both casual and formal, is broken and it’s utterly failing students while making a select few disgustingly wealthy.

I am not entirely powerless. I could teach and evaluate like I’m teaching what I would consider college-level writing and watch a considerable amount of my students fail until they catch up or flunk out entirely. I can also keep dumbing down my content until I might as well update my resume to say I stopped teaching college in 2026 and started teaching high school, which arguably fails the other portion of students just as much. It’s going to take years after Donald is dead to catch our education system up provided we’re around and willing to right the ship, but that means I still have to make a choice now. Which student do I want to fail?

Some institutions have honours courses and “remedial” writing and others let students test out of first-year writing. AP courses can also satisfy a first-year writing credit. The latter two options are generally unsavoury to me as I think we’re unfairly equating a “testing out” and an AP class with being ready to write at the college level. In my experience those students aren’t actually ready and very quickly fall behind students who do take a first-year writing course. Many of my students recognise that first-year writing does a lot more than just teach what general compositional expectations at a university are and you really can’t “test out” of that experience.

Honours classes are a fine idea, but we now have to reconcile the idea that honours is the new 101 is the new high school and so on. The fundamental issue is not addressed.

Most institutions don’t have a level below first-year writing and if they do it’s for international students who didn’t fulfil the English language requirement. Those courses are taught by language acquisition professionals and teach VERY different skills than the ones I teach and students usually still have to take first-year writing after taking that course anyway (compounding the money and time issue as well). Language and high education in the United States is another bear entirely and I only want to lovingly stroke it as poking it would see me ill-equipped to put it back to sleep.

As much as I hate to admit it, until we make sweeping reforms to the way education both operates and is appreciated in this country the only thing I can say is that “advanced” students will need to advocate for themselves to try and make their course work more rigorous and interesting while “less advanced” students may have to attend office hours or form a study group or, God forbid, read a few books (no offence to those students specifically, it’s just so fucking hard to get students to read a book any more).

I will say that next semester I will probably choose to teach college writing and get more comfortable handing out Ds. My soul is telling me that I will be failing students in a more explicit way if I do otherwise. My next published essay will be “why the hell did no one sign up for my classes this semester.”

Large language models aka AI

This is the big boy. Everyone talks about large language models and their effect on what I teach. And before we dive in, yes, they are large language models (LLMs), not artificial intelligence (A.I.). There is a distinction that we should strive to broaden as the two technologies do very different things. When students use “A.I.” in school they are really using LLMs, which aren’t intelligent. They are simple prediction algorithms and nothing more. The fact that they can inconvincingly emulate an uncanny valley human-esque intelligence is only because the black box that runs it stole mountains of human work for it to regurgitate. The tech industry has conned people into believing that large scale LLM usage is inevitable and that we should all be getting ready for it. Nothing is inevitable and we should be fighting against it, not welcoming it. LLMs are not a natural force, but a series of buildings built on pristine ground sucking up our air and water to make a cabal of wealthy people all the wealthier. If those buildings, for hypothetical example, violently ceased to be, or if people poison the stream of stolen work going into their models, then that inevitability goes up in smoke.

Everyone wants to talk about it though. Administration thinks they’re being smart in offering students free ChatGPT and free Abode Firefly and they encourage us faculty to teach “responsible and ethical usage” instead of abstinence. LLM usage is not sex. Companies are making fucking BUCKETS off higher education licences and so we are pushed to use it to justify said investment. There is no way to use LLMs ethically at any level regardless of hollow privacy and model training “guarantees.” The only ethical use of LLMs are a server building fire and a guillotine with Sam Altman’s address.

Students have something of a tendency to realise this, mainly because I bully them into said realisation. I interrogate students over their reading and writing and if I catch a whiff of LLM summary, I can usually get a confession out of a green freshman. I have absolutely no qualms in making a fool out of a student for not reading, but I do so in a pedagogically sound way. I demonstrate how the LLM got the reading wrong, I demonstrate how it makes them sound like an unintelligible creep. It usually works as I’m pretty good at embarrassing folks and have non reservations in being, admittedly, a bit meaner than maybe I should be. My own bullying aside, students do tend to eventually recognise that LLMs can’t do the thinking for them and it often takes more effort to get something only somewhat trashy out of an LLM than to just write the fucking thing.

Some folks still think it is an existential threat to my career and at the moment it is. For every student that admits we still need humans behind the writing, there are probably two that are silently disagreeing. It takes a Baltic Sea of effort to deprogram the pro-LLM propaganda that students have succumbed to and even more emotional effort to continue despite the clear and frequent LLM-written essays I get every week.

I’ll admit, I am tired of schools forcing A.I. on everyone to justify the massive pile of money they just handed tech companies. I’m tired of having to determine if something is a product of an LLM before I can even start taking it at face value as a piece of student writing. I’m tired of fucking talking about it. But if we want to deprogram this “inevitability” then we need to talk about it and fight it and remind folks that the Luddites were doing something noble in their time.

Students are are in a constant state of trying to justify a writing course to themselves when they think they can just generate a piece of writing for whatever they might need. This one issue compounds, multiplies, and complicates every single issue I’ve listed above. “Why should first-year writing be mandatory if I can just ChatGPT something? Why should it be taught by anyone, especially a somewhat unhinged blind Leftist, when a computer can teach me what I need when I actually need it? Why do I need to write in genres I don’t like if a computer can do it for me? Why do I need to do hard or boring things when a computer can do it for me?”

I now have to not only teach writing, not only manage a class, not only grade, not only lesson plan, not only not get paid enough, not only navigate my “career” as a blind person, not only get the reluctant attention of an indifferent crowd, not only know how to balance the difficulty of my course, not only stay updated on the latest pedagogical theories, but also justify my existence against the existence of a billionaire’s money printing technology.

This all leaves me with just one thought: do I send this to all my students that just wrote this essay?