[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 350 of The Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Ungrading with Susan Blum.

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[00:00:09] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

[00:00:18] Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives, and be even more present for our students. Joining me for today’s episode is Susan D. Blum. She’s a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, currently fixated on education and pedagogical praxis. She’s the author of “I Love Learning; I Hate School”: An Anthropology of College, and the editor of their recent volume, Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead). Susan, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:01:18] Susan Blum: Thanks, it’s so great to be here on this illustrious program.

[00:01:22] Bonni: Oh, I’m so glad to just get this chance to talk with you. Not only have I, of course, read your book, but also followed you for quite some time on Twitter. This is such an important series of conversations that are happening right now. I’m excited for us to explore them, but I want to start out way back when to our childhoods and hear as you talk a little bit about what do you remember about grades as either a little girl, or when you got to junior high, high school? What do you remember about grades, and what they did or didn’t do for you?

[00:01:55] Susan: I loved grades. I got good grades. I was this perfect good girl student. The grades were affirmation that I was good and smart, and following the rules, which I didn’t always do completely. I was a procrastinator. Sometimes I didn’t know exactly, I had these recollections of like, history class. I didn’t really understand what was happening in there. I was really good at test taking, and I love taking tests, and school was a perfect fit for me. Where I’ve ended up is kind of funny, because I kind of reject all of that right now. I’ve had quite a journey over my many decades of living with school as a student and a teacher, and also a parent. Whatever that’s worth.

[00:02:50] Bonni: When I think back to my own childhood, I think back to having a growth mindset, but not utilizing this feeling that I got good. I don’t even remember grades, kindergarten, third grade, I don’t remember them. When I start to remember something about grades, and also academics would be around high school. I felt like I could have continued on that, they call it gate, the gifted program. I know that that’s a whole, lots of challenges with that area of our education here at least in the United States. I remember, like I felt like I could have done that. That seemed really hard, and didn’t have a big payoff for me.

I didn’t understand really, I think the choices I was making. I went what I considered to be the easier route and didn’t care a lot about grades. I didn’t really care a lot about grades even by the time I got to college, but boy, oh boy do I remember in my master’s program, I don’t know what happened to me, but I was going to get perfect A’s. I’m here to tell you today that I got perfect A’s except for one A minus, and I’m still mad about it.

It’s interesting how it kind of evolves like that. I don’t think I really thought as critically. I shouldn’t say I don’t think I’m sure I did not think as critically about grades as I should have once I was in a position to “give them to people”, which the way I’m phrasing that, of course has its challenges too. What do you remember about– because at some point you have to realize, wait, everyone doesn’t have the same relationship I do with grades. Everyone’s not the perfect test taker. It’s not always because they don’t want to be.

I think a lot of times we ascribe merit to these things, that you’ve got that bad grade because you’re a bad person or you’re bad at whatever, like it’s a choice thing. Where do you remember in your career starting to go, “Wait, there’s a big difference here.”

[00:04:49] Susan: Well, I certainly knew people who I knew were very capable, and thoughtful, and interesting, and creative people who didn’t get good grades or perfect grades in school. I always thought there was some– I’m sort of humiliated to be saying this, but I’m saying it out loud, because I think it’s important for your listeners to understand that there’s a journey, and that if they have not questioned grades at all, they’re in really good company. I didn’t question the objectivity and value of grades until well into my teaching career, which is shocking to me right now. It’s like I had this complete epiphany and revelation and transformation.

Now, I know that I used to think that but I think so completely differently that it’s hard to feel like the same person feeling those things. My real transformation in terms of how I think about grades came when I was doing my book on plagiarism. I wrote a book called My Word: Plagiarism and College Culture. I really began by thinking that grade inflation was a problem and that students’ cheating was a problem. I ended up thinking that grades were the problem, and not the students, and not their production, and not their work ethic. The whole way we framed everything because, by that point, I was reading about learning in a really serious way.

I discovered Alfie Kohn, who literally changed my life. When I started to read about motivation, and I started to see how the rewards themselves were as he says punishment, I completely flipped the way I thought about all of it. Now here I am, like 15 years later, and I have a completely different attitude toward all of it. Grades are, in some way, that kind of linchpin in the whole transformation I personally have had in how I think about learning school, what we’re doing here in higher ed, my role as a teacher, what the students are supposed to be doing. All of it is connected, but you have to really question grades or you’re not going to get to what I see as the right outcome.

[00:07:25] Bonni: Alfie’s name comes up quite a bit in the literature and of course in other people’s discourse around this. I just hear his name in many aspects. Tell us more about what he means when he says rewards are the punishments. Tell us more about that.

[00:07:43] Susan: If you think that you have to give people extrinsic rewards for behavior that would otherwise be meaningful, then you are basically telling people that they shouldn’t trust themselves, they should always be waiting for external validation, external control. The end of his book has a whole detailed analysis of behaviorism and why that is not the right model we should have for the relationship between students and teachers. Even if you are getting good grades, you’re always threatened by the next bad grade, and you’re always missing an opportunity to focus on what you’re learning for its own sake.

[00:08:34] Bonni: Do you have a recollection of a time in your life, your education, where you saw yourself doing that performance, or the behaviorism?

[00:08:44] Susan: No, because I was made for school. School was made for me. I loved everything about it. I loved math, and I loved science, and I loved foreign languages, and I loved literature, and I loved everything except gym class. I felt great joy in learning everything. If it was hard, that was okay. For me, it was fun. I understand that not everybody’s like me. I’ve watched students over the years, and in some ways the more highly achieving students do this more, do things for performance for achievement, for pleasing the teacher. If you say three responses, I’ll give three responses. If you say one response, I’ll give one response.

All of that is simply a matter of keeping an eye on the points and making sure you get the points. To my mind, genuine education isn’t simply this kind of points game.

[00:09:55] Bonni: I started doing this. I’ve done it many times, but I’m just recreating it for virtual environment, there’s a company called Human Synergistics. They’ve been publishing for decades a very simple case that’s built around the way that institutional review boards make their decisions about medical research, what would be more permissible versus less permissible with their three guiding principles. We do it in a non-medical, non-research class. It’s a business ethics class, but it helps to introduce some vocabulary around ethics.

As I was introducing it, I was having to explain to them that you’re going to get points for doing this. Like there’s a place in the gradebook for points. Just by doing it, you’re going to get the points. There’s this tension where we’re just trained, we’re ingrained that there’s a right answer here, and what she’s looking for is this right answer. I’m going, no, actually, this whole experience of you just saying, what do you think? I don’t need you to be a medical researcher and practice probably better if you’re not, because then you’d be able to come into it with more of a beginner’s mind and thinking about ethics from more of a beginner’s mind.

I really had to spend a lot of time helping because this is a new class, and we’re all just getting to know each other here. Why would they trust me that there’s not something about the performance that they’re about to do that I’m going to trick them and be like, two points off, or whatever? I am one who is not fully embraced ungrading. I’m so glad to learn from people like you, you used the word journey a few moments ago. This isn’t something that I think would be wise to just jump wholeheartedly. We don’t have to be perfect in terms of that you can incorporate many aspects of it.

Then it does, of course, require transparency, this is how this is structured, then this will be rated using the following criteria. I tried to get a little bit closer to maybe specifications grading, although I don’t know if that’s the best representation, but we can start to hear from people like you. Then that’s where I’d like to head next with what were grades designed to do, versus what they are actually doing.

Could you talk a little bit about what many of us, myself included, just learned without realizing we were learning like this, this is it. This is why we do this. This is why it’s so important. Then that tires screeching moment where you go, but it’s not doing that. Here’s all the other stuff that it’s doing, that is really detrimental?

[00:12:36] Susan: I just want to piggyback on something you said a moment ago about students thinking you’re tricking them. Because when I first began ungrading, I had the sense that students thought I was tricking them. I had to learn how to really explain what I’m doing and build trust in the class, in each other, in what we’re doing in the enterprise, so that they can see that I really know what I’m doing in removing this thing that everybody thinks is actually the central part of the enterprise.

I wrote this other book called, I Love Learning; I Hate School. There was a chapter in there about grades. It’s based on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of interviews done with undergraduates. You ask them what the point is of college, and they say, “To get good grades.” People believe that grades are important. I think people think they’re important for three reasons. One is for sorting, so we can tell who’s good and who’s bad, or who’s most good, and who’s least good, for communicating, for feedback, or whatever, and for motivating. It falls flat on all three points, and then it also has bad effects, in addition to not producing the good effects that we hope.

We know that when you focus on extrinsic motivation, you reduce or even sometimes destroy intrinsic motivation. If you have to bribe somebody to do something, then it must be because they don’t want to do it for itself. If you tell somebody, “Eat this peach, it’s really delicious.” Eating the peach is its own reward. If you say to somebody, “Eat this peach and you get five points,” they’ll think, “I guess there’s something wrong with the peach so that they have to give me the points.” There’s research for decades and decades, a hundred years, showing that extrinsic motives don’t really work. They’re not necessary if you have meaningful activities.

If the learning is interesting, people will do it. Some of my happiest teaching moments are when a student says, “Wow, this was so interesting, I forgot it was for school.” I think, “Okay, that’s all I need.” I could die happy. We think that grades are necessary for communicating or feedback. For a hundred years, people have shown that grades are completely inconsistent, different faculty, teachers, K through 12, in higher ed, include different dimensions in their grading schemes.

Some include participation, some don’t. Some include attendance, some don’t. Some include all the quizzes, some let you drop some. Some include improvement, some don’t. Some include engagement, some fuzzy sense of that. Faculty are completely inconsistent. We also know that when students get a grade on an assignment, they only pay attention to the grade, even if there’s feedback, written feedback, they tend to disregard that feedback, because they see it and faculty see it as only there to justify the grade. We’re not actually producing much feedback anyway, we believe that grades are necessary for sorting in a kind of myth of meritocracy.

We know from all kinds of research in terms of equity, in terms of how advantaged people are going into things, that grades basically track with advantage at every level of school, everywhere. I don’t see my own role as reproducing prior sorts, I see my role as trying to help every student get somewhere, and they may be going to different places. Those are the three things that grades are supposed to do that they don’t do very well. Then we know, there’s so much research showing that grades lead to things like cheating and plagiarizing, because the incentive structure is there.

Grades lead to gaming the system, they lead to doing the minimum, to doing superficial work, to dependence on a teacher, dependence on the judge, what do you want? Is this right? They lead to a false sense of completion, now you’re done. As a writer, am I a perfect writer? When do I get to be the perfect writer? I don’t know. Then finally, all I’ll say for today is that, grades also lead to a huge amount of anxiety. In some cases, anxiety, so severe that people are depressed, and it leads to suicide. That, to me, is the most impossible and unthinkable outcome of this whole system.

[00:18:01] Bonni: I think sometimes it’s hard for people to take this in, because sometimes there’s just so much cognitive dissonance. It can feel like, “Wow, all of this is true, but this has been true forever.” Or, “Maybe I don’t buy into everything, but some of this is true,” to start to wrestle with some of this stuff. I know you’ve collaborated with, shared with so many people around this. Do you have a guide for us as we start to go, “Wow, some of what she’s saying might be true. Oh, I’m recognizing some of that in myself and also, in students that I have had in classes.”

To what extent do we need more information reading a book on? It would be great, which is why you’re here today. To what extent could we start small? Again, I don’t want to give you a binary choice. I just love your thoughts on, as you’ve seen people begin to be confronted with the same things that you and I have been confronted with in our teaching, and so many others. Start small experiment, or go out and get more information or give me a third choice? I’m not thinking, blend the two.

[00:19:12] Susan: I think starting small, is probably necessary. You can’t just do everything you’ve always done and get rid of grades through and through. You have to really think about your goals, and not only your goals, but the students’ goals. Think about your students as actual people and people who are learning things for purposes. If they’re not learning for a grade, why else are they learning? What are they getting out of this particular thing? The more fascinating you can make it, the more you can appeal to students’ innate curiosity, which we all have. It is part of our nature. It’s part of our being as mammals, not just humans.

All humans, all animals are curious, and we all love our subjects, and we are deeply passionate and curious about them. Why can’t we join our students on these kinds of adventures, to discover, “Wow, anthropology, it’s everywhere.” If you show students that their life can be more fascinating by learning what you’re doing together, you don’t have to grade everything. You can also have authentic outcomes so that the students do something with what they’re learning, they tell their classmate whom they like, or they tell their partner, or they tell their roommate, or they apply it to something.

Those are genuine outcomes, and when you do that, they can be small things, “Go interview your grandmother and ask her this.” You don’t have to grade that because your student will be so inspired, and the grandmother’s feedback will be reward. Then, grades aren’t necessary. It does mean rethinking assignments, it does mean you’re not going to necessarily get people to read something really boring, so maybe don’t assign something really boring, unless you help students find a reason for their own purposes, for that to be useful.

It does mean rethinking a lot of things, but you can rethink small things, and then get your confidence, and then see that it actually has good outcomes. Talk to your students, ask them what they think. Ask them what they feel. Once you actually have an honest conversation with your students, I don’t think it’s hard to get rid of grades all the way.

[00:22:04] Bonni: I’d like to share one other example from my class and then get your response to it because I have been so inspired by your work and it’s so rewarding to just know I’m not done but to have already felt really good about the progress. You were mentioning about thinking about your goals. What’s the purpose for why someone would learn this? I decided in this business ethics class, one thing I wanted to change pretty dramatically, at least it felt dramatic to me. Picture this, 2020 spring, I was teaching a business ethics class, and I always would do this business ethics in the news.

I’d give this sticky note to everybody as they came in, they would write down what’s the story they saw in the news that came up since we last met. We put them all on the back wall and then we sort them. As you already know, well, the story is going because there would be the first week one business news story about some economic effects of something potential, coronavirus, whatever, and then the next week, and the next week, and before you know it, every sticky note was about the coronavirus. Of course, we didn’t meet together after that, but I started to see some real misinformation that they were coming into contact with.

I had spent so much time thinking, “I’m not good enough. I’m not smart enough. I don’t know enough about this if I can’t do it,” and I was like, “Get over yourself. You cannot have students bring news stories if you’re not going to at least attempt to equip them with this stuff.” You might be familiar with Mike Caulfield’s work. He is an expert in misinformation. He has a framework called the SIFT model, and the whole thing about it is any of us can do this stuff. I did have that feeling like, “Wow. Well, this is something I’m feeling increasingly passionate about, but how do I get them to be interested in it?” I had a couple of exercises that were just you did it or you didn’t do it?

That was all I was looking for. I had them answer some questions like where do you get your news from? How do you feel about that? What would you change, if anything, about the way that you get your news and all of that? All of them, except one of them, had something they’d like to change? I thought, “Well, here we go,” because I couldn’t have and they all felt very different. I haven’t done even a simple analysis of them yet, but it’s all still fresh, but everyone coming in with some innate desire to change something about their current methodology. I suspect that as we go, they might even feel even more of an increase, I hope. I definitely feel it.

I have an increasing desire to learn more about this. I pictured this potentially being something they’ll carry with them for many, many years to come until it all changes again. Anyway, I wanted to share that with you in terms of the kind of reflection that you’re talking about, that curiosity. I’m sure you’ve run across times where people really struggle with, “I don’t know how to get people curious about this,” or that perhaps are not self-aware enough to know that in their discipline because they’re just so steeped in it that it’s hard for them to think with that beginner’s mind?

Do you have any guidance for us in terms of thinking about the goals to get outside of ourselves and back into our students potentially?

[00:25:20] Susan: Well, I now begin most all my courses asking students to generate their own goals, and to see how this class might fit into their lives. It might even be a required course. In addition to checking the box for the major or something, what else can you do from this? I have a lot of student voices and I asked students to do a lot of connecting between what we’re doing in class and what they are living. Even if students take five courses a year, that’s 40 courses over four years of college, they can’t learn everything. We can’t teach them everything in 1 semester, in 20 semesters, in 30 semesters.

What we have to figure out is, what are the dispositions that will help them learn going forward once school is over? I don’t just mean for their first job because their first job will not be their last job in almost every case. What kinds of experiences are students going to have in our classes, whether it’s critical information literacy, or whether it’s ethnographic observation, or whether it’s asking questions about ethics, or whatever it is? Having that experience of the power of this insight is something that I think we can help foster if we have interesting enough activities.

It might mean rethinking textbooks, and tests, and quizzes, and things like that, you can get to the same outcomes in a lot of different ways. I think trying to imagine what the students are actually engaged in, what does this feel like for the student to be doing, what are they reading, what are they hearing, what are they writing, what are they studying, what are they learning, what are they talking to other people about, and really trying to figure out ways that this could be meaningful in a multiplicity of ways.

Universal Design for Learning is something that has so many facets, and that can include people having different goals. Some of your students might end up going into business, and others might end up being teachers. How can all of these different future paths be enriched by whatever they’re doing in your class?

[00:28:03] Bonni: It’s so true. I got such a kick out of some of the less traditional disciplines that might sign up for ungrading showing up in your book, including I really enjoyed that, I need to go reread it again, the chapter with someone who teaches computer programming. I suspect you probably just got so tickled reading this chapter when you first started in because I’m thinking about your work in plagiarism, and cheating, and all of that, and programming, there’s a lot of challenges that would show up that just how easy it would be to copy-paste in all of those things.

You could think about fighting that with fire or you could think about that’s what we create with our system of grading, and if it doesn’t go away, then you’re not going to be able to tap into that. Then, the other one, of course, I got which I’ve had a chance to interview a couple of times for this podcast, but who teaches in STEM fields biology, I believe, forgive me if I’m getting it wrong. Just before we close this portion of the show, would you give any advice to people who are feeling a little resistance like, “This is all well and fine, but it doesn’t work with my discipline because it is so test-oriented or it is so traditionally-minded when it comes to measures?”

[00:29:19] Susan: Right. You’re talking about Rissa Sorensen-Unruh who teaches organic chemistry-

[00:29:25] Bonni: Yes. Thank you.

[00:29:27] Susan: -and Chris Riesbeck. They teach it very different institutions in very different disciplines, but many people have done versions of ungrading in all different disciplines. I don’t have time to talk about all the research on physics education, and chemistry education, and math education, but a lot of people have really tried to capitalize on active learning techniques, on involvement, on curiosity. Derek Bruff talks about, time for telling. You don’t lecture, lecture, lecture until the students are stupefied and then ask them to do something meaningful, you give them some puzzle or something that makes them curious, and then they have to work it through. At which point they might end up having to take a test, but the way they get there is a very different model.

[00:30:23] Bonni: Yes, and even when you’re talking about taking a test because that is some of the challenges that some colleagues of mine will share, we can give lots and lots of low stakes, no stakes practice tests because we’ve agreed that wouldn’t it be great if you could get into medical school or wouldn’t it be great if you could achieve, so there are still going to be boxes that our students need to check in order to attain some goal. Is it a master’s program, whatever? It’s not like that’s going to go away, but that’s true.

[00:30:54] Susan: Sadly, that’s true.

[00:30:56] Bonni: Well, maybe I shouldn’t even say that because I am pretty amazed at how quickly so much has changed around standardized testing. I’m embarrassed to admit, I have no idea if this is happening in other places, but almost as soon as the words are out of my mouth, of course, it has to be recharged sometimes behind on these things, but that happened pretty quick.

It took a pandemic to really dislodge it, but so maybe I shouldn’t be so confident at that, but at any rate, if that’s what your job is to prepare someone to take some type of a standardized test, that doesn’t mean you have to create the same conditions of that to help foster the learning and can we lessen that anxiety now?

[00:31:41] Susan: Well, and we know that when students learn for a test, they often forget it really fast. If we can deepen their learning, then they’re much more likely to have good outcomes on tests and I don’t want to take too long because I know we have some time limit. Like in Finland, they don’t take a lot of tests in school at all. They don’t have homework, they don’t have tests, they play outside, they don’t teach reading until they’re older and they do really, really well on international tests.

There are lots of reasons Finland is small, is wealthy, is homogeneous. There are lots of other factors, but just because someday there’s going to be some big standardized test doesn’t mean all of life up to that moment has to be fixated on these inhumane and ineffective learning experiences.

[00:32:35] Bonni: Yes, and what I know, you’re not saying, but just because I have another episode, that’ll be right around the time that this one airs and where neither of us is saying that memorization is an important, in fact, it can really deepen learning. In many of our disciplines, that’s a critical thing, but does the memorization have to come with that? Does it have to be coupled with these high anxiety, high stakes things? I think in terms of plagiarism and cheating and all of that, I had an opportunity to speak with James Lang who’s also written a book about cheating and that’s one of the things I take away from that conversation, which was five or six years ago, as wild as that is.

I think I was under the impression of like, “Well, we throw that out too, and no, no, no, we don’t throw that out.” That stays in here as a very important aspect of learning. It’s just how we’re trying to get people to memorize things, that’s the problem.

[00:33:26] Susan: Yes, we could keep going about that.

[00:33:29] Bonni: No, please, please just respond because I’d love to hear it, and then we can get ourselves over to that recommendation.

[00:33:33] Susan: Well, I think the main thing I would like to encourage everybody to remember is that the goal is learning and learning can be for the purpose of use or interest. Those are really good motivating reasons. If you have to memorize the abbreviations for the elements or something like that. When students really understand that it’s so that you can do these other things and we can make it fun and it might be hard, but we can do it, then it’s much more likely that it will stick.

We know a lot about how people learn about retrieval effects and memorization and practice and all of that, but also it’s true that you can learn a random string of facts more easily when they’re embedded in meaningful context. Rather than just have a stack of flashcards, it’s what you might also need to do. I studied Chinese and so Chinese characters, I had to learn with flashcards, but reading, writing, using, speaking, flipping them up and remembering, all of that is necessary, but also seeing them in context, not just having one very simple quiz after another is I think important to remember.

[00:35:03] Bonni: I’m so glad that I asked you to expound on that and also that you were willing to because you just gave me the perfect segue into what I didn’t realize I’d be recommending today. I want to extend actually something that you just said, and I’ve shared on prior episodes that Alzheimer’s runs in my family and so I have a close relative who we both worry together about that is that going to happen. Anyway, we were talking on the phone the other day and she was mentioning that she read, there was a book someone came out with recently about keeping your brain healthy.

She’s learned a number of languages in her life so she was picking up another one and I can’t even remember what the new one was that she was picking up, but I had this realization and that was as I was speaking with her because I have always wished that I had learned another language, specifically, Spanish is one that I really regret. I took a class in high school and just never got very far with and I kept always thinking like, “Well, I could never learn it fluently unless I immersed myself and so it’s not worth doing.”

In that moment, I thought, “You know what? What would be wrong with learning a little bit more Spanish than you can remember from college? What would be wrong with you using the same app that she’s been using and you could talk about it and you could ask how she’s doing with hers,” but I don’t know why I decided with language that it’s an all or nothing thing and I haven’t quite figured out and I’d be interested if you have any thoughts on this, but there has to be benefits that would come without me learning all Spanish to be able to speak and write fluently.

[00:36:38] Susan: Okay. Well, one of my other hats as a linguistic anthropologist and so yes, there isn’t an all or nothing mastery, but I know why you think that it’s because of school. It’s because you either get an A in Spanish and are perfect or you might as well give up and real life isn’t like that. Many people can communicate really well with what might not be seen as perfect standard Spanish and what is the harm in trying? What is the harm in demonstrating goodwill to Spanish speakers by trying to meet them partway?

I’m not even talking about the cognitive benefits of learning something new, but you should try to learn Spanish imperfectly. Learning imperfectly is a very good human goal for a lot of what we do in our lives.

[00:37:36] Bonni: That’s what I’m going to put for my recommendation. Try to learn something new imperfectly. The other thing I’d like to share, I know that there are a lot of apps and that any app or service, they’re all going to have their limitations in that, so I have not done extensive review. I did decide to use the same one that she’s using, so I’m having a ball with it. That was called Duolingo. Again, for example, it asks me to speak a phrase and I’m sure it’s not perfectly capturing if I’m saying it right, but it’s better than nothing. I’ve been enjoying it, so I’ll share that too if anyone wants to just dip it.

It’s been free so far that they do regularly try to get me to subscribe, but I just click no, thanks and I’ve just been having fun for about it takes five minutes a day, and I’ve been doing that most days and it’s been great. I’m going to pass it over to you now for your recommendations and, Susan, thank you so much for that encouragement. I just love the way you framed that.

[00:38:31] Susan: Great. Well, I’ve been using Duolingo for Spanish also, but I love languages. I’ve learned a number of them over my years, and I have reservations about Duolingo, but I’m using it anyway and I have actually paid for the premium version because I’m susceptible to that kind of pressure.

[00:38:50] Bonni: I may be too.

[00:38:51] Susan: My first recommendation–

[00:38:52] Bonni: We’ll see what happens to me in a few weeks.

[00:38:55] Susan: I’ve been doing it for years. My first recommendation is Jill Biden’s coat. Dr. Jill Biden at the presidential inauguration was wearing a spectacularly beautiful coat and in it, there was embroidery and the embroidery was of a quotation from Benjamin Franklin in which he said, “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” I think that’s right and I think it’s amazing that Jill Biden is so committed to her role as an educator, that she had that embroidered into this historic quote. I have another recommendation. I don’t know how many I get.

[00:39:45] Bonni: I’m riveted.

[laughter]

[00:39:48] Susan: Okay, I’m going to limit it to four.

[00:39:50] Bonni: I love it.

[00:39:52] Susan: One is a book called Insomnia which is by Marina Benjamin and it’s got a really beautiful purple cover. I read it when I had insomnia. It’s a beautiful book. It’s beautifully written. It’s got some research and some personal experience. The third thing I want to recommend is a book called Wad-Ja-Get? the Grading Game in American Education, it’s by Kirschenbaum, Napier, and Simon. The 50th-anniversary edition is being published next month with the effort of Barry Fishman, who is at the University of Michigan. He says the astonishing thing is that basically everything they wrote 50 years ago is still true, and we need to read this.

Then the fourth recommendation, and I will stop with this one is Peter Elbows book, Writing Without Teachers, which was recommended to me by my dear colleague, Kate Pantelides, and I am so inspired by Peter Elbow’s book and a lot of the other people writing about writing.

[00:41:07] Bonni: I’ve heard great things about Peter Elbows over the years. That sounds like so good. All these are so great. How did you know about the embroidery?

[00:41:16] Susan: I don’t have any idea. It was somewhere.

[00:41:20] Bonni: I’m going to have to go back and check out what she was wearing and see if I can find that quote in there. That’s great. This is so fun. It’s been such a joy to get to talk to you. I know we worked on scheduling this together for a while. I’ve been looking forward to the moment. It was nice to be able to have more of a relaxed read with the book and just soak it in. I read it a little slower than I do some of them, and it just what a treasure you’ve given us.

[00:41:45] Susan: Thank you for inviting me. Obviously, we could keep going for a reason all the time. [laughing] It’s really very thought-provoking to commit to talk with you. I look forward to listening to the next episodes on your podcasts.

[00:41:59] Bonni: Oh, great. Thank you so much.

[00:42:01] Susan: Thanks.

[music]

[00:42:05] Bonni: Thanks once again to Susan Blum for being a guest on today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. Thanks to all of you for listening. I recently updated the way that I do my now weekly I can say it now weekly updates. If you haven’t subscribed yet, head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe, you’ll always get an overview of the most recent episode, and you’ll also receive a look at some resources and other relevant episodes. Lots of people are giving me good feedback that the new format works. Head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe and thanks once again for listening. I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:43:05] [END OF AUDIO]

The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning. 

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