February(ish) Posts from Krause
It occurs to me that perhaps I ought to change the title of this substack/newsletter to “Krause-land.” It has a ring to it. Two more posts I wrote in February and one on March 2, which, since February only has 28 days, kind of seems February-ish to me.
I’m Still Not Using AI Detection Software; However….
Back in mid-February, Anna Mills wrote a Substack post called “Why I’m using AI detection after all, alongside many other strategies.” Mills, who teaches at Cañada College in Silicon Valley, has written a lot about teaching and AI, and she was a member of the MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI. That group recommended that teachers use AI detection tools with extreme caution, or to use them not at all.
What changed her mind? Well, it sounds like she had had enough:
I argued against use of AI detection in college classrooms for two years, but my perspective has shifted. I ran into the limits of my current approaches last semester, when a first-year writing student persisted in submitting work that was clearly not his own, presenting document history that showed him typing the work (maybe he. typed it and maybe he used an autotyper). He only admitted to the AI use and apologized for wasting my time when he realized that I was not going to give him credit and that if he initiated an appeals process, the college would run his writing through detection software.
I haven’t had this kind of student encounter over AI cheating, but it’s not hard for me to imagine this scenario. It might be the last straw for me too. And like I think is the case with Mills, I’m getting sick of seeing this kind of dumb AI cheating.
Last November, I wrote here about a “teachable moment” I had when an unusually high number of freshman comp students who dumbly cheated with AI. The short version: for the first short assignment (2 or 3 pages), students are supposed to explain why they are interested in the topic they’ve selected for their research, and to explain what prewriting and brainstorming activities they did to come up with their working thesis. It’s not supposed to be about why they think their thesis is right; it’s supposed to be a reflection on the process they used to come up with a thesis that they know will change with research. It’s a “pass/revise” assignment I’ve given for years, and I always have a few students who misunderstand and end up writing something kind of like a research paper with no research. I make them revise. But last fall, a lot more of my students did the assignment wrong because they blindly trusted what ChatGPT told them. I met with these students, reminded them what the assignment actually was, and to also remember that AI cannot write an essay that explains what you think.
I’m teaching another couple of sections of freshman composition this semester and students just finished that first assignment. I warned them about avoiding the mistakes with AI students made last semester, and I repeated more often that the assignment is about their process and is not a research paper. The result? Well, I had fewer students trying to pass off something written by AI, but I still had a few.
My approach to dealing with AI cheating is the same as it has been ever since ChatGPT appeared: I focus on teaching writing as a process, and I require students to use Google Docs so I can use the version history to see how they put together their essays. I still don’t want to use Turnitin, and to be fair, Mills has not completely gone all-in with AI detection. Far from it. She sees Turnitin as an additional tool to use along with solid process writing pedagogy. Mills also shares some interesting resources about research into AI detection software and the difficulty of accurately spotting AI writing. Totally worth checking her post out.
I do disagree with her about how difficult it is to spot AI writing. Sure, it’s hard to figure out if a chunk of writing came from a human or an AI if there’s no context. But in writing classes like freshman composition, I see A LOT of my students’ writing (not just in final drafts), and because these are classes of 25 or so students, I get to know them as writers and people fairly well. So when a struggling student suddenly produces a piece of writing that is perfect grammatically and that sounds like a robot, I get suspicious and I meet with the student. So far, they have all confessed, more or less, and I’ve given them a second chance. In the fall, I had a student who cheated a second time; I failed them on the spot. If I had a student who persisted like the one Mills describes, I’m not quite sure what I would do.
But like I said, I too am starting to get annoyed that students keep using AI like this.
When ChatGPT first became a thing in late 2022 and everyone was all freaked out about everyone cheating, I wrote about/gave a couple of talks about how plagiarism has been a problem in writing classes literally forever. The vast majority of examples of plagiarism I see are still a result of students not knowing how to cite sources (or just being too lazy to do it), and it’s clear that most students don’t want to cheat and they see the point of needing to do the work themselves so they might learn something.
But it is different. Before ChatGPT, I had to deal with a blatant and intentional case of plagiarism once every couple of years. For the last year or so, I’ve had to deal with some examples of blatant AI plagiarism in pretty much every section of first-year writing I teach. It’s frustrating, especially since I like to think that one of the benefits of teaching students how to use AI is to discourage them from cheating with it.
My Peter Elbow Story
Peter Elbow died earlier this month at the age of 89. The New York Times had an obituary February 27 (a gift article) that did a reasonably good job of capturing his importance in the field of composition and rhetoric. I would not agree with the Times about how Elbow’s signature innovation, “free writing,” is a “touchy-feely” technique, but other than that, I think they get it about right. I can think of plenty of other key scholars and forces in the field, but I can’t think of anyone more important than Elbow.
Elbow was an active scholar and regular presence at the Conference for College Composition and Communication well into the 2000s. I remember seeing him in the halls going from event to event, and I saw him speak several times, including a huge event where he and Wayne Booth presented and then discussed their talks with each other.
A lot of people in the field had one store or another about meeting Peter Elbow; here’s my story (which I shared on Facebook earlier this month when I first learned of his passing):
When I was a junior in high school, in 1982-83 and in Cedar Falls, Iowa, I participated in some kind of state-wide or county-wide writing writing event/contest. This was a long time ago and I don’t remember any of the details about how it worked or what I wrote to participate in it, but I’m pretty sure it was an essay event/contest of some sort– as opposed to a fiction/poetry contest. It was held on the campus of the University of Northern Iowa, which is in Cedar Falls. So because it was local, a bunch of people from my high school and other local schools and beyond show up. My recollection was students participated in a version of a peer review sort of workshop.
This event was also a contest of some sort and there was a banquet everyone went to and where there were “winners” of some sort. I definitely remember I was not one of them. The banquet was a buffet, and I remember going through the line and there was this old guy (well, he would have been not quite 50 at this point) who was perfectly polite and nice and with a wondering eye getting something out of a chaffing dish right next to me. I don’t remember the details, but I think he was asked me about what I thought of this whole peer review thing we did, and I’m sure I told him it was fun because it was.
So then it turns out that this guy was there to give some kind of speech to all of the kids and all of the teachers and other adults that were at this thing. Well, really this was a speech for the teachers and adults and the kids were just there. I don’t remember how many were there, but I’m guessing maybe 100-200 people. I don’t remember anything Elbow talked about and I didn’t think a lot about it afterwards. But then a few years later and when I was first introduced to Elbow’s work in the comp/rhet theory class I took in my MFA program, I somehow figured out that I met that guy once years before and didn’t realize it at the time.
I can’t say I’ve read a ton of his writing, but what I have read I have found both smart and inspirational. It’s hard for me to think of anyone else who has had as much of an influence on shaping the field and the kind of work I do. May his memory be a blessing to his friends and family.
Cancún, Winter Break 2025
A few months ago, we had no plans for Winter (aka Spring) Break. I had suggested to Annette (who is the one who manages the finances in our household, and for good reason) that maybe it’d be nice to at least get out of town for a long weekend to someplace warmer. Wisely, Annette pointed out that we just bought a new house and we are going on a big trip to Europe this summer, so no, we don’t have the money. Okay, fine.
Then we got a check from the IRS for $2500 because (we think) it turns out we were eligible for COVID relief money from the feds we never claimed. Thanks, Biden. “C’mon, found money!” I said and Annette could not disagree.
We considered a couple options, but we landed on Cancún for two reasons. First, we’ve talked for years about checking out an “all-inclusive” resort option. We’ve been on four cruises now, and I for one am undecided about them: there’s stuff I like, there’s stuff I don’t like. But we talked about how an all-inclusive resort might be interesting to try because we imagined it to be like a cruise that didn’t go anywhere. Second, while Annette visited Cancún a couple of times in the late 80s and early 90s, I’ve never been anywhere in Mexico, so what the heck?
Would I do it again? Well, like cruises, there are good things and not good things, so I don’t know.
By Cancún, I mean the region more than the city– the closest we got to the actual city of Cancún was the airport. A lot of the resorts are in an area called the “hotel zone,” which, based on the pictures and video I’ve seen, seems a little more like the Vegas strip. If we were to come here again, I might be more inclined to stay in one of those places, though I suspect there’d be a whole lot more people and noise and foolishness. Oh also, fun fact I didn’t realize until I looked it up while writing this post: Cancún was built by the Mexican government in the 1970s specifically to bring in tourism.
We stayed in an area referred to as the Mayan Riviera, an area along the ocean and south of the city that is lined with all-inclusive resorts. We stayed at Dreams Riviera Cancún, which I think is a fairly average kind of example of these sorts of places. Dreams is a chain of all-inclusive resorts (think maybe the average person’s White Lotus) that I believe is owned by Hyatt. It’s around 20 miles from Cancún itself, tucked back off of the main road and along the coast, surrounded by jungle with other resorts.
This was a “family-friendly” resort, so there were a lot more kids around than I was planning on, but it was mostly fine. I suppose we could have stayed at an “adults only” place, but some of those places seem a little swarmy to me. Hard for me to estimate, but I think around half the people at the resort were from the US; it seemed at least as popular with people from Mexico and other places around the world. When we were checking in, at least four different staff members asked if we were here for a wedding and in the time we were at this relatively small place, there was at least four different weddings. I guess holding a wedding at an all-inclusive resort like this is very popular down here.
The main activity at the resort was sitting in the sun, wallowing in the pools, drinking lots of watered-down cocktails, people-watching, and eating. It’s not unlike the at sea days on a cruise ship. We had about a half a day of that on Monday and Friday (our travel days) and all day Tuesday and Thursday. My sense is that a lot of people come here for around a week and this is all they do. I am far too antsy for that, but it was enjoyable enough for two days.
Besides the resort, the main activity we had was an all-day trip to Chichen Itza. Fantastic experience, though a really long day– we left our hotel around 7:30 am and didn’t get back until about 9 pm– and that was mostly spent on the bus. Our first brief stop after about two hours on the road was in Valladolid, mostly to stretch our legs and to look around at the lovely town square, the 16th century buildings that lined it, and an impressive church the Spanish had built from the rocks of a Mayan temple they destroyed.
Then we stopped for shopping and lunch at a place specifically set up for tour busses like ours. It looked like our tour company had a monopoly on the place for at least the day because there were three or four other tour busses from the same company stopped when we were there. The tour workers, all men and some of them older than I would have expected, sat together for lunch, which seemed like a regular thing.
And then the main attraction, Chichen Itza. We were at the site only for a couple of hours, but that was enough to get at least a sense of the place. The tour guide gave us a lot of details I’ll skip now about the Mayans– the complexities of their calendar system, their knowledge of astronomy (the main temple, called in Spanish El Castillo, was designed such that on the spring equinox, the light from the rising sun descends down one of the sides and the light/shadow like the body of a snake), the numerology, the role of the “ballgame” that was played here (and throughout what is now Mexico and Central America), how human sacrifices worked, so on and so forth. One of the many things I didn’t realize until this trip is that Chichen Itza and the Mayan civilization had mostly collapsed for various reasons hundreds of years before the Spanish arrived. There were still Mayan native people living in the area, but the city and the temples were largely abandoned by then.
Annette came to Chichen Itza twice in the late 1980s/early 1990s (it’s a longer story she can tell), and a lot has changed. For one thing, they used to let tourists climb up the steps to the top of El Castillo; that stopped in the early 2000s. The other thing our guide told us is that when Chichen Itza was named one of the “new” modern wonders of the world, tourism blew up. Now there are hundreds of tour buses coming to the site every day, and there are also hundreds of vendors on the grounds selling every Mexican souvenir you can think of.
We got back on the bus and went to the last stop, which was a cenote which was in/next to a complex that had some stores and a restaurant, and also a bunch of spaces for big events like weddings and conventions. Apparently, there are thousands of these cenotes in the Yucatán Peninsula, some quite large and most filled with water. While there were several people in our group who did swim (they have changing rooms at the site), we did not. I don’t know how to swim, but beyond that, it seemed like a lot of trouble for getting into the water for maybe 20 minutes. It was quite beautiful though. Then back on the bus and the very long ride back to the resort.
It was a fun five days, definitely. Would I do it again? Hard to say.
The resort was lovely, the beaches and weather were great, the service was spectacular, no question. It was indeed “all-inclusive,” which is different from a cruise ship where they add on a 15-20% gratuity charge to the final bill. However, I did notice a lot of people passing their waiters or bartenders a dollar here and there to keep the drinks coming quicker.
A lot of the downsides for me are similar to the problems of cruises. I don’t think the other patrons of either of these experiences are “my kind of people,” if that makes sense. The service can be a little too fawning, which did make me feel like a (comparatively) rich American exploiting the poor workers picking up my towels and making my drinks. There’s a lot of wasted food and resources.
And I didn’t think much about the quality of the food or the booze. I have heard people raving about the quality of food on cruise ships before, but my experience has been that the food on cruise ships is essentially the best cafeteria food you’ve ever had. This was a notch or two below that. Annette thinks I’m just too much of a food snob (she has a point), though I did hear people making similar complaints.
So yes, this trip was a lot of fun, but I still have a lot of mixed feelings. If I were to do something like this again, I might try to push for a place with better food– if such a place exists and is in our budget. Or I might suggest a cruise instead, which does have the advantage of taking you to things to see and do beyond just a place to hang out.
You're braver than me. I think of cruises as petri dishes for norovirus. The Cancun stuff interested me a lot because I'll never get to go and I've always been curious. You pretty much convinced me that I probably wouldn't go: hanging on the beach is not my idea of fun.