During an idle moment I was recently talking with Googles Gemini about Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, and the bot cited Adonis as the source of the passage “I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer; / Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale.”: / Graze on my lips, and if those…
I teach my department’s career planning courses. English majors have many valuable skills, and I encourage them all to publish in any venue that interests them. An important part of my job involves encouraging students to seek out classroom, internship and part-time experiences that will help them pay the bills while they wait for Netflix…
This video explains why I tell my students that EBSCOhost is not what I’m looking for when I’m evaluating the “title of the database” part of their MLA bibliography citations. Similar:One of the benefits of teaching at a small college, with small classes…In a final reflection video for a freshm…AcademiaJournalists prefer plain language.AestheticsThesis…
Redefining the Dream: Justice, Faith and the Call to Change Within
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My classes are generally small enough that I have time to get to know each student’s writing. When a student who confuses “bias” and “biased” in a hand-written response later that day sends me an email later that day that uses “whom” and “betwixt,” I notice. I can’t prove a student is abusing AI, but…
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On my ride into work yesterday, my mother mentioned “That popular singer has a song about a Shakespeare character.” I had seen social media posts about Taylor Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia,” but hadn’t investigated yet. I watched the video right before teaching my “Shakespeare in Context” class, and I felt kind of overwhelmed. I…
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The following comment appeared recently on one of my YouTube lectures, “Historical Context for American Literature.” American???? So where are: CANADA, MEXICO, GUATEMALA, CUBA, COSTA RICA, BRAZIL, CHILE ARGENTINA, PERÚ, COLOMBIA, PANAMÁ, URUGUAY, PARAGUAY, EL SALVADOR, HONDURAS, VENEZUELA… ETC ETC ETC. STOP SAYING THE UNITED STATES IS AMERICA! Here’s how I responded: Geography and names…
If you have ever experienced this, you might recall the feeling of confusion after opening such a document, followed by frustration—Wait, what is this exactly?—before you begin to wonder if the sender simply used AI to generate large blocks of text instead of thinking it through. If this sounds familiar, you have been workslopped. —Harvard Business Review
From an essay that includes a reflection on discovering AI-fabricated quotes while peer-reviewing a scholarly essay for potential publication. (Academics don’t get paid for the labor of pre-reading scholarly drafts for potential review. An author who uses AI is squandering the resources of human peer-reviewers.) Humanistic study once promised — and for many, still delivers…
Students say they appreciate AI’s ability to organize ideas and improve flow, but many also recognize that what comes out often feels “robotic,” emotionally flat, or uncanny in tone. Still, convenience almost always wins. Reflection is hard, and AI makes things easy. I don’t fault students for wanting help. Writing about your life, especially the…
Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage. I’m almost at the halfway point of editing 35 short videos from the 2025 York Plays, presented in Toronto by a troupe of hundreds of performers in June. The event was a textually faithful but theatrically creative staging of some 50 plays that were performed as…
A cast of hundreds participated in a public medieval re-enactment dramatizing the Christian story from Creation through Final Judgement at the University of Toronto a few weeks ago. I attended as the event videographer. I had at least three cameras running at all times — sometimes five — while a roving camera also caught the…
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I’ll be in Toronto next week to observe and document a full production of the York Corpus Christi Cycle. The event, which took place annually for hundreds of years in the streets of the medieval city of York, dramatizes the Christian salvation story from the creation of the universe to the final judgement. The plays,…
We’re drawn to activities that invite us to grow, by trying and trying again, because we want to evolve as people. Life is mostly repetitive—wake, eat, work, sleep, repeat—and each day can feel like an unsatisfying circle. But repetition with variation broadens us. It makes our circular days into spiralling journeys. “The spiral is a…
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