Time Strategies

Based on this summer, I know I'm going to have trouble managing my time this Fall. One of the main decisions I need to make is to LIMIT the time I spend reading news.

During the summer, it made sense to keep up with the news: COVID news, news about OU's Fall semester plans, etc. I wanted to be a well-informed participant in those discussions (even though, in the end, I don't think the OU administration really listened to what faculty, staff, or students were saying).

Now, though, the semester has started, and I really want to focus my time and efforts on making it a good semester in these classes. I built up a really good set of workflow/time strategies for my writing this summer, and now I hope I can continue that into the Fall.

My goal is going to be to spend one hour every day doing story-writing for the classes. I might make it my first thing to do in the morning... and, if that is not working out, then I might try getting up an hour earlier. Not my favorite thing to do, but it need be, I can do that.

Also, I didn't do any new reading for this assignment, but I'm going to bookmark some items in my Twitter feed, perhaps worth using? I'll ponder that later (I still haven't got a really good content management strategy for Twitter stuff lately; I need to do that!)

• 3 Reasons Students Procrastinate—and How to Help Them Stop
• Beat Procrastination Once and For All
• Why You Procrastinate (It Has Nothing to Do With Self-Control)
• Procrastination Isn't a Time Management Problem, It's an Emotional Problem
• How to win the emotional battle of procrastination
• Inquire: Are We Born Procrastinators?
• Can Procrastination Be a Good Thing? (PBS video)

And here's a fun one from Debbie Ridpath-Ohi:

And this is also from Debbie: Just jump in and start writing! :-)

Technology Thoughts for the Fall

For this post, I'm taking a minute to look through the Tech Tips to figure out some thing I can/should/must do as the semester gets started. I never get around to doing everything I want to do there, but here are some quick thoughts:

• remove NEW labels from last semester's new tips
• MUST update the Blogger tips for the new interface
• update Twine to include the amazing pandemic twines
• more Canva tips? (use ungrading book quotes maybe?)
• do some more advance Google Sites tips
• maybe find some writing space with word counter (NaNoWriMo?)
• write up a Pressbooks section!
• more SoundCloud tips!

I really hope some students will want to join in on a book publishing experience with Pressbooks. I'll start weaving that into the class with the Story assignment in Week 2 (encouraging people to try 3 100-word stories if they want, for example, or 100- and 200- to get a sense of the difference in length), and then with the Microfictions option... plus I need to remember to update the Story Lab to emphasize that as an option too.

SO GLAD that I found Pressbooks. I hope it will help make this a better semester in this class, despite all the pandemic stress.

Assignments for Fall 2020... including something new

For this assignment, I'm not writing from a student perspective but from a teacher perspective, thinking about changes for this semester. I'm pretty happy with the assignment flow in the class, but I decided to tinker with the extra credit to reorganize it a bit, making it more clear and also making room for something new this semester. Right now the class works pretty much through the individual spaces, but I want to try to create a group space for sharing videos and graphics (I'll use a Padlet), so there's a new extra credit option for that.

So, here's how the extra credit array will look this semester:

Extra Reading OR Comments. [no change, but now either/or]
Extra Writing: Microfictions. [which will contain the old biofiction; I need to rework this whole area.]
Wikipedia Trail. [no change]
Tech Tip. [need to add/delete/update tips]
Mindset OR H.E.A.R.T. [I need to revise the instructions for this combination.]
Check-in and Connect. [new; see below]
Famous Last Words. [no change]
Back-up and Review. [no change]

And here are the things I need to do for the new Check-In/Connection item:

1. Create a Google Form with a stress check, maybe on a scale of 1 to 6: things are great, things are good, things are okay, some stress, a lot of stress, too much stress! I created that form for this assignment. With cats. :-)

2. Create a Padlet (I can repurpose that music one from last Spring), put it in Canvas, and write up some tips on adding graphics to Padlet and adding music videos.

3. Write up an instructions page for this extra credit option.

4. Make sure the Declarations and points all match up in Canvas by swapping out the HEART html and image file.

5. Update all the Weekly pages with the new array.

I might play with this some more, but I was thinking this could be something to make the stress check form more fun:

Here's the form:

Growth Mindset and the Power of P/NP

For the growth mindset post this semester, I want to write about something that happened last Spring, when OU allowed students to choose P/NP grading.

I thought that was GREAT, and I participated very actively in a movement at Twitter with the hashtag #PassFailNation to promote the adoption of P/NP grading at schools everywhere. Some schools even got rid of letter grading completely (a list of those schools if you are curious), although most schools took the route OU did: teachers recorded letter grades as usual, and then students had the option to transfer that to a P/NP option.

As a teacher, I can definitely see the value of having a threshold that constitutes passing a class for credit. There are some specific things that you must do and/or specific things that you must learn. You do/learn those things, and then you have passed the class, and that shows up on your transcript. That makes perfect sense, and it's easy to explain. If OU wanted me to create a single paragraph description of what it means to "pass" this class, I could do that, and that paragraph could even be included as part of the transcript. That paragraph would not show everything that a student did/learned in the class, but it would explain what they did in order to pass the class. Which is useful to know!

But A-B-C-D is just ridiculous. That doesn't tell anybody anything specific about what a student did; you cannot really conclude anything for certain based on looking at those letters on a transcript. It's just an arbitrary rating (usually based on averaging test scores, ugh) that then allows the university to rank students against each other. It's meaningless, and yet it dominates most students' lives and occupies a huge part of their intellectual attention and emotional energy throughout all the years of school. (And it's no fun for teachers either.)

Grades are all about rating and ranking and avoiding mistakes at all costs; that, in short, is why grades are not a good way to promote growth and real learning. P/NP works better: it allows the university to carry out the bureaucratic business of awarding credit for courses without getting in the way of growth and learning the way that grades do.

So, OU has not announced whether it will offer the P/NP option again this semester, but I hope that they will. Even better: I wish they would adopt P/NP grading for all Gen. Ed. classes all the time. People seem to think grades are necessary in major classes to rate/rank students in a major (I disagree... but hey, I just teach Gen. Ed.; that's all I have to worry about). Anyway, I was really glad about the P/NP option last Spring, and now I can hope for it to happen again.

Here's a graphic I made for a presentation on P/NP grading that I did at a (virtual) conference this summer; I say: take the red pill! alternate grading all the time... not just during the pandemic.

And if OU does adopt a P/NP policy for this Fall, I will gladly update this post with that information! Fingers crossed......

more at:

OKSummit.LauraGibbs.net

Storybook Favorites... and thinking about new projects to come!

I'm glad to be back here blogging again... for this Storybook Favorites post, I decided to look back over some of the projects I did in the past for this class to help me figure out some priorities for this semester's projects! For the first time, I'm going to be doing both classes (this Fall is going to be so weird, which means: why not? I might as well give it a try!) ... and I want to try to blend my class projects with the Tiny Tales work I am doing, which means: Sufi stories, Anansi, Hanuman, Krishna, Ramayana and Mahabharata stuff. I'm not sure what that will mean in terms of my class projects, but there will be lots of stories going on.

So, last semester I did this "tiny tales" project with Ramayana stories: Big Epic, Tiny Stories: Microfiction from the Ramayana. I included stories about Hanuman, Rama, and Ravana, and I like how it turned out. The layout of the 100-word stories looked good! So maybe this time I could do something like that with stories about women of the Ramayana, or maybe a woman of the Epics so I could pick a couple of women from the Ramayana and a couple of women from the Mahabharata!

Another relevant project is this one I did a while ago about Hanuman: Hanuman in the Ramakien: Tales of the Monkey Warrior. Those were long stories (I hit the 1000-word maximum every time!), so maybe I could back through the Ramakien and take a different approach, focusing on teeny-tiny stories instead of the big stories.

And here's probably my favorite project I've done for Myth-Folklore (since I really do love chain tales so much!): Chain Tale Anthology: One Thing Leads to Another. Chain tales are obviously more fun when they are expanded, but I've also been able to include some chain tales in my "tiny tales" books too, so maybe I could do a fun project where I picked some chain tales and told them BOTH ways, once as a 100-word story, and then in a fuller version. If I am doing all tiny-tales for the Indian Epics project, then this chain tale project might be fun to do so that I could get some practice writing longer stories this semester too!

Tucson, Cracow, Berkeley... My Favorite Places

Like other returning students, I'm re-using my favorite place blog post from last time, but adding in some new pictures. So, here are my three favorite places (because I cannot choose just one!).


Tucson, Arizona. I lived in Tucson in the 1970s when I was a little kid, and of the many places we lived, Tucson was my favorite. It is so beautiful! We lived in a house in the foothills of the Catalina mountains which you can see here. Aren't the saguaros beautiful?

(Sabino Canyon in the Catalinas:
Wikimedia Commons)

The saguaro blossom is the state flower of Arizona:

(photo by Alan Levine)

Kraków (Cracow), Poland. I did a "study abroad" in the summer of 1985 — and what an adventure! I was a Polish major in college, so getting to live in Poland that summer was a dream come true. Here's a picture of the "Sukiennice" ("The Cloth Hall") on the main town square in Kraków:

(Stary Rynek: Wikimedia Commons)

I stayed in a dormitory called Dom Piast, and it's still going strong (the Piasts were the first kings of Poland):

(Dom Studencki Piast: PolHotels.com)

After I graduated from college I moved to Poland and lived there for a while, near Płock; here's a picture of Płock; it is located on the Wisła (Vistula) river, the same river that runs through Warsaw:

(Płock: Nocowanie)

Berkeley, California. I lived in the Bay Area for over 10 years, and I guess it is the place I love the most. For sure it is the place I know best. I moved to San Francisco after graduating from high school because it seemed like the most exciting place to be ... and it was! Then, after working as a secretary for a year, I decided to go to college, so I went to Berkeley. After graduating from Berkeley in 1986, I lived in other places, but for grad school I went back to Berkeley again; that was in the 1990s. It's a great place and is definitely a big part of who I am! Here is a beautiful picture that shows the Campanile (bell tower) on the Berkeley campus, with San Francisco Bay in the background.

(Campanile seen from the Stadium,

photo by Tristan Harward)

Here is the campus building where I took most of my classes: Dwinelle Hall, home to the departments of Classics, Slavic Languages, and South Asian Studies:

(Dwinelle Hall)

And here is the best building of all (for me, bookaholic that I am): Doe Library.

(Doe at sunset)