Photo by Michael Cali
Essays
Jim publishes essays about education, writing, literature, and religion on a regular basis. He had been writing a monthly column for the Chronicle of Higher Education for twenty years, with close to two hundred essays in print as of 2023. Other venues which have featured Jim’s work include Time, The Conversation, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Commonweal, Writer’s Chronicle, and more. See below for recent work.
Love Means Answering the Mail
Commonweal
November 27, 2021
In the fall of 1943, in a world that seemed to have gone mad with war and division, Dorothy Day decided to take a year-long retreat from her duties at the Catholic Worker to reflect, pray, and write. For nearly a decade she had been working continuously to build up the fledgling Catholic Worker movement—publishing the newspaper, funding houses of hospitality, living in community with the destitute and the difficult, traveling and speaking—not to mention raising a daughter as a single parent. Everyone seemed to want or need something from her.
The calls for help from every quarter of her life had come to feel like distractions that were interfering with what she viewed as her primary vocation: writing. Although we revere Day now for her commitment to social justice, she identified herself first as a writer. Jim Forest, Day’s biographer who worked and lived with her wrote, “Dorothy was a writer. There was always a notebook in her bag. She seemed endlessly to be taking notes and writing. Note-taking and journaling were as much a part of Dorothy as breathing.” Her output included not only spiritual masterpieces like The Long Loneliness, but also a massive catalog of diary entries and letters, published selections of which each run to six hundred pages or more. She produced her monthly column for the Catholic Worker newspaper, “On Pilgrimage,” for many decades.
Want to tear students from their phones? Learn their names
TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION
September 16, 2021
The challenge of cultivating student attention has never been more intense than it will be in the coming academic year. Faculty have been battling the distracting power of student devices in the classroom for a decade or two, and during the pandemic the integration of screens into education has intensified. Continuous engagement with our devices over the past 18 months will likely make it more challenging for students to pull their eyes away from their screens and focus on in-person classroom activities.
However, we set ourselves on a quixotic quest if we try to remove all distractions from our courses. Distractions are everywhere in our lives; even without our devices, we can be troubled by our worries and anxieties. Educators have expressed concern about the easily distracted human brain as far back as ancient Greece, when Aristotle described how music lovers had trouble paying attention to arguments when they heard a flute playing nearby.
Should We Stop Grading Student Participation?
Chronicle of higher Education
April 9, 2021
When I began teaching, I adopted the common practice of grading student participation. I set aside 10 percent of my students’ grades for that purpose, and did my best to keep track of how much they spoke up in class. That was challenging, especially early in my career, when in a typical semester I was teaching three or four courses of 20 to 30 students each. I had no formal system for tracking who spoke and how often — I simply relied on my observations and recollections.
Practically speaking, I tended to use the class-participation score to reward students who I felt deserved a grade boost at the end of the semester. When I was sitting down to assign final grades, I would first look at how they did on papers, tests, and projects, and then at their class participation. If they’d participated a lot, I would give them an A in that category, and it might raise their final grade from, say, a B to a B-plus. If they didn’t participate much, I didn’t punish them for it — I would just match their participation score to whatever grade they had earned for the other 90 percent of the course, so their overall grade would remain the same.
Even as I write these words, I am cringing at the thought that I engaged in this pedagogical practice for a good dozen years or more . . .
Distracted Minds: Why You Should Teach Like Poet
Chronicle of Higher Education
December 14, 2020
Every Sunday morning of my childhood, my father would pile the family into our station wagon and drive two miles from our home in suburban Cleveland to our local church. Part of this route involved passing a gas station that was, at some point in my early teens, torn down and temporarily replaced with a dirt lot. We had been driving by this new dirt lot for at least a month when, one sleepy Sunday morning, my father stared at it and exclaimed in surprise: “Hey, the gas station’s gone!” This was met with laughter and incredulity from the rest of us, who had seen the gas station disappear many weeks ago.
Routine is a great deadener of attention. When you drive the same route, the scenery begins to fade into the background, and you barely see it anymore. When you follow the same routines at home, folding the laundry or doing the dishes, your mind goes on automatic pilot.
Likewise, routines can deaden the attention of students in our courses. They come into the same classrooms every day — in person or online — and experience the same generic suite of teaching activities: listen to a lecture, take notes, ask some questions, talk in groups. Even if we are mixing up our teaching strategies, as we should, they will eventually become routine enough that students will check in to class physically, but their minds are somewhere out of the room . . .
With Kids Spending More Waking Hours On Screens Than Ever, Here’s What Parents Need to Worry About
the conversation
July 15, 2020
Millions of working parents have spent months largely trapped in their homes with their children. Many are trying to get their jobs done remotely in the constant presence of their kids, and they are desperate for some peace and quiet.
Many mothers and fathers have sought any available remedy that would enable them to do their jobs and fight cabin fever – including some who have given their children a free pass on video games, social media and television. One survey of more than 3,000 parents found that screen time for their kids had increased by 500% during the pandemic . . .
How to Teach a Good First Day of Class
Chronicle of higher Education
January 4, 2019
I was 21 years old when I first stepped into a college classroom as an instructor. My master’s program had assigned me to teach a composition course and gave me a brief orientation to teaching the week before the semester began. I was so close in age to my students, so nervous about how they would perceive me, and so uncertain about what I was doing that I had precisely one goal for the first day of the semester: Get through it.
I managed to achieve that modest goal. But over the course of the next couple of decades of full-time teaching, I have become much more aware of the extent to which the first day of class sets the tone for everything that follows. In her book, The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom With the Science of Emotion, the psychologist Sarah Rose Cavanagh explores how humans quickly make initial judgments of people, on the basis of thin slices of evidence. “On the first few days of class,” she explains, “students will be forming their impressions of you, and this impression may be more important than much of what you do later” . . .
Small Changes in Teaching: The First 5 Minutes of Class
Chronicle of higher Education
January 11, 2016
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
In a conversation I had with Ken Bain, my longtime mentor and favorite education writer, he cited that quote — the first sentence of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude — as one of the great openings in literary history. It’s hard to disagree: The sentence plunges us immediately into a drama, acquaints us with a character on the brink of death, and yet intrigues us with the reference to his long-forgotten (and curiosity-inducing) memory. That sentence makes us want to keep reading . . .