Writing Together: A Teaching Experiment (guest post)

“I’m very fond of the take-home essay, as there’s something irreplaceable about the experience of articulating a theory over the course of multiple weeks—doing background research, letting the ideas marinate in one’s subconsciousness, and chiseling away at the draft until every word is perfectly placed.” That’s Tom Kaspers (University of Chicago), expressing a feeling many professors have about teaching in the early days of the AI era. Yet unlike many who have either ignored their students’ AI use on take-home essays, or have eliminated that kind of assignment from their courses, Kaspers “set out to try to save this experience.” In the guest post, below, a follow-up to a piece he wrote for the Boston Globe, he describes how he did it. As he notes, his method won’t work for all kinds of courses, but it may work for some. [A “Cadavre Exquis” by Jacqueline Lamba, Yves Tanguy, and André Breton] Writing Together: A Teaching Experiment by Tom Kaspers This past winter, I developed a new kind…