I celebrate the labor movement on May 1 and syllabuses on the first Monday in September.
This semester I volunteered to teach in Rutgers’s revamped first-year writing course, College Writing (the Course Formerly Known As Expos). My last first-year writing course was a while ago, when we still used styluses and clay tablets, but I think I am ready to meet the younger generation where they are and make the leap forward to quill pens. The course-wide syllabus gives a sense of the revamped focus of this course on self-conscious practice with multiple genres, occasions, and media of writing.
The other course continues my streak of science-fiction teaching, this time in Interdisciplinary Honors guise: Science/Fiction: Ghosts in the Machine. The focus is on fictional machine intelligences, with occasional glimpses into philosophical, computational, and cognitive perspectives on the questions they raise. My qualifications for the interdisciplinary part of the course include having read Gödel, Escher, Bach at a vulnerable age and knowing a dimension-reduction technique when I see one.