Grumblings about Grammarly

A few days ago, I was noting on LinkedIn that the Grammarly ads I keep seeing there seem to substitute efficiency for learning. The "influencers"(?) who talk about how they use it suggest that it gives them more confidence as writers, but all I can see from the way that they use it is that it's doing all the work and they're just accepting its inputs. How does that give you confidence as a writer? Then there's this post from Jason Gulya, commenting on an announcement from Grammarly--now known as Go:

As he adds in a comment, "It seems harder and harder these days to find spaces that value productive struggle and sitting with a problem, before something or someone comes in to help."

Teaching Update

I thought I'd write a little about my First-Year Writing classes in which we're exploring and writing about the university's archives and special collections. The students just turned in the final drafts of their exploratory essays, where they were supposed to, as I told them several times, "go from what you already know about the archival site you're looking at to what questions you have that you can try to answer in future research." That is, they spent some time reading in the archival collections of Northeastern University or the special collections of a social movement organization of their choice to identify a topic of interest. Then they read more closely in those archives and also tried to find relevant secondary sources. Then they summarized what they had learned and wrote about what questions they still had. 

We've visited the archives 3 times so far as a class--the first for a more general introduction to the archives and the other two to give them a chance to do research. (Most of the students are engineering majors and don't have a great deal of time to visit the archives outside of class. Fortunately, the library also has an extensive collection of digitized records that they can use.) 

When I asked them about the experience of doing the research, one frequent complaint was that they wish their process could be more efficient. This led me to realize that something I should be emphasizing in this class is the value of going more slowly, of not trying to do everything "efficiently." Sure, there are some ways that we can improve our experience and make it more efficient, like learning how to write good search terms for the digitized records, using research tools like Zotero or Google Keep for recording notes, and (at minimum!) recording what box and folder they found that interesting flyer in. (By the way, am I the only person who write "flyer" instead of "flier" anymore?) But I realized that in this course, I could perhaps try to stress the value of going slowly to develop familiarity with the archives and to develop questions about the collection they're working with. I preached to them a bit about this, though I don't know how they took it. I think some of them, particularly the ones who seem really connected to their topics, liked the idea, but some students might just think it's all boring. Guess I'll find out at the end of the semester. Maybe this is something I should talk about at the beginning of the semester the next time I teach this course. 

As I said before, I'm not trying to turn them into historians, but maybe they can develop a historical perspective on Northeastern or Boston. That would be valuable. And I have to admit that I'm learning a lot about Northeastern and Boston through their work! Lots of topics that I didn't know much (or anything) about in the past, like Northeastern's Faculty Wives organization, the African American Master Artist in Residence Program at Northeastern, La Alianza Hispana and Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción, the Chinese Progressive Association and the Asian American Resource Workshop, Pride at Work, Freedom House, Roxbury Youth Council, etc. 

Now we're working on their final projects, where they're going to try to answer those research questions. I've given them options on how they can present their work. We'll talk more about that in class tomorrow. 

Research Update

Last week I received the proof of my paper about George H. Kerr that will come out in the Journal of American-East Asian Relations by the end of this year (I hope!). It's about his struggles to write about what he saw and experienced in postwar Taiwan--the events leading up to and immediately following the March Massacres of 1947. I was able to locate correspondence between Kerr and William Holland of the Institute of Pacific Relations that cleared up (though not entirely!) what happened to prevent the earlier version of what eventually became his most famous work, Formosa Betrayed. I'll let you know when that comes out.

In the meantime, I'm still working with my colleagues from Taiwan and Japan on the biography of Kerr. There have been some delays in the process (as is inevitably the case, I think), so I'm not sure when the book will be out, but it will probably be done next year. (Fingers crossed!)

I've also been invited to take part in a roundtable next summer about the Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association's work in China and Taiwan. If our proposal is accepted, it'll be a chance for me to reconnect with the research I did (and the people I worked with) on Shansi in Taiwan. The last piece I wrote about that research was published in 2013 in a collection about Taiwan church history. It's interesting that this is coming back again at this point in my life. I wonder where it will lead...

No "new book(s) in the former native speaker's library" for a while

Since professional development funds in my college have been cut by 80% and the new purchasing/reimbursement system is unnecessarily baroque (no disrespect to Baroque--I actually like the period's art and music!), I've stopped buying books for the near future. 

It has been tough--I keep seeing books like Anna Beth Keim's Heaven Does Not Block All Roads: A History of Taiwan Through the Life of Huang Chin-tao that I'd like to get. 

On the other hand, maybe it will force me to read the books I already own. (Actually, all I'm reading these days is student work and drafts of my co-authors' chapters for the GHK biography.)

As for my professional development money? When "donation day" comes around, I'll tell them to donate it to the school...

"Representing Taiwan in DC: How Taiwanese Americans Can Bridge Culture and Policy"

This looks interesting...

Making and eating sweet potato strips (蕃薯籤) during WW II

My wife recommended this video to me. On my YouTube, there are English subtitles in addition to the Chinese subtitles. So even if you don't understand Taiwanese, this should be understandable, I hope. 

It's about what the grandmother and her family ate when she was a kid during World War II: sweet potato strips (蕃薯籤). It gets into the history of wartime Taiwan--what ordinary people experienced. 

She mentions the May 17, 1945, bombing of the Keishu Sugar Plant (溪州糖廠 [Chinese]) in Changhua. This was part of the series of bombing raids the US conducted on Taiwan in the last years of the war. Here's an interesting article on that history and how it was buried during the time that the KMT wanted to deemphasize the fact that the US was bombing the "enemy"--Taiwan wasn't part of China at that time. In the video, the grandmother talks about how terrifying it was back then. People would sit around in the courtyard of their traditional Taiwanese homes and say, "We're all here tonight, but we don't know what will happen tomorrow."

"Taiwan’s Latest Food Trend: The Return of Movable Feasts"

This looks like a good short video for a future class I might work on (once I get everything else done)...

This is a good video, too, although I don't like the way the interviewer jumps between the two interviewees, Clarissa Wei and Bobby Chinn. 

Another new book in the former native speaker's library

T. C. Brown, Made in Taiwan. Proving Press, 2025

I heard about this book via a LinkedIn link to this review by David Frazier. Because my dissertation was about the experiences of a different group of young people who were in Taichung--some around the same time as Brown--I'm curious to see how his impressions of Taiwan compare to theirs. 

The young people I wrote about were Oberlin College graduates who were teaching English at Tunghai University for two years as part of a fellowship program run by the Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association. While I know that some of the "reps" (as they called the Oberlin Shansi representatives at the time) visited the Ch'ing Ch'uan Kang (清泉崗, also known as CCK) military base mainly to buy American products at the PX. There was some association between some reps and the servicemen there too, as I recall.

Interestingly, I just received an invitation to participate on a roundtable discussion about Oberlin-in-Taiwan next summer. Stay tuned for more on that...

My on-ground teaching starts tomorrow. Wish me luck!