Getting Recognized at the NCTE Convention

My "celebrity for a day" experience.

The first indication I was in a strange place was at 6:30am as I stepped off the hotel elevator after gasping my way through a 30 minute treadmill hike in Denver’s insufficient air and hearing a woman ask, “Are you John Warner?”

It is hard to overstate how anonymous the life of a writer is the vast majority of the time. When I meet a stranger and they ask what I do and I say that I’m writer and they ask if they would have ever read something I’d written my answer is always, “Almost definitely not.”

I’ve now learned that the one place on Earth where this is not necessarily true is the annual convention of the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) convention where I had the privilege of appearing on a panel, and then delivering a “luncheon keynote” to the college section while some nice folks ate their mushroom chicken over risotto with asparagus spears and yogurt parfait deserts.

The NCTE convention gathers thousands of teachers who are dedicated to the proposition that reading and writing matters. I had only previously met a small handful of attendees, but it was very clear from even before I hit the convention floor that these are my people.

I’d never attended NCTE before because of the nature of my employment in higher education, contingent appointments without monetary support for travel or professional development. I kept thinking about how even though there were many thousands of people present, they represent a fraction of those who would like to attend.

It’s been a whirlwind couple of days. I was excited to see Percival Everett in conversation with incoming NCTE president Antero Garcia. As you would expect, Everett was a laconic and quick witted personality, joking (or not) about how thoroughly sick he was of his NBA and Pulitzer winning novel James before reading an excerpt from it. Garcia did an amazing job keeping up with Everett, including topping an Everett reference to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue album (the best selling jazz album of all time at 6 million copies) with a joke of his own.

Everett was using Kind of Blue as a an example of the limits of commercial appeal of work that strives for what we might as well call art, noting that sales are not a great metric for quality and Garcia observed that the title of the first track on the album was fitting, “So What.”

I shared a panel with Sam Reed a teacher and entrepreneur and journalist/writer Vauhini Vara, author of both the wonderful novel (and Pulitzer finalist) The Immortal King Rao, and a nonfiction book, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age which blends memoir, essay and reportage into a exploration of what it means to live with and through technology in this moment. Sam is working daily with students helping them to discover their authentic selves even as they’re surrounded by technology. Vauhini kept reminding us that the cultural messaging we’re receiving about AI, its power, its inevitability, is marketing coming from AI companies.

I have become mostly comfortable with public presentations, though I will admit to some nerves prior to the luncheon keynote. I was in a room with serious people. Good people, open-minded people, but serious. I wanted to do the time justice.

The title of the talk was “Let’s Teach Writing…Rather Than Automation-Assisted Document Production.” My conviction that the existence of text extrusion machines makes allowing students to write more important than ever grows by the day. I spoke to a number of educators who testify that their students are crying out for authentic connections, and what better way to achieve this than writing?

But as I discussed in the presentation, there’s many barriers, a society that seems to devalue both teaching and writing, a culture that prizes speed and efficiency of production - two things that have no salience when it comes to writing.

Let’s not forget our burgeoning authoritarian/tech oligarch alliance.

But one of the things I insisted on is that we really do know how to teach writing. That is not a problem that needs solving. The hard part is that teaching writing is hugely context dependent and requires…well…teachers. As I argued in Why They Can’t Write we tried to solve this difficulty with standardization, but all this did was deny a couple of generations of students a chance to write.

The hopeful part is that the outputs of large language models are demonstrating daily that there is a difference between human writing and automated text extrusions. At the exhibit hall there were long lines for signings of real books by real authors at publisher booths while the AI detector and chatbot writing “coach” booths had a bunch of unclaimed swag and lonely representatives.

It was heartening to be among so many people who are engaging in the same challenges. It was, frankly, shocking to have multiple people say that they use The Writer’s Practice in their classes and that it works!

I did not anticipate what it would mean to be recognized. For the most part I’m happy to spend my time alone with my thoughts and then sharing those thoughts through mediums like this, but at least for a couple of days, it was nice to be seen.

As I reflect on the whole thing, my belief that this is all students want, to be seen, to be recognized. The primary, perhaps the only way to be recognized in school contexts is through grades, but I know students need and desire so much more. It’s clear that interfacing with bots is not going to do anything to fulfill those needs. I think the vast majority of teachers at the NCTE convention recognize that the AI companies are not motivated to ease the burdens of their work, but to insinuate themselves in the relationships between teachers and students. The open question is whether there is the will to resist the forces that insist that a less-human future will usher in some kind of utopia.

I think it’s the opposite. Writing is more than words.

I’m writing this in the minutes before I board my flight home. I’m tired. They really don’t have enough oxygen in this city, but at least for now, my spirit feels sufficiently buoyant that it could carry me home, no plane required.

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune, I share my experience of reading the deeply creepy new novel, The Sofa, by Sam Munson.

At Inside Higher Ed I talked to long time education reporter Jeff Young about his new podcast, Learning Curve.

At Academic Freedom on the Line I looked at the ways that state legislatures and institutional boards are using the threats of the Trump administration as cover to erode the academic freedom of faculty, and the freedom to learn for students.

The National Book Award winners were announced this week.

Over at his newsletter Sean deLone has a helpful inside publishing look at the distinctions between commercial, literary, and upmarket fiction. Earlier at this newsletter I discussed why I often find upmarket fiction unsatisfying.

Two books were recently disqualified from a major New Zealand book award for having AI-generated covers. The authors didn’t know their publishers had done this.

I found this David Marchese interview of John Green interesting reading.

And via my friends McSweeney's a piece in honor of this week’s coming holiday.

Post-Dinner Interview with a Twelve-Year-Old Who Sat at the Grown-Ups' Table for the First Time on Thanksgiving

Recommendations

Boarding for my flight is happening and I have to put this thing to bed so no time to mine the recommendations this week, but I’m always collecting requests, and given that you folks are all readers, maybe you can put some recommendations in the comments.

Thanks to everyone at NCTE who were good enough to invite me to participate, and thanks to everyone I met who had kind words to say about my work. My gratitude can’t be expressed.

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate, a group which includes me and mine.

JW
The Biblioracle