The Jenn Co.

The Jenn Co. Probably struggling to roll up the projector screen. Professor POVs on: college life, rhetoric, Disney Parks, circus arts, & Flarda. Come learn with me!

08/25/2026

Storytime. 📖

When I taught high school, my friend joked she’d make me a t-shirt that said “I’ll do it” — because like many teachers, it was easier for me to just do something myself than to delegate it.

That followed me to the job I have now. When I started directing this program, I had an assistant director — but I wasn’t used to having continuous help. I didn’t know how to delegate. I hid in my office the first few months not knowing what to ask her to do, because I wasn’t used to asking for help.

What I realized: when I withhold the opportunity for someone else to do their job, or take ownership of a project, in trying not to be selfish, I was actually being selfish.

When I started to think about delegation as allowing people the opportunity to shine on their own, it changed my dynamic.

Teachers, professors, program directors: how many of you struggle with delegation?

08/24/2026

Students think they know what office hours are all about. It’s a place to go if you have questions from class or if you need help. But what students are missing out on is that it’s also a place for students to get to know their professor — and vice versa.

When students come to my office, they ask a question, and then suddenly we’re talking about the kind of music they listen to, the hobbies I have, the things that make all of us feel like a normal person outside of academia.

That’s the part I absolutely love most about office hours. They’re not *just* for feedback, or missing assignments, or clarifying questions. They are a place where students realize their faculty are people — and where faculty realize their students are people too.

What is something surprising you learned by going to a professor‘s office hours? Or faculty, what’s something memorable you learned about a student who came to your office hours?

08/22/2026

One of the mistakes my college students make when they begin writing is the same mistake high school seniors make when writing their college application essays/personal statements: they don’t look at sample essays before they begin writing.

As a result, they don’t understand what the features of the genre are. And when you don’t understand the genre, you’re writing based on what people (or AI) have told you, and that doesn’t give you a complete sense of what you should actually be doing.

This student had done what a lot of people on the Internet tell students to do, and had really focused on her introduction. She had a beautiful intro, a great metaphor. Then the essay stopped saying anything about her. It was lovely, but it wasn’t giving the reader any insight into who she was. It wasn’t that this writer is not capable because she’s a strong writer. That’s obvious from her first draft.

I recommended she look at some sample essays on Johns Hopkins’ Essays That Worked website and look for patterns. I also recommended she watch my free tutorial videos on connecting your topic to your non-cognitive strengths. These are what you want the reader to know about you. Once she realized her essay needed to show her noncognitive strengths, and once she’d looked at some samples, she knew exactly what she needed to do. She didn’t need my help, she just needed to be pointed in the right direction.

My tutorial videos will guide you through analyzing sample essays and coming up with a topic if you don’t have one, or making sure your topic reveals your noncognitive strengths if you do. It’s free, and it takes less than 30 minutes to go from stuck to unstuck, from confusion to clarity and confidence.

If you have a start to your draft but don’t know where to go, comment “tutorial,” and I’ll send you the link.

08/20/2026

I made this for my students in my college level intermediate rhetoric course. I typically do not assign textbook reading in my courses. We usually read academic essays or journal articles written by scholars in writing studies or rhetoric. But in this class, I am using a textbook, and I want to make sure my students know how to read it efficiently.

I know that it is popular to complain about the current young generation as incapable of reading or uninterested in reading, but I have lived long enough to remember when Gen X said that about millennials and when now millennials are saying that about Gen Z. And, in fact, if we go back to the early Greeks, Socrates was complaining that the youth of his time were going to be ruined academically because they were starting to write things down and would not rely on their memory. So I do not agree that students today cannot read, but I do think we need to do a better job of providing them strategies to deal with challenging reading. Why students are not getting challenging reading leading up until college is a different question.

08/18/2026

Grades do not automatically ensure rigor.

The University of Michigan will be having all of their freshmen in fall 2027 have pass fail grades instead of A, B, C, D, F. The university is saying that it is because of students’ mental health and helping them transition from high school to college. A lot of commenters are interpreting that as Michigan making their classes easier; they claim pass/fail is certainly easier than a graded class.

As someone who has taught at a college that does not give letter grades for 12 years, and that college has recently started to offer the approximation of grades, I can tell you it is incorrect to assume that pass fail is less rigorous than graded. In fact, pass fail can be much more rigorous than graded, because the bar is set where it is set, and students have to clear it or they don’t.

There is nothing that says that if you give a passing grade at a college as a D, pass fail means that in order to pass, they have to get a D or above. That’s incorrect. You could set the bar at what you would normally grade as A work, but then that becomes your pass bar. You can raise the bar and put it wherever you like, whereas you are more restricted to having many bars in a graded system.

Students, when they are not obsessing over doing the work to get a grade, can focus more on learning and taking risks and trying new things, and not just relying on what’s worked for them in the past. Which is arguably the point of education.

Take it from me, as someone who’s taught at a college that does not give letter grades and is now giving grades. It was actually much easier for us to hold students to a higher standard and to foster more rigor in our students’ work than it is in a graded system.

08/17/2026

What nobody tells you about higher education is that it can be very isolating not only for students, but also for faculty and staff who work at a university.

People tend to be siloed or isolated in their offices, their programs, or sometimes their dorm rooms.

It’s nice to not always eat by yourself. So I’m starting these lunches. I’ll be doing them throughout this academic year. Today I just want to talk about what we’re all excited about, what we’re looking forward to this semester. I’m sharing a little information about a new course I’m teaching that I’m excited about — and also a little nervous about — because you never really know how things are going to go the first time you teach them.

I’d love to hear from y’all. What are you looking forward to this semester — either in your own classes that you’re taking, or in the classes you’re teaching, or in the job you’re doing for the university?

08/14/2026

The semester hasn't even started, and I'm definitely not already planning my next trip.

I'm definitely not thinking where I want to go.

I'm definitely not watching YouTube vlogs about Virgin Voyages.

I'm definitely not looking up flights leaving from multiple airports, flying into multiple airports, to determine the best options to get to multiple hypothetical destinations.

I'm definitely not reading TripAdvisor, Reddit, and Instagram to triangulate reviews.

I'm definitely not compiling a mental list of all the food I want to eat on my next vacation.

I'm definitely not calculating the points I'll earn from my regular credit card spending and how they'll convert to airline miles.

08/13/2026

Spicy opinion: college faculty are responsible for managing their own classrooms.

I just led two professional development workshops on this. Sometime faculty feel that, “this is college; they should know better” or “this isn’t my job.”

That may be true, but my take is this: as the host of my classroom, I have a responsibility to make sure that the classroom works for all of my students.

I start with a philosophy of classroom management. I got tired just reacting to behavior issues, so I now ask myself what environment am I trying to create, and what environment is necessary for students to be successful?

The point of classroom management is not to punish disruptive students, but to create and then maintain and defend the classroom environment that is going to allow everyone the opportunity to learn.

A few things I do:

Seating: I don’t have a seating chart, but I do randomly place students so they can’t sit with the same people every time. It’s helped create an environment where it is harder for cliques to exist in the classroom.

Technology boundaries: the default is laptops and phones completely away at the beginning of class. Once we start an activity, they can be used if relevant. Yes, if a student has an accommodation, of course that’s an exception. I don’t lecture so there is not a need for extensive notetaking. Once students are using laptops, like for in-class writing, I move to the back of the room.

Scripts: I am providing scripts for the kinds of behavior that I do want, instead of only focusing on “don’t do these things.”

Conversation: If I have to talk to a student about their behavior, I want to do that privately, not in front of their friends.

What do you think as a faculty or as a student: should college faculty manage the classroom? Or is that too “high school”?

classroom

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