Snafu Edu

Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. It's good to see you again. Today's teas are:... Jessamyn, are you drinking tea? Tea is my afternoon beverage, and we're recording this in the morning. So I've got  a very large cup of high octane coffee. A good way to power the day. Exactly. I have Yunnan Noir today. Very good. And I have a ginger peach green tea today. Nice. We're invited here today to discuss Snafu Edu. Can you tell us  the origin story of this book?

Yes, so John and Rebecca, let me take you back  in time to the late 1990s, dawn of the internet age. Grunge was king, and I was pursuing my  doctorate in U.S. History and Gender Studies, and in doing that research, I became just utterly  fascinated with 20th century prescriptive texts, things that reinforced sociocultural  and especially domestic ideology, normative domestic ideology. I mean stuff like  cookbooks, etiquette guides, 1950s mental hygiene

films. And so as a scholar in the archives,  that's what I loved examining in the most, this evidence, these leftovers, of what people at  different points in time had decided was the best, most ideal way to live and be, especially at  home and at school. And if you're fascinated by those things, here's a shameless  plug, check out my first two books, which were published in my work in history.  One's on cookbooks, and one is on gender and

advertising representation of housewives. So  anyway, as a scholar of teaching and learning, I've always had that little research fascination  in the back of my mind. I kind of question about how advice and research about teaching reinforces  certain norms and ideals, not intentionally or consciously, but as discourse, as texts doing  ideological work in culture. So I was always thinking, could I maybe write something about  teaching, give actionable advice about teaching,

like in real life, that interrupted some of those  prescriptive ideals. I wanted to write a book that would be useful in people's daily teaching work.  That was the great joy after I published Geeky Pedagogy was hearing from people who were able to  use it in their just day-to-day work and drawing on the abundant research about effective  teaching practices, and at the same time, in Snafu Edu, I wanted to emphasize that that  daily teaching work is, in a word, it's messy,

and it's not a matter of if, but when something  will go awry. And then that was all percolating, and it got cemented in the post-pandemic years  so when something had really, really gone wrong in a major way, and the time was right for me, as  an author, because I'm fortunate at this point in

my career to have something of a platform.  I'm no James Lang or Sarah Rose Cavanagh, but I have the ability in the world of educational  development and in scholarship about teaching, I have some power to get my work published  and to speak to people about things I think are important, the things that I believe need more  attention, that we need to talk about more. I'm in

a position to be able to articulate those and get  some listeners. And what I wanted to articulate this time in this book, is, OMG, things can go  really, really wrong in teaching and learning. I know when I was reading, Jessamyn, I felt  like you totally captured the messiness, and certainly the messiness of my classroom  and many other colleagues that I have. Excellent. And I think that will resonate with probably all of your readers. So,  speaking of readers, who is the target audience?

Is it for faculty just starting off, or for  faculty at all stages of their careers? Well, my audience is anyone who's in an  instructional role on a college campus. I have been thinking more and more about the ways  that teaching happens, not just in classrooms, not

just with professors, but all kinds of people in  designated staff positions as well. And I am very attentive to what Roxanna Harlow termed disparate  teaching realities, meaning that teaching labor is really shaped by every individual's intersectional  positionality, including our embodied identities. And so my hope is that, with those things  in mind, anyone and anybody in any teaching

context can find it useful. I do think it will be  useful for anyone at any stage in their career, but I think it's going to especially resonate with  mid-career educators, basically, anyone who's been teaching long enough, and it might just even be  a couple classes, but anyone who's been teaching long enough to have made some serious bloopers and  experience students making big mistakes too. Definitely does something to establish some sort  of community around the realities of teaching.

Yeah, so you have some experiences to think  back on. I would say, especially for a large section of us, the experiences that kept you up  at night, that you tossed and turned, reliving, wondering what you should have done differently,  torturing yourself about what went wrong, it would be helpful to have a couple of those  in your mind when you pick up this book. So, I know that we've talked about, and  you've certainly written about in your work,

the idea that one size fits all professional  development doesn't really work. So can you talk a little bit about why there's just no simple  solutions to the common problems in education? Yeah, I mean, humans gotta human. Nobody's  a widget moving through the world like a product on a factory belt. Every person  has their own unique set of experiences, life circumstances, pet peeves, passion projects.  I know, for example, Dr. John Kane is a musician

and makes a lot of time and effort in his life  to play music. There's things that just matter to us more than maybe matter to other people. And  especially in our work, everybody's bringing with them into the classroom a whole huge honking set  of emotional and cognitive baggage that they've acquired during their previous or even concurrent  experiences in educational settings. I mean, it's a lot. And also what we're here to do is  incredibly hard. Learning is very, very hard. It

often, usually always entails setbacks, and that  includes learning how to teach effectively. So, in my view, this reality needs more direct and  specific highlighting in discourse about teaching. We just need to talk a lot more about the fact  that teaching is not a perfectible activity. And

it's not that anyone's out there saying teaching  is perfectable. No one would say that consciously, but there's a real strong subtext and a lot  of discourse about teaching that, in even, like otherwise, really excellent advice  about teaching that, if you just do it, everything will be fixed, everything will  be perfect, and that's not possible.

You talked about the bloopers, but  I think a lot of people feel really isolated when those bloopers occur, or those  are the things they don't want to share. Yeah, exactly, for many reasons, teaching  in higher education is absolutely a closed door culture, and it's really hard to describe  to people who are not college teachers, even people in K through 12, like the dynamic, where if  another professor walked into your room when you

were teaching, it would be shocking. You would  stop. You would be stunned. What are you doing here? …would be absolutely the feeling. It's a  closed, locked, barricaded door around teaching in higher education. So yeah, the stakes are super,  super high for when something goes wrong. One of the issues that you've just mentioned  is that people are working in their own little

silos. And when things go wrong, they often don't  talk about it with other people, and as a result, everyone imagines that everything's  going really well for everyone else, and then you have those sleepless nights. And  faculty respond to that in different ways. Some people will blame themselves and will struggle  with it. Other people might blame their students, and we see a lot of that as well…. …or both… …or some combination thereof. Why  are faculty so resistant to share

their experiences with other colleagues? I could sum it up in two words: graduate school. A whole bunch of us, not every single person,  but a whole bunch of us in higher education, we've been quite literally trained in how to  wield our intellect like a weapon, and to always try to be the smartest person in the room. I'm  exaggerating, and obviously our positionalities,

identities, really shape our experience with  graduate school. But I do think there's a culture in academia that feeds perfectionism  generally, that you never expose your vulnerable underbelly to the other smarty pants in the  room. And I think teaching is especially fraught because of our limited and limiting  ideas about what good teaching looks like. How do we start to normalize this idea  of discussing our snafus? Is there things

that professional development like teaching  centers should be doing? Are there things that administrators should be doing? Well, I have two thoughts on this. One is highly aspirational, probably not possible. One is  more immediately doable. So in my utopian vision of life as a college educator, everyone will  gather every spring for a campus wide oops day, like the only thing we're doing is discussing all  the things that we personally did wrong and all

the things that went wrong in our classrooms. And  we could include some brainstorming about what to do better next time, but that wouldn't be the main  point. The main point would be, we're gonna bring out into the light, all the monsters under the  bed, the things that went wrong. And as we know from every story about monsters ever, like, once  we bring them into the light, they'll shrivel up

and blow away. So probably not too realistic,  but more practically speaking, we can advocate at every stage and in every way that when we're  formally evaluating teaching that we need better language and systems for recognizing and then  documenting every instructor's growth narrative

of teaching advocacy. I'm really influenced  here by the book Critical teaching behaviors: Defining, documenting, and discussing good  teaching, by Lauren Barbeau and Claudia Happle, they offer a framework based on six identifiable  instructor behaviors, and they argue there's a vast amount of work that effective teachers do  before, during, outside of class meetings in

order to facilitate student learning. So leaders,  that includes your promotion and tenure chairs, department chairs, administrators, they need  to do everything they can to define effective teaching as a career-long process, and that has  to include pedagogical learning and reflection, trying new things, assessing and adapting, and  importantly, that in that growth narrative, because it's about growth and learning, there will  be mistakes and missteps, but that is evidence of

growth, not evidence of ineffective teaching. You mentioned the work by Lauren Barbeau and by Claudia Happle. We had an earlier podcast with  them in the spring of 2025 and we'll share a link to that in the show notes. To help build  this sort of discussion, it's really important that teaching centers have the trust of faculty.  And one of the things I think we've both seen is that when we have faculty reading groups and  people are talking about things that work well

and things that don't work well, it helps to  develop that sort of trust. Would this book be a good focus for a faculty reading group? Yes, I think so, of course. We would want to ensure, this is one thing I do mention in the  book about classrooms, but we want to ensure psychological safety for our participants, making  sure that everyone feels able to share ideas, bounce ideas off, and maybe flop, like, maybe  suggest something that doesn't really make sense,

and definitely share all the things that we have  personally flubbed. So framing it as we're here to build our growth mindset and think about ways to  keep moving forward in our own growth narrative, keeping those things in mind and maybe even more  importantly, right now, I think this would be a good book for our present moment when, in fact,  there are so many very, very big, truly, almost

incomprehensible things going very, very wrong for  higher education. These are being brought mostly by outside political and legislative attacks on  our curriculums, on our programs, other essential aspects of our day-to-day work. I mean, it's a  true shit storm, and I wrote this before, the past administrative… what would you call it? …the list of executive orders?

Yes, exactly. So I don't discuss it in detail, but  one thing I do mention, and what is happening now, is the beep storm that is happening right now  on the heels of another major beep storm was the pandemic years, and even more, like for most  faculty, the incredibly fast spread of generative AI has taken another big bite out of our cognitive  emotional and even our physical stores of energy

we have for teaching. So, it's a good time to  think about how educational development can support pedagogical wellness, and how something  like a book club is not only a chance for us to learn stuff from experts in research about  teaching, but also, and maybe right now more importantly, a place to build connections and  community by talking honestly with each other

about teaching and that has to include all the  things that can and do go wrong. And I would take it as a very big personal victory if, in  discussing this book, we could draw on the power of humor and laughter, even rueful laughter, maybe  defiant laughter. I don't mean mocking. I don't mean laughing at students, but maybe by not always  having to take ourselves so super seriously, we can counteract some of the incredibly demoralizing  and discouraging realities about teaching,

the ongoing disparate teaching realities, the  perfectionism. I know not everyone is willing or able to engage in kind of self-deprecating joking  that is my go to but that's one reason I shared a bunch of my worst mistakes in this book. So if you  can't share your own for whatever reason, this is my public permission for you to use mine. We'll be doing a book club on our campus this

fall, so we'll let you know how that goes. And anyone who is doing a book club on Snafu Edu, I'm very happy to zoom in to do  a Q and A with your group. Awesome. I couldn't help but imagine, while  you were describing your utopian oops day, like a lot of laughter and things like “bravely  sharing their blunder award,” or something, like where everyone votes for the best blunder. Yeah. The face plant award, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.. I wanted to just share that  I imagine that as it being a very joyful event, despite the hard conversations. Yeah, that would be fun. I'm there. Send me an invite. All right, sounds good. You suggest a general approach throughout this  book, addressing challenges in our classrooms, and summarize it with the acronym, STIR,,  S-T-I-R. Can you talk about what STIR

stands for and how one might use it? Sure, with the caveat I get that there's already too many acronyms, and this is  a pretty cheesy one, but part of the reason I went to the acronym is because of when  things do go wrong, it's hard to think clearly, and sometimes a snappy acronym can help keep  us on track, can help us bring back to the present moment. So this particular one, it's a  variation on other kinds of conflict resolution

strategies such as SOAR, which is stop, observe,  assess, react. For Snafu Edu. I'm suggesting, for my audience of other brainiacs and eggheads  in higher education, is Stop, Think, Identify, and Repair, and it's just a way of framing some  of the preparation we can do for when the snafus hit the fan, a reminder that in situations that  pose problems, when things are about to go wrong, when things might go wrong, when things are going  wrong, we can usually exercise some agency in the

classroom and interactions with students  by taking a beat to use our big brains, then think about what all might be going on, to  approach with curiosity based on what we know from our research and the scholarship for teaching  and learning from our wisdom of experience, try to identify what's going on, and then to the extent  that it's possible, taking steps to repair the snafu. And this is a good place to note that my  book doesn't address the very worst case scenario

for any classroom, active shooter threats or other  kind of physical danger. That's 91,1 not STIR. I really like that you chose repair  for the R, because there's a lot of other words you could have maybe chosen  that was a really important choice.

I think so. It evokes trying to patch  something up to the best you can. One thing that I really wanted to avoid was  some of the cliches around making mistakes, or the discourse about making mistakes that  it's always inevitably going to lead to a good outcome. With the right “can do” attitude and the  right frame of mind, you can always turn it into something really positive. That's not true. I  don't believe that, and I didn't want to even

accidentally reinforce that with the word. Your book is broken up into five parts that address challenges in teaching and learning  associated with inequity, disconnection, distrust, failure, and fear. Could you give us  a couple of examples of some of the problems associated with these issues and how you might  perhaps go through that STIR approach?

Sure. The most important thing I want to say first  is the thing that Snafu is really adding to the conversation is that those five things create  problem and obstacles for learners and for us as educators. Most books about teaching,  including my first book, Geeky Pedagogy, they focus mainly on the learner’s experience and  strategies for addressing and reducing obstacles to student success and then conversely, research  on like inequities faced by instructors often

doesn't also fold in that students are navigating  those inequities as well. So in Snafu Edu I want to make sure that when we talk about things  going wrong in the college classroom, we are talking about everybody in the college classroom,  including us, including the instructors, including the TAs, including everybody. So for instance,  inequity, systemic intersectional inequity, it exists no matter how much certain politicians  want to convince us that it doesn't... it exists.

It creates obstacles to student learning, and  it creates obstacles to effective teaching, especially for any faculty member who doesn't,  quote, unquote, look like a professor. Disconnection and distrust are also aspects  of higher education that researchers have been showing for a long time really interfere  with success, with major upticks in the

post-pandemic era for obstacles to students’  academic success. So, like when a student just doesn't feel connected in any meaningful way to  the subject or the institution, it's going to be a lot harder for them to persist, and Felton  and Lambert's book, Relationship-Rich Education shows us pretty darn definitively. But so too  do instructors need to experience some sense of connection to their work, to the students,  in a professionally appropriate way, to their

institution. Otherwise things snafu up our work.  They get in the way of our success. And distrust, so talk about snafus in the classroom, trust  is just the bedrock for what we do, but often not central in our minds when things go wrong.  So take for example, here's one, 100% of people listening to this podcast will have experienced  students engaging in non- class related scrolling, emailing, texting, online shopping and so on.  There are many and many complicated reasons that

our devices are so distracting in the classroom.  There's a bunch of strategies we might use to cultivate attention, covered really well, most  recently by James M Lang's book, Distracted: Why Students Can't Focus, and What You Can Do  About It. But even before all those strategies, we have to be aware that these interactions, even  like you see it out of the corner of your eye,

they can seriously erode our trust in students as  a group. Another one that I think many listeners and readers will relate to is how even one,  like literally even one, deliberately cruel, demeaning or even thoughtlessly worded comment on  anonymous standardized end of student evaluations,

how much that can damage our trust in  students. And speaking of student behaviors, another one where it's really important to think  about it in terms of the snafu is fear, because student fear can manifest in behaviors that on the  surface look like something else entirely, and not coincidentally, look like things that really can  just drive us right up the wall, something that

looks like complete disengagement, even hostility  or inattention. It might be rooted in students’ really deep psychological physiological fear,  completely unrelated to us, related to something else in their school experiences, related to  something in their life circumstances. And I guess the last couple things I'll say is that these  snafus, one thing that really became clear as I was doing the research is that they're both very  common and systemic and almost universal, but then

they're also really shaped and defined in unique  and individual ways. So, take failure. What does it mean to fail in college? What does it mean to  fail in academia? I mean, we have some system wide metrics, like, literally an F for failure, but how  that's experienced by students, how they define it, is really shaped by their life experiences,  their goals, their personality traits, what fields they're interested in, and so on. And  failure is tricky too, because by its very nature,

learning has to include some failure. You have to  do something not very well…and that might include, really just completely dropping the ball… you have  to do something not very well before you can learn how to do it well, and that includes teaching.  But again, we're working in these bigger systems that can really interfere with our ability to  engage in productive failure and mistakes.

Each part of your book uses a similar  organizational structure where you kind of describe the problem, discuss possible repair  strategies when things go wrong, and concludes with a discussion of proactive approaches  and a go bag, that reduce the likelihood or severity of the problems in that section. Can  you talk a little bit about why you chose this

particular organizational structure? Yeah, I so appreciate that question, because I really wrestled with how to structure  the book in a way that supported my argument, we have to normalize mistakes, missteps and things  going wrong in teaching and learning, and when I say normalize, part of that is recognizing that  they take a real toll on us, that again, I didn't

want it to be like this cliched view of mistakes.  I didn't want it to read like I was saying, “Oh, well, we mess up sometimes, but it's all a  glorious process of learning, and we're gonna hop on our Mr. Mess, the learning unicorn. We're gonna  fly up to the rainbow of perfect teaching and learning.” No. Things going wrong, it can really  suck, and it's not always resolved in a productive way. Sometimes things go wrong, period. There's no  silver lining, there's no wisdom gained. It's just

bad and things go wrong. So the structure, how I  thought about how to do this, the first section really is just an overview, but it lays out some  of the most compelling evidence from the research

about why things go wrong because of inequity,  disconnection, distrust, failure, and fear. And I want to start there to really enforce why these  snafus can be expected, and then building on that, the next chapter, again, is working to normalize  snafus by focusing on what to do when they happen, and keeping in mind that, again, positionality  and context always matters, and that the repair suggestions in the next section, they always  have to be adapted to your teaching context,

your personality, and what will work for  you with where you're at. But I didn't want to just leave it there. I did want to make sure  that readers were empowered as much as possible to exercise agency wherever and however they can.  And increasing agency is my response to the snafus caused by fear. The opposite of fear isn't exactly  agency, it would be something like courage, like Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach, but I  think courage is just a little bit too judgy. It's

a little bit too much to say to people, things  go really wrong, but you have to be courageous. I don't think that's sufficient, in the year of our  Lord 2025 to say, “be more courageous.” I think, though we can say for students as well, in  the face of fear, that we can find ways to exercise agency. Agency is limited. It's limited  by things outside our control often, but there are places where we can exercise it in teaching  and learning, in our classrooms, in our actions,

in our course design. So those last chapters in  each of the sections gives an overview of some, it's not all of them, it's just a selection of  a couple high impact practices for increasing equity, increasing connections, increasing trust,  increasing success and increasing agency. And in all cases, it's about how to increase those  things for ourselves as well as our students.

Can you give us an example of  something going wrong in the classroom, some possible repair strategies and how  to ameliorate future related issues so that people come prepared for such problems? Sure, let's talk about one super, super common snafu that on the surface may seem like a small  issue, but once you've delved into it, it touches on some really big ways that things can go wrong  and can create real obstacles for teaching and

every single student's name in your 300-person,  400-person lecture. That doesn't mean that names aren't important. I mean, they're not just  like labels. They're not just widget labels. They're the first and foremost expression of  our subjectivity, of our ability to act and

be in the world. And so to be recognized by names  is to be recognized as a person. The scholarship on teaching and learning very clearly shows that  when an instructor learns and uses student names, even if, like in a huge class, they can't learn  every single name or use them every single time. It improves students’ rapport with, perceptions  of, the professor, and it can improve learning and

engagement. But I would argue, just as important  is students learning and using each other's names, and students learning, correctly pronouncing, and  using… and this is maybe controversial… but using a professor's last name and their title. Yep,  I'm going on record here to say that when you're working with them in the classroom, in a class,  students should call you Professor such and such, or Doctor so and so, because and here's where  names intersect with some of those big potential

snafus. Names, and for professors, titles are  closely tied to inclusivity in the classroom. So inclusivity, meaning that every single  person, including the professor, has the maximum opportunity to learn, to engage with the material  and to improve their skills. So professional titles really matter, because professors from  historically marginalized populations must navigate, must mitigate, students’ preconceptions  and stereotypes about academic expertise and

authority. So just in short, students are more  likely to call women and to call all faculty of color by their first name or Mrs., like in my  case, than to call us professor. And of course, students’ sense of belonging and willingness to  participate, even attend class, is demonstrably improved when people there, including the  professor, know their name. But let's be honest, it's really hard. Learning names is really hard in  any setting, and I have to give a major shout out

here to Michelle Miller's book. It's a short  guide, A Teacher's Guide to Learning Student Names. I mean, like chef's kiss, it should be  required reading for everyone in higher education. There's a lot of ways and means for learning  student names, helping students learn each other's names, and here's where Snafu Edu comes  in. There's also so many ways this can go wrong. We can get students’ names wrong. We pronounce  them incorrectly, we stumble, we fumble, and

sometimes that can be pretty disastrous. Sometimes  that can be in a way that reinforces stereotypes, that undermine students’ sense of belonging, and  that is the same with students using each other's names and students using our names incorrectly  or not knowing them. So all those things could go wrong. When this happens to me, I use the  first two repair strategies I discuss in the book for when I mess up a name, students messes up  my name, I use a script. That's my first strategy,

and I apologize, my second strategy. So when  I say a script, I don't mean like a memorized monologue you're using word for word, like a  robot in every situation. I don't mean literally a script like actors use, but I do mean having at  the ready a collection of short phrases, a couple sentences that we can do almost automatically  in tense or difficult situations. We are human people. When we're dealing with other human  people, we have some biological, even social,

cultural, learned responses to potential conflict,  problems, defensiveness. We may default to fight, freeze, fawn, or flee. Fawn was new to me, just  recently. I know fight, freeze, or flee. Fawning means people pleasing, trying to appease someone,  bending over backwards to placate and eliminate any perceived threat. So script in this context,  doesn't mean memorize, but does mean practice, like you have stood in your office and practiced.  This is something Chavella Pittman, in her work,

has recommended to faculty as well, that you do  need to practice what you're going to say. Now maybe you are so socially skilled and extroverted  that you never for one second feel the need to practice your words. And if that's true, like, how  nice for you, like, I love that for you. Good for you. But for the rest of us, scripts can really  help. So my two combined strategies, scripts and apology, when I call a student the wrong name  or I don't remember their name. “I'm sorry, [Use

the correct name].” That's from Michelle Miller,  like you got to use it to learn it. “I'm sorry, [Correct name]. Names are important. We've all  been working on remembering them. I apologize for my error.” That's it, short, simple, no need to  get into any like explanations or defensiveness, just “sorry about that.” And to be clear,  apologizing is never fun for anyone, and again,

positionality and context always matters. It  won't look the same for everyone every time, but when we mess up, and we will mess up, a short,  quick apology is an effective repair strategy. Using a script can ease the pain of that. And  I have another one for when students call me, it's usually Mrs. Neuhaus. Sometimes they  try Jessamyn, but that's can be hard to say, so they might default to Mrs. Neuhaus. So  I have a script, and it's something like,

“Thank you for that question or comment. Before  we discuss it, I just want to remind you that when we're working together in this learning community,  I asked to use my professional academic title, Professor Neuhaus. I know it's not easy to  remember, using everyone's names isn't easy. I appreciate your effort to do this,” something  like that. These are my repair strategies, because of the ways that those small moments can  really create big, big snafus in equity, trust,

and connection, for educators, for us and for our  students. So the final part of your question was, then, how might we reduce this in the future?  It's not easy. Again, from Michelle Miller's work, I know that the key thing is to make it a priority  and put in the time and effort to learn names and also structure classes and class activities so  students can learn and use each other's name, and more broadly, learning and using names goes to  two important strategies I outline for increasing

equity. We want to plan for learner variability,  and we also want to plan for learner biases. So we want to proactively structure activities, office  hours, interactions, knowing that we must expect and hey, let's be joyful about this. We celebrate  diversity as an academic asset, and that includes every unique and individual name. So that's great.  Let's plan for that. Plan for ways to do that. If it means I'm going to have a shorter class the  last day of our first week, because I'm going

to make names the priority and I need time to  practice them, then that's what I'll do. And two, the second one is also important, planning for  ways that learner expectations or assumptions can flare up around names. So instead of getting  caught in, “Oh my God, who is Mrs. Neuhaus, I spent so long in graduate school to get my  PhD, do not call me Mrs. Neuhaus,” like and then snapping “It's Doctor, not Mrs.” I mean,  that's true, but is that helpful? Is that a

good way to build connection, trust, equity  and to move on productively? And does it feel good for me to do that? No, no, better is to  have that practiced response, that script in my mind so we can address it and move on. …In a much more calm fashion. Each chapter ends with a section called “gear for your go  bag,” which we mentioned a little bit earlier. Can you talk a little bit about why you chose  the metaphor of a go bag for these sections?

Sure? Yeah, two reasons. One, just on a practical  note, and especially for books like this one, that's kind of crammed full of actionable teaching  advice and you’re generating a lot of ideas as you're reading it, it's really helpful to have  that concise summary at the end of the chapter.

But second, I just love the metaphor. It resonates  with the quotes that I use throughout the book, from the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook.  I deliberately chose this book, and I wanted to use it because it's this very tongue in cheek,  but also factual guide for surviving ludicrously

ready to go when the apocalypse hits. So  in the book, it’s just my little bit of a snarky way of saying we can at least have a few  things to grab when something goes wrong. What would you say is the major message that you'd  like your readers to take away from this book. Sure, I have to start with a shout out to  Liz Norell. She's the author of The Present

Professor. She was an early reader of Snafu in  manuscript form, and she helped me identify and articulate three major ideas that run through the  whole book and that I would like readers to take away into their teaching practices: humans mess  up, inequities exist, but the super teacher does not exist. And don't get me started too much on  the super teacher. I'll take up all the rest of

my time. But since we haven't mentioned it yet,  the super teacher, I want you to think about the last time you saw a college professor character  on a TV show or film, and specifically, were they teaching? And if they were teaching, what they  were doing, they were lecturing. They're always lecturing, but they're not just lecturing. Their  lectures are on this inherently fascinating topic, usually like psychosexual violence or like serial  killers. And students were mesmerized. They show,

they always show… They depict the students.  Nobody's scrolling, nobody's sleeping. They're nodding. They're eagerly raising their hands to  ask questions. And after his, it's not always, but often it's, his lecture, his highly  entertaining lecture that he gave with no notes whatsoever, the students might even feel moved  to applaud. I mean, I ask you applause. Okay, so such depictions, they're more than just  amusingly inaccurate representations of the

college classroom. They express this really  persistent and powerful, limited and limiting assumption and expectation about what good  teaching and authentic learning looks like. So it's not just bad for teaching. It's bad  for learning, because in this representation, students do nothing but sit there and get  entertained and somehow their heads are magically filled with knowledge. So it undermines our own  self efficacy. It can undermine our self image.

It really contributes to stereotypes around  professors, and they are just born that way. The super professor’s not like going to the  workshop and reflecting on pedagogical practices, and they're definitely not messing up and  then making an adjustment trying to do better.

So it would make me really, really  happy if, because of reading my book, any educator who gets caught in snafu, the first  thing they think of is, “yep, humans mess up,” and then going forward, figuring out what to  do next, keeping in mind that inequities exist, they’re reality, shaping everybody's teaching and  learning contexts, and that nobody can live up to that really impossible ideal that doesn't  reflect how teaching and learning actually

works in real life, to stop, think, identify,  and repair to the extent that is possible. That seems like a great note to wrap up on, but  we always wrap up by asking, “What's next?” I am really excited about my current book project,  which is going to be a guide for college educators to designing, assigning, assessing and, most  importantly, enjoying, unessay projects. That sounds fun. It's going to be fun.

I like the underscore on the enjoying. Yes, yes. It's the biggest ace in the hole for talking about unessays is that people  who put in the work to design them, because it's not easy, and assess them, also not  easy, report that they have fun assessing them. That's like a mind blowing, reality shattering  statement, instead of slogging through grading, counting every minute you could have fun  doing it. Yeah, let's talk about that.

Fun is good. Well, thank you. It's always great  talking to you, and we're looking forward to future conversations. Yeah. Thanks for having me. I always appreciate that you put a full range of human emotion in talking about  teaching and learning and enjoy your storytelling. So I'm glad folks will have the opportunity  to read Snafu Edu soon. Thank you so much. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please  subscribe and leave a review on iTunes

or your favorite podcast service. To  continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page. You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com.  Music by Michael Gary Brewer.