Anna Lännström

When my first-year students write bad papers, I assume they are bad writers. If they don’t revise, I assume they don’t want to do it. If they don’t pay attention, I assume they don’t care about my course. Again and again, I assume that my students’ ...

Teaching through pandemic brought home two basic lessons to me: What happens in our students’ lives affects their performance in the classroom. Professors are mere human beings who can only do so much before our health suffers. Both seem obvious. Surely, I knew all that even before the pandemic? Perhaps. ...

I’ve been increasingly frustrated with my first-year students’ reluctance to argue with each other. Several years ago, I started asking my classes where these sentences change from being OK to not OK: I agree with Peter. I want to add to what Peter said. I disagree with Peter about ...

I avoided teaching our gen ed Catholic intellectual tradition courses for years at my small Catholic college in the Northeast. I’m not a theologian. I’m not Catholic. And teaching these courses sounded challenging because our students’ impressions of the Church are both negative and muddled: “The Church is ...

Having practiced on my first-year students for a few years [Race in the Classroom #1   Race in the Classroom #2], I felt brave enough to add several readings on race at once to my junior level course, Is God Dead? It was a good time to do it because I was revising ...