Charlotte Deason Robillard | Substack
Charlotte Deason Robillard
Essays and contemplations on teaching, making art, and living. I am a college English instructor and ceramicist in Portland, Oregon. I make pottery as Punctuation Ceramics and write essays here.
By Charlotte's Substack
· Launched a year ago
Charlotte Deason Robillard
Charlotte Deason Robillard
@charlottedr
Writing about life, art, teaching, and higher education in Portland, OR.
On Art, Practice, and Making Time
A creative practice and a day job.
Of course writers and artists have day jobs. They always have. When I teach Survey of English Literature, I make a point to tell my students that William Blake was a print maker, John Keats a surgeon’s assistant, and Virginia Woolf a college instructor at the modern day equivalent of a community college. Still, the notion of quitting your job and only then becoming an artist seems to persist in our imaginations. And with good reason. When the strike ended, I could feel the creative space in my brain closing up, or perhaps just being occupied by other things again.
Behind the Picket Line
Portland Community College faculty and staff are entering our third week on strike. Media has (understandably) focused a lot on the impact on students, but I wanted to highlight what it’s like for instructors behind the picket line.
On Getting Dressed and Getting Coffee
A piece that’s not about AI! This was published this summer by The Amazine, and I’m finally getting around to sharing it here.
My Year with ChatGPT
A little excerpt from my letter to students about why they should do their own writing.
Your brain and your body are yours. But corporations and politicians want them for their own benefit. They benefit when you are so addicted to scrolling that you no longer have the will to put your phone down and do something else. Politicians who want authoritarian power benefit when you don’t have the capacity to do anything but make it through the tasks of the day and zone out. Both benefit when a population views the hard but rewarding work of reading and writing as pointless drudgery that should be pawned off on a machine. The result is a population that has not developed the skills to think critically, problem solve, and stand up for what they believe. That is why college writing classes exist. Not because you need someone to teach you the specific tasks you will do as a worker.
Why I’m Reclaiming Impassioned Rhetoric
Shared a letter I sent to my writing students the first week of class, along with some thoughts about why I’m turning to impassioned speeches (or letters) to discourage the use of AI.
But it’s easier than ever for students to finish my class, or graduate from college even, without doing these things. This has been documented in increasingly panicked think pieces over the last few years, and there’s no clear solution in sight (besides going back to paper and pencil, which isn’t an option for two thirds of the classes I teach, which are completely online). Alas, I cannot be the 24/7 AI police and be an engaged, dynamic, and caring instructor who emphasizes personal critical thinking. I need my students to want to do the hard stuff, to read and think with their own beautiful brains. I need them to see that in a society that is hurdling towards totalitarianism, they should be fiercely and aggressively protecting and cultivating their minds.
Let’s Move to the Country
Get in loser, we’re wandering around and gathering sticks and crying at a lake (Wordsworth summer)