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!

09/06/2026

For all the teachers who said they would get to their yard projects over the summer and they didn’t and now it’s Labor Day weekend and there is no other break until November: I see you. I’ll just be over year digging out torpedo w**d … forever.

09/02/2026

Have you ever read something and not remembered a single word? Highlighted a text and still didn’t remember it?

How about sat through an eighty minute lecture and couldn’t tell someone what it was about?Have you ever had a friend (or are you this person) who talks nonstop and doesn’t let you get a word in edgewise?

How do you feel in these situations? You get irritated. You tune out. You can’t wait for it to be over.

I tell my college students that this is the same reason they tune out when they are reading and can’t remember what they have just read.

When information only comes at you in one direction, you’re passively consuming it, not engaging, so you don’t remember. But if you’re actually part of a conversation, or a class discussion, you’re more engaged, because you’re participating too.

The key to reading something once and remembering it is to treat it like a conversation. Imagine the author is talking to you, and your job is to interject, to comment back.

If you’re reading in print, write in the margins, or use sticky notes if you don’t want to mark up the book. If you’re reading digitally, most PDF readers let you highlight and comment. Some Kindle versions let you leave comments too.

You’re not annotating like an AP Literature class, tracking theme or character development. You’re writing down your side of the conversation.

Yes, this takes a little longer. But you’ll remember more of what you read, and it’ll be more engaging. If you’re going to spend the time reading something, you might as well remember it.

So next thing you read, imagine the author is talking to you, and make it a conversation, not a lecture.

08/31/2026

Colleges and universities do genuinely try to improve things for students. But large scale decisions often have downstream implications no one thinks about, and they can inadvertently make things worse.

Welcome to my weekly lunch! Join me in my office to talk all things Higher Ed.

This past year, Florida passed a law requiring all faculty to post their entire syllabus, required and supplemental readings, course schedule, calendar, assignments, all of it, by June ninth. We were told we couldn’t make any changes, or we’d have to report that someone at our college was out of compliance.

That means faculty have to make decisions about the fall based on imaginary students, not the real students in their classes. For new courses, they have to decide what to assign before they’ve even had time to develop the course. Faculty who know they could make better decisions to meet their students’ needs are hamstrung by having a final syllabus due the second week of June for classes that don’t start until the end of August.

This is just an example of the university trying to be helpful, possibly, but making it worse.

Do y’all have examples of rules
or regulations that inadvertently made things worse for students?

08/29/2026

What’s Dolly telling you today?

When I was 40, I decided to start aerial silks classes. It was a journey. My first class was so awful I almost didn't go back. But I'm glad I did.

Here's what I learned: in the beginning, it's not fun. It's hard and frustrating, and that's exactly why most people quit. I kept going because I'm stubborn. Once I got strong enough for the basics, it became fun. Still hard, still frustrating sometimes, but fun.

This summer I started Lyra (steel hoop), and I'm right back at that same starting point. It is not fun yet. It is genuinely painful, I'm covered in bruises from where my body presses into the steel. But I know the pattern now. I know that if I push through this phase, it turns into something I love.

This is why that Dolly quote hits so hard for me. We're usually the ones telling ourselves what we can and can't do. If you're like me, you won't listen when someone else tries to tell you your limits, but we're so quick to set those limits on ourselves. There have absolutely been moments on silks, and now on Lyra, where I wasn't sure I could do it. But I just keep going, and eventually, I do.

So whatever you're trying to learn, it's okay if it's not fun right away. It's okay if it's hard. It's okay if it's frustrating. You're the one who decides whether you keep going.

❤️

08/27/2026

Campus maps with nonexistent intersections and street names that aren’t even real words, social media captions that are obviously AI-generated, an American flag with the wrong number of stars and stripes, and a student info tool built on scraped data that’s three years out of date.

As someone who teaches rhetoric, this is embarrassing. It tells me the school doesn’t actually care about giving people accurate, meaningful information. Maybe someone was too busy to write a real caption. Maybe there’s no graphic designer on staff who knows how many stars and stripes are on the flag. Either way, it reads as laziness, a lack of care, and inauthenticity. None of that should be coming from a university.

Tell me your most egregious, rage-baiting examples of university-generated AI slop.

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