This week's Seed Challenge, October 12 to 16.

Faculty: when you hand back the midterm, find the one question the most students missed and post one practice problem on that concept for your class before Friday.

Students: take the topic for your next paper and rewrite it as a question that could have more than one defensible answer.

Reply here with yours. One line is plenty. On Friday we name everyone who did it.

Week 6 challenge, closed honestly: nobody posted a reply to last week's challenge, so there is nobody to name this Friday. That is useful to know, and it is exactly what this week's Tuesday session is about.

Week 7 challenge, open now through Friday.

For faculty, tied to Tuesday's session, The Discussion Board Went Quiet: find one post in any board you run that got no reply at all. Answer it with one encouraging sentence and one real question back. Then come here and tell us the question you asked.

For students, tied to Thursday's session, The Email You Have Been Avoiding: send the one email you have opened and closed more than once. You do not have to share what it said. Just come back and write one word: sent.

One line either way counts. Friday's post names everyone who did it.

WEEK 5 SEED CHALLENGE, CLOSED.

Straight answer: nobody posted a response. Zero comments, zero reactions. I said I would close it by naming who did it, so I am closing it by saying plainly that there is nobody to name. That is on the challenge and on the fact that Friday's close never went up, not on anyone reading this.

The rubric challenge stays open informally. If you did it quietly, the three lines are still worth posting.

WEEK 6 SEED CHALLENGE. One paragraph, by Friday.

This week's two Teaching Days sit on either side of a deadline. Tuesday is faculty and the first grading weekend of the term. Thursday is students and the paper due Sunday. Both are really about the same thing, which is what happens to quality when time runs out and the plan was never written down.

THE CHALLENGE

Take the next graded thing on your calendar. One assignment, one stack, one paper. Write down three numbers before it arrives:

One. How many hours you think it will take.
Two. How many hours you actually have.
Three. What you will cut first when those two do not match.

Number three is the whole exercise. Everybody has an answer to it and almost nobody writes it down in advance, which is why the thing that gets cut is usually feedback.

Post the three numbers in a comment. You do not have to say what the assignment is.

I will close this one on Friday, and this time I will actually be here to do it.

WEEK 5 SEED CHALLENGE. Three lines, by Friday.

This is a day late and I am posting it anyway, because the week is the point and Monday is not.

This week's two Teaching Days are about the same thing from opposite sides of the desk. Tuesday is faculty and rubrics. Thursday is students and the first exam that comes back worse than the studying felt. Both come down to the difference between a thing you recognise and a thing you can point at.

THE CHALLENGE

Open the rubric for your first real assignment of the term. Find three criterion lines that a student could argue with. Rewrite them so a student could put a finger on the evidence in their own draft.

Three. Not the whole rubric. Three is finishable tonight and three is enough to teach you which of your own words were doing no work.

The working session that walks you through it is here, and it takes about twenty minutes by hand: https://www.harvestkernel.com/the-soft-word-sweep/

HOW TO ENTER

Reply to this post with one before and after pair. Just one line, as it read, and as it reads now. You do not have to name the course.

I will close this on Friday and name everybody who posted a pair.

And to start it off, here is mine, from a real rubric of mine.

WAS: Demonstrates strong critical thinking.
NOW: Names at least one counterargument and says why it fails.

What is the softest word in yours?

Closing the week of August 17. The Bottleneck Challenge.

No classifications were posted in this thread, so there is nobody to name. Rather than let the prompt sit unanswered, here is a worked one, because a challenge with an example in it is easier to answer than a blank thread.

Course: a first year composition section. The bottleneck: written feedback on drafts. Most of the time goes there and most students stall waiting for it.

Classification: an information problem, not a capacity problem. The reason is that the same eight comments get retyped across thirty papers. If it were capacity, the fix would be more hours. Because it is information, the fix is a rubric that carries those eight comments as named criteria, which turns retyping into selecting.

The Bottleneck Brief is still open and still takes twenty minutes.

https://www.harvestkernel.com/bottleneck-brief/

New challenge posts Monday. If you want to answer the old one this weekend, it still counts.

Week of August 17. The Bottleneck Challenge.

One course. One sentence. That is the whole challenge.

Name the single place in a course you are teaching this term where the most of your time goes or the most students stall. Then classify it as a design problem, a capacity problem or an information problem.

The Bottleneck Brief walks you through it in twenty minutes and hands you a finished one page document at the end.

https://www.harvestkernel.com/bottleneck-brief/

Post your classification in this thread. Friday I will name everyone who did it.

WEEKLY SEED CHALLENGE, week of August 10.

This week both Teaching Days are about the same thing from two sides: what someone sees first, and whether it survives contact with a real week.

Tuesday is faculty. Your syllabus is the first thing you ever teach, and most of us spend it on a grading table.

Thursday is students. Registration gave you four class times. It did not give you a week.

So here is the challenge, and it takes about ten minutes.

FACULTY: open one syllabus. Read only what a student sees before the first scroll. Then answer one question here: what is the first thing they learn about your course, and is it the thing you would have chosen?

STUDENTS: open your class schedule. Find the two hours between two classes that look free. Answer one question here: what is actually going to happen in that gap on a normal Tuesday?

EVERYONE ELSE: you have a first screen too. An inbox, a landing page, a course shell. Same question. What does it say first, and did you pick that on purpose?

One reply. One sentence is enough. I will close this Friday and name everyone who posted.

The two working sessions land Tuesday and Thursday. This is the ten minute version you can do before either one.