So much has changed.

”In about seven days, we converted it to an online environment with faculty who had largely never taught in that environment and students who had largely never learned in that environment,” says Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Jonathan Cavellero.

But some things haven’t changed, say these ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ professors, who, from their new off-campus workspaces, share insights and takeaways after two weeks of teaching their students remotely.

Video by Theophil Syslo.

The strong bond between students and their professors hasn’t weakened.Ěý“I still care about my students — as individuals, people on an intellectual and personal journey,” says Su Langdon, visiting assistant professor of psychology. “I still want them to succeed.”

And the students are still diving into schoolwork.Ěý “I am still teaching a community of students that are enthusiastic about learning the Japanese language,” says Lecturer in Japanese Keiko Konoeda.

Assistant Professor of Biology Lori Banks is impressed. ”I’ve got to give it to them,” she says of her students. “They’re pulling through … They are absolutely stepping up to the plate.”

The faculty who appear in this ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ News video, in order, are:

• Rebecca Fraser-Thill, Visiting Instructor in Psychology
• Joshua Rubin, Lecturer in Anthropology
• Keiko Konoeda, Lecturer in Japanese
• Michael Rocque, Associate Professor of Sociology
• Jonathan Cavallero, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies
• Lori Banks, Assistant Professor of Biology
• Su Langdon, Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology
• Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic, Assistant Professor of Physics
• Stephanie Pridgeon, Assistant Professor of Spanish

The students’ assignment: Write an op-ed about lead poisoning in Lewiston-Auburn. Or write a caption for a photo, or text about a campus tree. Write about how strange quantum theory is, or write a competitive book review in Japanese.

Their professors’ goal: Through solid writing, get students to persuade or inform. Help them understand the course material, whether it’s mathematics, environmental studies, or history. Get them to consider their own writing mistakes, or build up to a larger project.

Your assignment: Read about these 10 professors’ all-time favorite writing assignments, which they presented to their colleagues in the fall. What’s your favorite?

Biblio Battle Project

Instructor: Keiko Konoeda, Lecturer in Japanese

Course: “Advanced Japanese II”

Lecturer in Japanese Keiko Konoeda teaches a section of Beginning Japanese I. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

Assignment: Each student writes a book review in Japanese, then turns that review into an oral presentation for the class. After each presentation, students discuss the book, and at the end, the participants vote for the book they most want to read. The assignment was inspired byĚýBiblio Battles, a popular form of competition created by researchers at Kyoto University in Japan.

Why she likes the assignment: “I believe in combining writing and speaking, especially in the context of language courses, I also like to make writing assignments not only to develop writing expertise, but as a stepping stone to developing speaking. Many adult learners who learn a language in the classroom tend to develop writing before they become more comfortable in speaking.”

Op-Ed on Lead in Lewiston

Instructor: William Wallace, Lecturer in Education

Course: “The Environment and Social Justice,” First-Year Seminar

Assignment: First, write a two-page essay comparing and contrasting the issue of lead paint in Lewiston-Auburn neighborhoods with the drinking water crisis in Flint, Mich. Then, write a newspaper-style op-ed about the lead paint issue, using an op-ed about the Flint water crisis as an example.Ěý

As they geared up to turn in their final op-eds, Wallace’s students received help from, among others, Karyn Butts of theĚýMaine Center for Disease Control & Prevention; former American Cultural Studies lecturer Christopher Petrella, andĚýLewiston Sun Journal reporter Lindsay Tice.Ěý

Why he likes the assignment: In their course evaluations, the students “said it was one of the highlights of the semester for them, because they felt like they were learning a new skill they didn’t know before. They knew how to write, but this was a type of persuasive writing that was politically active and important to them.”

Faulty Sentence

Instructor: Myra Wright, Lecturer in English

Course: “Reading Cats & Dogs,” First-Year Seminar

Lecturer in English Myra Wright teaches a section of “The Literary Insect,” her 2017 First-Year Seminar. This fall, she taught “Reading Cats and Dogs” to first-year students. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

Assignment: Students submitted a one-sentence analysis of the John Keats poem “To Mrs. Reynolds’ Cat” — but made sure the sentence contained one writing error the professor corrected in previous coursework. The class then discussed each sentence, complimenting each other’s writing, identifying the error, and discussing solutions.

Wright was inspired by Associate Professor of Politics Leslie Hill, who had told her about a similar process of identifying errors with her students.

Why she likes the assignment: “It allows me to be a real stickler but also make more friendly the work of doing excellent editing at an investigative, imaginative, and critical level.”

What Makes an Expert?

Instructor: Adriana Salerno, Associate Professor of Mathematics

Course: “Calculus I” (largely taken by non-math majors)

Assignment: Read “What Makes an Expert?” from Ken Bain’s What the Best College Students Do, then write an essay connecting the reading to your experience of taking the midterm exam. Address which example of an expert from Bain’s chapter resonated with you, the approaches to learning you take, and how you can improve your performance in the class.

Why she likes the assignment: I have so many students who are like, ‘I’m so bad at math, I’m not very good at this, I’m just here because I have to be.’ There’s a lot of that anxiety coming into a class like Calc I. This helps them think of how these experiences can be transferred to other things.Ěý … This kind of work, understanding that writing is also thinking and processing, gets them to do certain things that are really helpful in math.”

Natural History of a Tree

Instructor: Brett Huggett, Assistant Professor of Biology

Course: “Dendrology and the Natural History of Trees”

In 2015, Julia Fisher ’16 (right) of Philadelphia and Samantha Purnell ’18 of Portland, Ore., measure a tree on the Historic Quad. Their data was part of a webpage documenting the various species of campus trees. (Josh Kuckens/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

Assignment: Photograph and write a short essay about one campus tree species. Then, tag each tree with a small plate indicating the species name, family, and a QR code linking to a webpage with the student’s pictures and natural history essay.

Why he likes the assignment: “Writing is heavily emphasized in biology. Students are well-trained in the structure of scientific writing and the format of abstract, introduction, methods, results, and discussion. I felt there was a niche to create a writing assignment that asked students to write for the general public and step out of the framework of the rigid scientific structure.”

Toward a Philosophy of Nonviolence

Instructor: Stacy Smith, Lecturer in the Humanities

Course: “The Roots of Nonviolence,” First-Year Seminar

Assignment: Having read three texts that influenced Martin Luther King Jr. at the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, write a letter to King about these texts, asking King what you want to ask him and saying what you want to say. Use King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” or James Baldwin’s “Letter to My Nephew” as a model. Alternatively, write a prose essay using as a model King’s chapter entitled “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” from his book Stride Toward Freedom.

Why she likes the assignment: “I am really interested in cultivating student voice. I feel like I was quite successful as a student, and throughout my academic career, writing in a way where I wasn’t really there. What I’m interested in at this stage of my teaching career is cultivating the ‘alive’ human being, within the student and the teacher, in an academic setting. The personal is intellectual, and the intellectual is personal. This assignment is capturing that.”

Thinking About a Research Paper

Instructor: Joe Hall, Associate Professor of History

Course: “Maine Environment and History”

Associate Professor of History Joe Hall delivers the 2018 Convocation address in August. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

Assignment: In no more than four pages, explain how two works are helping you think about your 20-page research paper. Put the works in dialogue with each other. The grade on the final research paper replaces the grade on this preliminary assignment, if the final paper is better.Ěý

Why he likes the assignment: “The most useful element of the paper as a writing assignment was that it enabled me to tell all of them, because all of them needed to do this, how to use transitions to make an argument that consists of more than one piece. For a research paper, that is absolutely fundamental. Often, the single piece of advice I give my students for all of their papers is, ‘You have a really good summary of this piece and a really good summary of that piece. Tell me why they’re part of the same paper.’ That transition is where your argument is, and now you have an essay.”

Reflective Writing in Quantum Chemistry

Instructor: Lynn Mandeltort, Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Course: “Quantum Chemistry” (mostly upper-level chemistry majors)

Assignment: Write two responses — a paragraph at the beginning of the semester, several pages at the end — to the strangeness of quantum theory, but also accurately describe quantum theory. “Construct concise, specific, logical prose connecting the ideas we have discussed thus far, while tying in your own experience.”

Why she likes the assignment: “In these technically based courses, students can go through the motions and give you an answer and not tell you why it matters or if that answer makes sense. What good is science then? … Writing is something you to do communicate broadly and make sure you understand something in a course like chemistry.”

Lewiston Triptych

Instructor: Jane Costlow, Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies

Course: “Lives in Place” (mostly first-year and sophomore non-majors)

Assignment: Read an essay on how nature is embedded in urban spaces, even if we don’t recognize it as nature. Draw or photograph a material object at Museum L-A in downtown Lewiston, and take a picture of “nature” in Lewiston. Caption the photograph with a quote from the essay, and write a 300-word essay that connects the museum object and the photograph, offering a reflection on nature in L-A.

Why she likes the assignment: “These are wonderful essays about Lewiston-Auburn. If there’s not enough writing about Lewiston-Auburn, maybe my students can be doing some of that writing.”

Podcast Guest Profile

Instructor: Michael Sargent, Associate Professor of Psychology

Course: “Searching for the Good Life,” First-Year Seminar

Pictured in 2014, Associate Professor of Psychology Michael Sargent hosts a storytelling event he founded. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

Assignment: To prepare for a group project involving making a podcast about an interesting person’s work, write a profile of your subject — focusing not on broad biographical details, but on specific aspects of their work. Develop one or two questions the work raises for you.

For example,Ěýstudents in the group interviewing a former deputy chief of staff to the U.S. Secretary of Defense wrote about such topics as a documentary film the deputy produced, women in the Department of Defense, and artificial intelligence.

Why he likes the assignment: Full disclosure,Ěý“this is not my favorite assignment,” Sargent says. “I used to have them write their own eulogy, and I’m really lucky that did not blow up in my face, at least to the best of my knowledge. I’ve dropped that assignment. I’m not taking any more chances.”

This assignment, however, was “writing in the service of some other purpose, and that made it come to life for them. They weren’t just writing for the sake of writing, valuable as it is. They were writing because they saw this as essential to help them get ready for these interviews.”

Learning a new language opens up career prospects, richer travel experiences, and opportunities to communicate with people.

It also helps you see your own culture from a different perspective.

“You won’t know your own culture or language until you learn another language or culture,” says Keiko Konoeda, a lecturer in Japanese whose research focuses on teaching languages.

ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ offers countless resources to learn a language, through courses, clubs, language tables, tutoring, and study-abroad opportunities.

“You can be immersed in the language,” Konoeda says. “There is a strong community for that.”

Lecturer in Japanese Keiko Konoeda teaches an introductory Japanese course. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

We asked foreign language faculty and student tutors about their best strategies for learning a new language, whether it’s French, Japanese, or ancient Greek. Here’s what they said.

1. Immerse yourself in any way you can.

Immersion is speaking, listening, and thinking in a new language as much as possible — but that doesn’t mean you have to go to a country where the language is spoken, says Michael Lombardi ’21, who tutors Japanese in the Academic Resource Commons.

Plenty of resources are available right on campus, such as “going to language table sessions, seeing your ARC Peer Tutor, and immersing yourself in the vibrant ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ community,” he says.

Laurie O’Higgins,ĚýEuterpe B. Dukakis Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies, presides over an induction ceremony for the classics honor society in 2017. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

2. Dedicate time each day.

Ancient Latin and Greek are somewhat different from modern languages, says Laurie O’Higgins, Euterpe B. Dukakis Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies — the learning focus is often on reading, rather than speaking and listening.

O’Higgins recommends setting aside quality time with the language. “Give 20 to 30 minutes, six days a week, to learning new forms and vocabulary. Those must be the best 20 to 30 minutes you can spare, when your brain is at its best. Have the environment as quiet as is possible. Focus exclusively on saying the words, reading them, and writing them too, if it’s Greek. Then stop.”

3. Do everything.

Communicating involves speaking, listening, reading, writing, and nonverbal expression. So does learning a new language.

“The best students practice writing by hand, read grammar explanations, listen to audio, practice speaking on their own, practice speaking with others, watch movies in the target language, and even practice acting out verbs or adjectives with their faces and bodies,” says Justine Wiesinger, assistant professor of Japanese.

Language-learning resources are particularly abundant in libraries, says Associate Professor of German Raluca Cernahoschi. “All the major newspapers have an online presence, and Ladd Library has a good selection of print newspapers and magazines in several languages. There are international editions of all major fashion magazines and many more online resources.

“Have a favorite novel? It’s probably been translated into your new language, too. The resources are endless and often only a click away.”

4. Listen to music.

“People are wired to remember rhythms and rhymes — song lyrics in a new language can help build vocabulary and grammar. My advice is to find a band you love to listen to in your target language,” Michael Lombardi says. “You’d be surprised by how much variety there is out there!”

5. Put vocabulary in context.

Dennis Browne is an associate professor of Russian who’s been learning German for several years. Browne likes to rehearse personal stories — for example, learning car-related vocabulary in order to talk about a time his car broke down — and tell the stories to native speakers of German.

Associate Professor of Russian Dennis Browne serves sausage during ”the Wurst day of the semester,” an open house for the Department of German and Russian Studies. An associate professor of Russian, Browne has studied German for years. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

“You tell that story and find they don’t use those words in everyday German,” Browne says. “That’s useful because you realize that there are these technical terms, and then the terms people actually use.”

6. Tell stories.

Especially when a new language has a different writing system from English, it helps to associate feelings, images, and narratives with concepts you’re learning, says Wiesinger.

In kanji, one of the Japanese writing systems, characters represent things or ideas as opposed to sounds. Research has shown that narratives help with memorization — for example, Wiesinger encourages her students to think of the Japanese character for charcoal, 炭, as made up of symbols that look like a mountain, a cliff, and a fire.

“If you can imagine the shape of the mountains as you climb and the coolness you feel on your skin as you walk out onto a cliff, and then the smell of the charcoal fire you kindle, it will help retain the elements of this character in your mind and help distinguish it from similar characters, such as 岩,” which means rock, Wiesinger says.

Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies Baltasar Fra-Molinero teaches an intermediate Spanish course in Roger Williams Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

7. Talk to a lot of people

Language learning happens in community, says Professor of Spanish Baltasar Fra-Molinero. “You learn a language not speaking to another person but by speaking to two, three, four, five other people. That’s how the process of language acquisition happens.”

8. Use flash cards.

“I recommend note cards or notebooks and keeping them neat and up to date,” says O’Higgins. “It’s not high-tech, but it works.”

Katherine Ziegler ’19 of Katonah, N.Y., who tutors Latin in the ARC and minors in German, heightens the tech just a little. “I really like to use sites like Quizlet to learn new vocabulary,” she says. “Quizlet is a website that allows you to make your own flashcards and then quiz and test yourself in a variety of ways. This is particularly helpful for Latin, which involves a lot of memorization.”

9. Keep a language notebook.

“I like to have a little notebook to write down new vocabulary, grammar paradigms, writing exercises or diary entries in the target language,” Ziegler says. “It’s also a nice place to write down any poems or phrases that you like. This helps remind me why I’m learning the new language in the first place.”

10. Plagiarize.

Well, not really, says Kirk Read, professor of French and francophone studies. But he recommends copying native speakers’ words and forms as much as possible. “Imitating good syntax, playing with it, feeling it and how it guides your thoughts, is the way to go. It will get you away from word-by-word translation, which is silly, wrong, and ineffective, though often hilarious.”

11. Make mistakes.

“Stop thinking,” says Read. “Language learning the first time you do it is all about hearing, mimicking, reproducing. No child ever turned to their parent and said, ‘How do I conjugate that verb?’”

Mary Rice-DeFosse, also a professor of French and francophone studies, asks students to “give up total mastery” once they’re at the intermediate level.

“It’s important that students not look up every word and instead begin to get the gist of a reading based on what they think they understand,” she says. “My job is to provide a safety net as they develop that skill. Eventually, they start to think — and even dream — in French.”

Associate Professor of German Jakub Kazecki makes a point in his introductory German language and culture course in 2017. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

12. Find what works for you.

“Put sticky notes with new vocabulary on furniture and your belongings in your room, listen to a lot of news and podcasts in the language, pick up a few lines from songs and sing them out loud, enjoy any silly language joke you can find,” says Associate Professor of German Jakub Kazecki.

“Because, you know, the German sausage is the Wurst.”

13. Be fearless.Ěý

”Learning a new language can be greatly intimidating or even feel embarrassing when you mispronounce or misuse a word, but the more you practice it out loud — whether that’s in class, with your roommate, or with a peer tutor — the easier and the more comfortable it begins to feel,” says Claudia Glickman ’19 of Houston, a student tutor of German.