In my very first class I ever taught at my institution, I helped one of my now best friends out of a convent. What if I reversed it? I figure if anyone could route a student INTO a convent, it'd be me. Right? That's my big impact over time. Making solitaries. Plz correct me if I am wrong cz I think I might be a human catlady factory.
Along the way somewhere, one of my students found out that the grey nuns owned slaves - I routed that into the history program for further analysis and research, which became part of David's book about them and the school founding, now the authoritative text on that subject. So. Open fuckergpt, put all of that history and info in, including his book, and the "why/how/if you give a shit" grit inverted rubric from last night, now map 15 weeks...
GREY NUNS — 15-WEEK THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
Week 1 — What is a Grey Nun?
Start with the problem of definition. Who gets to define a group: its members, the Church, historians, or outsiders?
Writing move: Description and definition.
Week 2 — Why would a woman become one?
Vocation, constraint, agency, faith, economic circumstances, and the possibilities available to women.
Writing move: Distinguishing explanation from assumption.
Week 3 — What counts as women's work?
Caregiving, domestic labor, nursing, teaching, and the cultural construction of women's labor.
Writing move: Making an argument from historical evidence.
Week 4 — When does care become power?
Hospitals, orphanages, schools, social services. Complicate the easy binary of powerful/powerless.
Writing move: Complicating a claim.
Week 5 — Who gets cared for—and who decides what care means?
Poverty, disability, illness, children, marginalized populations.
Writing move: Comparing competing accounts or interpretations.
Week 6 — Can you help somebody and harm them at the same time?
Missionary work, assimilation, colonialism, Indigenous communities. Learn to sustain a contradiction rather than resolving it.
Writing move: Holding two evidence-supported claims in tension.
Week 7 — What does religion do in public?
Church, state, charity, social institutions, and the idea of the public good.
Writing move: Distinguishing private belief from institutional action.
Week 8 — Who owns a woman's body?
Habit, celibacy, reproductive expectations, obedience, autonomy.
Writing move: Visual and material-culture analysis.
Week 9 — What makes somebody a nurse?
Religious nursing → professional nursing → contemporary healthcare. Narrative medicine can sneak through the side door.
Writing move: Tracing change across time.
Week 10 — What makes somebody a teacher?
Education as service, discipline, liberation, and reproduction of culture. And now the students are unknowingly studying you studying them.
Writing move: Applying an idea to a contemporary institution.
Week 11 — What happens when institutions outlive their original purpose?
Institutional change, decline, survival, transformation, and adaptation.
Writing move: Argument and counterargument.
Week 12 — Who owns the story after the people are gone?
Archives, photographs, letters, oral histories, buildings, cemeteries.
Writing move: Source evaluation and research.
Week 13 — What can a building remember?
Students read the campus itself as a cultural text: architecture, names, plaques, objects, repurposed spaces, things preserved and things erased.
Writing move: Multimodal composition / reading material space as evidence.
Week 14 — What did we inherit?
Now—and only now—the reveal becomes explicit: you are attending a university created out of this history. Students investigate one institutional inheritance and argue whether it remains visible, transformed, contradicted, or erased.
Writing move: Research-based interpretation.
Week 15 — What do you do with an inheritance you didn't choose?
Not: Were the Grey Nuns good or bad? Instead: What responsibility, if any, accompanies inheriting an institution's history?
Writing move: Final synthesis—show how your thinking changed rather than merely announcing what you believe.
and to that I add that I can pull up Sister herself as a guest speaker / pen pal for them + OLV Jeff (different than deadJeff) for an informative field trip of their vast array of social programs, including AA (yep, I know the dude who runs all that - great guy)
it's just a thought experiment. the point is, I could do this 24/7 - I need to NOT get my all my C02 from this job anymore - so 🤔 how do I use this job to get over this job?
What does it mean to care for someone?
When is obedience unethical?
Who gets to decide what may be taught?
Can an institution contradict itself?
What happens when science and belief disagree?
Who gets left outside systems of care?
Can animals grieve?
What does a building remember?
What happens to an idea after the people who fought for it disappear?
and every couple of weeks another switch throws, until I find the switch that LETS ME OUT
there has to be somewhere I am wanted when nothing needs fixing
