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Jessica Variz

@varizey.bsky.social

138 followers 482 following 18 posts

I overheard a student say “only old people have those lists in their profiles” and I’ve been terrified to write one ever since.

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Jessica Variz @varizey.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

This poem by @kjaxon.bsky.social is pulling me apart at the seams. In the worst way. In the best way.

A prose poem titled “Make This Sound Academic” by Kim Jaxon published in the recent California English journal.

Make this sound academic, the student prompts, which is to say: remove the inkwell from my mouth. Remove my grandmother. Remove the sentence that turns back before it arrives. Remove the joke, the doubt, the rhythm I came in with. Make this acceptable to the place that has already decided what right sounds like. The machine obliges. It has been trained on our preferences, our rubrics, our longtime love of the sentence that complies. It gives back a paragraph with no fingerprints. Frictionless. Efficient. Adequately signposted. The kind of prose that can walk through an institutional hallway without setting off anyone's alarm.
We call this cheating because a machine wrote it, but perhaps the scandal is that we recognize it so easily. We have seen this paragraph before. We have praised it.
We have written "clear" in the margin. We gave it 9/10. We have asked for top sentences and transitions and an appropriate academic tone, as if tone were not a house built by someone, owned by someone, guarded by someone. The chatbot did not invent this voice. It simply learned how much we only recognized writing that behaved.

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Jessica Variz @varizey.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

My students made creative responses to Lord of the Flies using a critical theory lens and this little sculpture of William Golding’s brain demon is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.

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