Farewell to Canvas: A Live Q&A on Big Ten Football?

ANN ARBOR, MI - April 26: The Northwestern Wildcats bench celebrates a goal against the Maryland Terrapins in the third quarter of the Big Ten Women's Lacrosse final on April 26, 2026 at U-M Lacrosse Stadium in Ann Arbor, Michigan. (Photo by Paul Barnick/Big Ten/University Images via Getty Images).

Not for that reason, though.

Teaching is tiring enough as it is—at baseline, I’m annoyed, frustrated, and underpaid.

Happy Finals Week.

Students don’t read, can’t write, and yet Michigan State’s admission rates aren’t getting any better. (This is a Big Ten blog, remember.) Use of artificial intelligence abounds, and some Big Ten institutions are just wholesale absolving their students of the need to think ever again by forcing faculty to embed AI practices in their courses.

So no, angry state legislator that stumbles across this someday, I’m not busy indoctrinating them—for all the “free speech hubs” you build on your campuses, I’m just trying to make sure that they can name the three goddamn branches of government before they get that really worthwhile business degree that’s going to allow them to, and I quote their start-of-semester aspirations, “Open a CrossFit gym.”

Anyway, the latest tomfoolery: after a brief dalliance with written blue book exams last fall, I relented and returned to in-person but typed exams. They’re online using our Canvas learning platform—yes, that Canvas—but with a quiz that’s online, timed but open to building on your last attempt (during the in-class exam hours) in case your browser crashes, and gets heavy feedback from me. There are options for a lockdown browser, but the university (1) doesn’t buy a campus-wide subscription to it, (2) passes those charges onto students if I assign one, and (3) both blames me for the rising costs of classes and designates my class as a non-low-cost option while heavily encouraging us to be one. [This on top of trying to make students pay for blue books. I just print off 4-page, double-sided exam booklets for all 120 students taking the exam. Ream of paper’s cheaper, I guess.]

So, after grading the second set of midterms from this semester, I started to think “Wow, this is…well-researched, even for a decently-prepared student.” (Now, it’s not rocket science—I ask them to give me 2-3 sentences for a short response on, say, the facts and significance of the Marshall Plan or Emmett Till.)

But when one student gave me all three names of the leader of the Bonus Army (Walter Warfield Waters), I did finally get suspicious. At the risk of taking a dim view of my undergraduates…uh…

Well. What these dumb motherfuckers forget is that Canvas does keep a log of damn near everything they do. And it turns out that includes where they’re clicking! So imagine my surprise when some of the most thorough answers include reports like this before and after damn near every question:

So now I’m the asshole for beginning Finals Week, when these students are stressed out enough—and resentful enough that I’m making them take an in-person final when their marketing class doesn’t and their wildlife ecology class only had a group project due last Thursday—with a stern warning saying (and here I do quote myself), “Don’t be one of the dumb motherfuckers who thinks that technology won’t rat you out, too.” And then I went and sat in the back of the classroom, like a goddamn hall monitor, as about a dozen faces in the room pinched a panicked look because they knew they’d been sold out.

The snake oil will not save you, kids. It’s like I put up on the time-keeping slide: “Pts. III and IV are meant to challenge you—I just ask that you do your best.”

Thus beginneth the Q&A.

Because I am in a classroom with two consecutive rounds of these students, I will be taking and answering your questions from now (about 9am CT) until 12:30pm CT, whereupon I will pack up my entire office—not because I’m getting fired, though that’s just a matter of time, but because we are being relocated so the business college can build a new palace on the site of our soon-to-be-former circa-1960s brick prison.

(I have three windows in my fourth-story office, but each is only a foot wide, not openable—even if I wanted to jump, I’d jump onto a rocky maintenance ledge surrounded by other offices in a quasi-courtyard to the damned—and yet, somehow, lets in a mighty draft in the winter.)

What questions do you have about Big Ten football, life, or using Canvas in the classroom?

Here are some headlines to spark your curiosity:

ACC comes crawling back to the Big TenYes, the Atlantic Coast Conference now supports a 24-team College Football Playoff, a move that will, to analysts, put pressure on the SEC to move from its support of a 16-team playoff toward what the Big Ten and ACC now support.

Thankfully, Southern state-level decision-makers do not merely change their minds on a dime unless there’s a chance to effectively disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Black voters—whether they’re in Mississippi or Louisiana, regardless of what Kiffykins claims—so I’m sure this’ll all turn out fine.

Three Big Ten teams make some random writer’s Top 5.
Ah, hell, FOX Sports doesn’t need your clicks. My kids need a new pair of shoes, and I’m about to be out of a job. The three are Oregon (4), Ohio State (2), and Indiana (1). Rounding out the Big Ten’s involvement are USC (14), Michigan (15), Penn State (17), Iowa (19), and Washington (21).

Is this disrespectful to anyone? NO! Touch grass.

**Do YOU want to be wisconsin’s next AD? Here’s the search firm to know.**It’s an interim chancellor, CSA Search and Consulting, and these poor saps:

• Chris Ballard, General Manager, Indianapolis Colts and 1993 UW–Madison alumnus and former UW student-athlete in football
• Rob Cramer, Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administration and 1992 UW-Madison alumnus
• Meghan Duggan, Director of Player Development, New Jersey Devils, UW-Madison 2011 alumna and former UW student-athlete in women’s hockey
• Michael Finley, Dallas Mavericks organization, 2014 UW–Madison alumnus and former UW student-athlete in men’s basketball
• Elzie Higginbottom, President, East Lake Management & Development Corp., UW-Madison 1965 alumnus and former UW student-athlete in men’s track and field, member of the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association Board
• Marija Pientka, Senior Associate Athletic Director for Sports Administration, Wisconsin Athletics, UW-Madison 1995 alumna and former UW student-athlete in women’s tennis
• Michael Shannon, Co-Founder and former Chairman/CEO, KSL Capital Partners and 1980 UW–Madison alumnus, member of the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association Board
• William Smith, Current Men’s Soccer student-athlete, President/Chair, Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC)

Speaking for myself, I hope they fail miserably.

NCAA Softball Tournament: B1G Enough
After Nebraska won the conference tournament—backing up their regular-season title—here’s your roundup, with all seeds regional:

• #1 Nebraska hosts #8 Lhvl, Grand Canyon, and South Dakota. Go Yotes.
• #2 UCLA hosts #7 South Carolina, CSU-Fullerton, and Cal Baptist.
• #4 Oregon hosts #5 Mississippi State, St. Mary’s, and Idaho State.
• #7 Washington heads to Fayetteville for #2 Arkansas, with Fordham and South Florida also participating.
• #8 wisconsin will visit #1 Texas, drawing a tricky matchup with Baylor and a loser’s bracket contest somewhere down the line with Wagner.
• Michigan is in #1 Oklahoma’s regional (RIP, Wolverines) with #8 Kansas and Binghamton.
• Indiana also gets an at-large and heads to #2 Tennessee alonside #7 Virginia and Northern Kentucky.

I like the top three to make it, and I wouldn’t be stunned if the Huskies made some noise.

NCAA Women’s Lacrosse Tournament: Go ‘Cats
Same old song, same old dance, same old salsa down your pants — Northwestern’s the top seed and faces #8 Colorado today on ESPNU at 2pm. The Buffs already stunned the ‘Cats once this year. The rest:

• #3 Maryland beat Rutgers, 11-8, and faces #6 Navy today at 5pm on ESPNU. The Scarlet Knights had beaten Princeton, 12-11, in their opening round game. Did you know those two schools played a supposedly-important soccer game back in 1869?
• #4 Johns Hopkins beat Army, 21-13, and faces #5 Stony Brook today at noon on ESPNU. They’ll play the winner of NU-Colorado.
• #7 Michigan is out, having whooped Mercer 18-8 in the opening round but then lost to unseeded Stanford, 13-12, in the Round of 16. The Cardinal face #2 North Carolina tonight at 7:30pm on ESPNU, and the winner of that takes on the winner of Maryland-Navy.

Semifinals and finals will be held at the Bunny Hutch, scenic Martin Stadium, in Evanston, IL, on May 22 and 24.

I’m told baseball and men’s lacrosse also exist; I do not care.

That’s more than enough from me. What questions do you have?