The New York Sophist

I’d like to say I have a new job but this would be equivocation. What’s really happening is my relationship with my job is totally different than it used to be due to distance in many ways.

The first kind of distance – geographical. I now live an hour and 20 minutes from the office. This is very different than a bus ride, or a 15 minute walk to the University. I miss those days but I also don’t. I think the commute is just the price for the higher quality of life that I have out here in deep suburban New York.

I do not miss living in New York City, even with all the nice food and the museums. I am totally ok with sitting here and reading in the afternoon. Or typing a post like this one instead of reading or writing something directly engaging with work.

Another form of distance is identity. I no longer identify with the University as a member of the community, if I ever did. There was a time when this was somewhat important to me, that the University reflect my values or be doing things that are not actively harmful to my work or position in the world.

Now I just accept the University as a failed structure that allows me to have the position I have. I am quite distant from caring much about the goals, vision statements, or plans of the University at all. What I’m focused on is providing the best classes I can for the students and hope to provide them some value and the means to craft value in some way. That’s really it. I also like the library and being able to study or read things to improve my perspective on the world, the people in it, the field, and my own work.

I am distant in another way too – I don’t feel connected to the events on campus. I would like to attend a lot of events that look interesting but there’s no way to justify a three hour drive for a one-hour event (or perhaps less) on a day when I wouldn’t normally be on campus. This issue creates a relationship where I cannot participate in the community in the way that I was used to or accustomed to. I hardly went to the events as it is, but now that they are even more distant it’s tough to feel connected to a community, even one where you could imagine going to different events.

The most difficult distance is the one from my old self. I recently saw a photo come up on my Amazon Echo of me in the first month of working there and I looked very different – a cheerful sort of optimism I no longer recognize. The hardest thing about the recognition and acceptance of the new job is that I really do have to accept this position, this subjectivity is long dead. That’s tough for me regardless of how cynical I am!

I think I can remain hopeful and positive about reading and writing, about posting here, about making videos and teaching. At least I hope that I can remain hopeful!

Photo by Taneli Lahtinen on Unsplash

The most valuable things for me in college were reading books and discussing them (or listening to the professor talk about them). The other valuable thing was being in clubs, meeting people and making relationships.

I don’t think either of these are possible any longer. Students are on campus a minimal amount of time due to the cost and that runs interference on these kinds of relationships – there’s no downtime. Secondly, they are taking 18 hours a term to reduce cost as well, which obviously interferes.

I also don’t think students can or want to read a book anymore. They try, but they can’t do it. So assigning a book is like assigning something they don’t know how to do. But they won’t say it, because they feel they should know how to do it.

So assigning a chapter or two is all you can do, but the students are so well-trained to think of school as cutting corners, trickery, breaking rules, deception of the teacher that you really don’t know if they read it or not.

Therefore the only reason I wanted to be a professor – to share in these experiences from the other side, to make them possible, is no longer possible.

I’ve become a very bad teacher recently and I’d like to figure out why.

Reflecting on what a bad teacher is, I’ve come up with the following ideas

1. More interest in the material and the value of the material outside of the students’ interest
2. Dismissal of student concerns as equaling in importance to the course material or events
3. Inability to make easy, meaningful connections between course material and the sphere of student engagement (i.e. what’s on their minds)
4. Inability to create meaningful assessment experiences for the students

All of these things are elements of bad teaching and being bad at teaching, but perhaps the bad teacher is someone who just disregards these and doesn’t worry about them popping up in their pedagogy.

The bad teacher might not be bad teaching, but bad teaching is still a problem.

What can be done?
Perhaps more attention to what students think and concern themselves with would be helpful. More supplemental material for the course would be good too, such as audio and video recordings that help support class time.

Trying to reconstruct narratives of the teacher’s first contact with the material to determine how it made an impact on them, then considering ways to make that same sort of connection today with the situation we face.

Distributing power over the course activities to the students in a major way without any intervention or refusal to accept what they propose.

Maybe these things will work. I might try to return to Neil Postman’s 4 declarative sentences and 30 questions rule for having a class – what that means is that is all you are allowed to say if you are the instructor.

Rhetoric historians – I know you are reading. Please let me know what the analogue is to this issue? I beg you, I need to read some of the historical material.

Rhetoric has been ruined by the Institutional Rhetoricians. By this I mean rhetoricians who think NCA is more important than rhetoric; that NCA represents rhetoric; that NCA can provide a good accounting or defense of rhetoric; that think NCA doesn’t exist as a function of rhetoric.

J.M. O’Neill founded the discipline using rhetoric to craft a professional role of speech teachers at the University level. He did this not because he was an NCA officer, went to legislative assembly, or any of that bullshit. He was able to do it because he was an artist, his medium being debate.

We cannot lose rhetoric to the institutional jockeys. Many of the people are interested in power, status, authority – but above all that they are interested in having a substantive role. The mark of the institutional rhetorician is the person who has intense anxiety about what Kenneth Burke labeled “the paradox of substance.” They cannot ever feel comfortable with the label “rhetor” or “rhetorician” because they don’t like having to defend it and explain it – something rhetoricians and rhetors delight in. Instead they invent and lie. They call themselves “political scholars,” “legal scholars,” “scholars of race and gender,” or whatever the title de jour might be.

Instead, why not say you are a scholar of rhetoric and you study race? Or gender? Or trans-politics? Or anything! Why not that? Because they are lazy and they do not want to have the discussion about rhetoric one more time.

The field is in that conversation and that articulation every time. Every time we articulate what rhetoric is to someone, someone who might not have been lucky enough to encounter it before running into us, we breathe new life into the field. We renew it and we welcome more into it. The power of it is that we can articulate, without constraint the importance of examining whatever issue it is that we wish to study and discuss. No other field has that latitude. None.

But that’s not all. Rhetoric has the capacity to instruct others how to talk about what matters in ways that bend other people, that transform matter, that alter what matters to them. It’s a teaching art, and many institutional rhetoricians resent having to teach that. Instead they want to be admired; they want to be the smartest person in the classroom saying the smartest thing about race, politics, the first amendment, whatever they love. Instead of opening the tent wide and inviting others to become advocates – effective advocates for issues – they would like to keep the group small and keep the spotlight on the few people who they think “have it right.”

Grasping to hold onto a slippery rock like NCA for your identity is kind of sad – reminds me of Ralph Ellison’s essay The Little Man at Chehaw Station where he talks about how we hang onto the rocks of tribal identity when we fear the phoenix that results from the combination of various identities. This is a great way to think about “the paradox of substance,” and one that Ellison would approve of, after all he and Burke were friends.

Why do rhetoricians scramble for the stable when the unstable and the shady are their home? I’ll end with a quote:

“The Sophist runs away into the darkness of that which is not, which he has had practice dealing with, and he is hard to see because the place is so dark.” ~ Plato, Sophist (254a) trans. Christopher Tindale (I think).

The Sophist might not be your identity as a rhetorician, but one thing is certain about them – you can call them whatever you wish but they were people who were interested in teaching others how to speak, relate, and create meaning within their community. That’s admirable. They didn’t flee to the institutions of Athens; they used them to riff off of to create the words that would create the meanings that were valuable to their students and their audiences.

Still thinking about what makes bad teaching/good teaching. I found this atrocious lecture from “debate coaches” supposedly teaching the best and brightest young debaters at an exclusive “forum” for debate at Emory University.

The Barkley Forum doesn’t seem to have any quality control standards. We get a route lecture that is thin, vapid, and incorrect by most people’s read of the things that these two are teaching (“teaching”) about.

It’s sad to me. I see the immediate sediment of people who think that their tournament debating experience has made them more intelligent, more educated, more well-read, more brilliant than other people in the population. This means that when they instruct people on one of the most “complex” forms of tournament debate argument they feel they have to really dumb it down so that the regular people, the uninitiated, can understand the complicated nature of what is going on here.

Instead, debate should teach humility, respect for doxa, respect for people’s daily thinking, and try to improve it in some way – or at least call attention to it. A good kritik lecture would be to set up the scene: You are debating with a group of people about public assistance, welfare, unemployment, whatever it might be. One of the people in the group is making arguments that are good but their tone and the terms they use to describe those who are on public assistance is offensive – they are speaking about them like they are a disease, like they are animals. What should the response be?

That’s all you need to start off an educational conversation about kritik arguments. But these two clowns treat it like it’s some kind of precious and holy discourse that can only be understood through an incredibly bad reading of the ancient world. I don’t think this lecturer has ever read or probably heard about the essential books for discussing the sophistic situation in Athens. It’s so bad that I wouldn’t even call it an interpretation, I would call it plain ignorance.

The most incredible thing is that Emory put this video out for the public to see, clearly unaware at the incredibly poor teaching in the video, the ridiculous interpretation of quite interesting/serious/well researched subjects, and the demeaning way that philosophical argument is being characterized to high school (I’m assuming) students who make philosophical arguments all day, every day with teachers, friends, and family.

The ignorance of hubris here is astounding. And it’s one of the many reasons why I dislike debate coaches, never liked being called one, and think that debate coaches and tournaments have obliterated any value that comes from a serious study of debating.