The New York Sophist

Letting the Term Lie Fallow

Fall 2021 was a transition semester for me. Everything after the pandemic that I was planning to do or planning on happening fell apart that spring. I spent most of the summer wondering what the future was going to be. I felt like I needed to make a plan right away and start developing something.

Instead, after my upper level courses were cancelled and I found myself teaching only into courses, I decided to pile on. The opportunity for extra teaching was there and I thought that a good cure for my condition would be to just hide in labor and let my unconscious mind figure things out for me.

It seems to have done the trick. I let my long-term and project-oriented mind lie fallow, just growing whatever popped up in there. I didn’t plant anything; I didn’t set the field up for a particular crop or expect a particular amount of yield. I just taught and graded and tried to do a good job with a course I hadn’t taught in person in a couple of years.

Reviews were mixed of course, but I saw a lot of student improvement in public speaking this fall. Considering it was all I thought about or did for the entire 15 week term, I am glad that this was the result.

I think that the practice of sabbatical is overrated. Teaching is not in opposition to research, it is letting the productive land do what it wants. When teaching you do not have control over what grows or what is in the soil. You just let it grow and replenish what might have been taken from you in terms of your research agenda. Letting the field lie fallow might be the more productive form of a sabbattical – a sabbatical from the pains of research and writing.

Why is publication the tail that wags the dog in academia? It seems odd that so much time and effort are spent on something that very few people will read or comment on, yet teaching – which has a significantly larger impact – is thought of as the barrier? I used to take the position that research and teaching were similar, but now after this fall I believe that they are in a yin-yang relationship. One feeds the other; one supports the other. You cannot just be a teacher or a researcher, by doing one you are invoking the other, at least in some kind of shadow-relationship.

The yin-yang relationship is one that invokes the rhetoric of “at the heart” or “center” or “what lies deep inside.” These rhetorics are pretty dangerous as they tend to make us forget we are attributing motives and instead lead us to think that we are discovering true essences or substances or foundations, but in this case it’s checked a bit by the idea that the substance or center is really the element of the opposite. So the yin of teaching has the yang of scholarship as its foundation. And the yang of scholarship has the yin of teaching as its foundation. Or center. Whatever word you like there really.

This means you are never not doing the other. When you pick up one you pick up both. This is also echoed by Japanese poet Basho’s famous line, “not one; not two.” As far as what I’ve picked up from teaching so much in the fall I’d say this is what I’m holding.

Course creating tips for anyone who wishes they paid more attention in the required college courses.

It’s June, and although most people believe that teachers prepare to take a 3 month paid vacation, the reality is that I am beginning my preparations for my fall courses.

I have a method and system for planning courses that I’ve worked out over a lifetime of teaching. In the fall I’ll start my 23rd year of teaching professionally. I’ve done a number of levels, but the most challenging and rewarding level so far has been the university course.

I speak with a lot of people who have a university degree who express regret that they did not engage more with courses in the humanities. I also speak to a lot of current students who complain about having to take requirements that have “nothing to do” with the major course of study they’ve selected. It seems to me that a lot of our courses on history, literature, philosophy, and the like are somewhat wasted on people who are a lot more motivated to get into the thing they want to study, get hands-on with it, and find immediate benefit from it – a skill or concept – that they think will make them employable.

A few years into work and post-graduate life, many people start to feel some curiosity about the world around them and wish they had paid more careful attention in college. The solution here is to plan your own course, for yourself, on whatever it might be that you want to learn. Although many universities offer what are commonly called “extension” courses, or enrichment courses – courses without official credit – the cost of such courses can be staggering. You can be your own professor and plan a course for yourself using these guidelines that I use when I’m planning an actual university course.

Establish And Refine an Area

What is it you’d like to learn more about? Poetry? Middle Eastern History? the European Union? How the Supreme Court Works?

The best thing to do is figure out what you’d like to know more about, then narrow it down to something that can actually be accomplished. People find this step intimidating because they do not effectively narrow the question to something that can be done in a certain period of time.

For example, if you would like to learn more about poetry it might be a good idea to either limit your course by geography or time. It’s easier to do a class on 19th century American poets than “poetry,” which could extend back into ancient Greece, China, and India. Remember you can always do another course.

Middle Eastern History could be refined to “20th century Middle Eastern History” or “The Middle East in the Age of Colonization.” These reductions in phrasing help you feel like you can take steps to plan the course instead of groping around for anything relevant.

Set a clear goal, or goals, for the course

One of the most important practices in education is to set goals you can assess. These are usually done by professional teachers in the terms of student ability at the end of the course. Teachers look for observable, measurable outcomes that students can do. Here are some examples:

Students will be able to discuss major theoretical ideas in argumentation.

Students will be able to research, plan, and deliver a persuasive speech.

These are from my own syllabus planning and might seem a little vague. That’s ok for now. What you want is a vision, a goal, an outcome that will help you be selective in what you are going to read, watch, and listen to during your course. If something doesn’t help you accomplish your stated goals, don’t include it in your course. Again, there’s plenty of opportunity to make another course and read or watch something later on.

Phrase your goals in terms of things you hope you will be able to do at the end of your course. For poetry, maybe your goal is to be able to discuss the life and works of 5 major 19th century poets. Or maybe to understand and communicate the shifts in poetry writing that occurred in the early 20th century in Britain. Perhaps you would like to be able to explain how the 20th century foreign policy of the US impacted Middle Eastern politics today. The choice is yours, and the more specific your desire, the better your course will be.

Setting a Time Frame and Schedule

This one is easy for me as it’s out of my hands. My university runs on a semester system, with 14 week terms. Every course I teach has to be fully completed and assessed within a 15 week period. This limitation has a huge influence on what I’m able to assign and expect in my course. It also forces me to limit my lecture and teaching time to cover things that are essential in relation to the goals I have for the students in the course.

For you, i suggest less is more. If you want to spend a month studying something, set a month long time-table. If you are busy during the day, be realistic about how many hours you can spend on the course at night. It’s also ok just to teach your course to yourself on weekends. Whatever your constraints are, I encourage you to set an end point for your course in order to help you stay focused, avoid tangents, and really make sure you are working toward your goals. Without an end point or a “final exam,” there would be no need to select what is really vital toward helping you choose what to do in order to help you with your desired outcomes.

Finding Materials for Your Course

This is an amazing time of abundance when it comes to teaching resources. Some of the best experts in the world on myriad topics have placed their course lectures on YouTube and other video sites. Professors around the world will post their reading lists, course outlines, and assignments online in convenient formats for anyone to download. Your task in this part of the course design is to figure out what to read, watch, or listen to in order to reach your goals.

I always think of direct instruction – lectures or presentations – as a resource that students can use to create their own texts that prove they have mastered the material. You can do the same thing. I suggest finding, through Google, experts in what you want to teach yourself. See if they have course outlines published, and consider reading those books. If a lecturer on YouTube suggests or references a book, it might be worth looking up. As you consume this material you should always be taking notes and asking yourself, “How can this be useful in helping me achieve my desired outcome?”

A good habit to develop here is the freedom to dismiss a book or a lecture if it isn’t relevant. We feel pretty guilty about starting into a book then realizing that it’s not what we hoped it would be about. Since time is limited, you should not feel bad about giving up on a text. But before you do, have a look at the bibliography – authors usually will cite another book you haven’t heard of that will be more useful for your course.

Once you have a sense of what you want to look at, divide it up into reasonable tasks for the time you have planned for your course. Every week or so give yourself some accountability assignment: Journaling or blogging, answering a question related to your goals for the course, or maybe writing a summary of what you have learned from the last week. If you really want to keep yourself accountable, blogging your course might help. Sometimes that pressure of thinking that there are people out there looking at what you are learning might motivate you to keep up with the course when you are tired, overwhelmed, or busy.

Making sure you’ve found good sources is important. The internet is full of propaganda as well as non-professionally produced “studies” of various topics. The things to look for are the author’s credentials. Researchers and professors are trained in how to conduct non-biased research and are superior authors to read in comparison to journalists, who are taught how to represent a story in an engaging way to readers or viewers. Journalism isn’t bad, it’s just not thorough as it must be related to what is circulating “right now.” Professors and scholars can take up any issue, whether it’s in public conversation or not, and write about it. They have significantly less pressure, and more years, to develop positions about different topics and represent deeper, more complete opinions on them.

Looking for who wrote or who paid for the creation of a book or video is important as well. Not all sponsorship is bad, but certain political organizations have strong motives for putting material out. It is a good idea to research these sponsoring organizations so that you are aware of any possible influence in the direction of the lecture or the text that would be to their benefit. They might not be trying to misrepresent an issue or idea, but have very firm commitments about the nature of the idea. It is good to be aware of that so you can make up your own mind about what you are reading and watching.

Products

At the end of a formal course usually there is some formal exam. In your course there won’t be. It is still good to test yourself by trying to write or create some formal document or text that attempts to show you’ve reached the desired outcomes. Maybe you can record yourself presenting your ideas in a short video, write a blog post for Medium or Vocal, or set up a podcast where you relate what you learned and how you feel about it.

Creation is one of my favorite parts of the class. I always assign students a lot of work where they present their own ideas to one another. Maybe you can share your ideas with family and friends, or encourage them to take the course along with you. Sharing what you create at the end of a course is the most rewarding part of learning.

I hope you find these steps useful in the creation of your own course. It’s never too late to learn, and with the resources out there now it’s easier than ever to find expert resources for free to help you learn what you wish you had spent more time on when you were in college.

This could become something to celebrate

Make no mistake – the Republican withdrawal from debates hosted by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) is not some giant repudiation of democracy. It is what happens when you try to get a group to participate in your event by giving them nearly all control over that event. The CPD exists to serve the parties, and at the point where the parties or one party is no longer happy, that’s the end of that organization. 

On Tuesday the Republicans announced they will make sure any candidate for President, and I assume Vice President, will sign a letter saying they will not participate in CPD hosted debates. The CPD only controls the 3 Presidential debates between the Republican and Democratic candidates for President, and the one Vice Presidential debate. Primary debates are hosted by news organizations and have nothing to do with the CPD. Their quality is also abysmal, but irrelevant to this conversation.

No need to mourn. This comes after 30 years of the CPD passively doing nearly everything the Democrats and Republicans wanted done. When mistakes were made – like permitting Ross Perot to debate in 1992, they were quickly cleaned up. The CPD does not enforce anything the parties don’t want to do. The only thing the parties don’t really care about is what universities will host the debates. Everything else is totally in their hands, from lighting, to background colors, to the height of podiums. The CPD is as in-charge of these events as a waiter is in charge of a meal. 

This is by design. When the commission formed in the mid 1980s, founder Newton Minow believed – and still believes – the Democrats and Republicans should control all aspects of the event. You can think of the CPD as a company like Uber, providing only a place where two people can meet up and make a deal. Uber doesn’t provide cars or drivers or even customers, just a space for them to meet up. Same with the CPD. Minow thinks that the two party system is good, and has set up the CPD to preserve it. 

The commission consists of news readers and former elected officials from the two parties, and their supporters. There is not one expert on argumentation, language, oratory, debate, public speaking, or media on the commission (former morning show newsreaders are not media experts). This tells you everything you need to know about the CPD and their view of debate. It’s a smokescreen for the two party system to dominate the issues and control discourse. 

I have three viewpoints on the Republican withdrawal that might not be able to co-exist. See what you think:

1. Finally! 

It’s about time one of the two parties threw a tantrum. All parents know that if you keep conceding to a child they will continue to ask for everything and still melt down when they don’t get what they want. The CPD made this the inevitable conclusion to their work by choosing the path of least resistance, conceding to the two parties at every turn, and not standing up for some practice, theory, or model of the debates that the parties participate in. 

The commission has no grievance process. Look at the Trump Biden debates. After the first debate the commission had no idea how to handle a candidate who refused to follow any of the rules whatsoever. Why is there no process? Why no enforcement? It’s because these events are illegitimate events that have no substance of their own. 

Look at the controversy over the selection of Steve Scully as the moderator of the debate that didn’t happen. The CPD continuously waffled and had no plan for a backup moderator or any formal process for bias. They also never questioned the idea of using national journalists or TV news personalities as moderators.

Finally in the history of Presidential debating under the CPD, only Republicans have suffered from the CPD format. Look at the inventor of the “gaff,” Gerald Ford. Look at George H.W. Bush, someone who did more televised political debates than anyone (I think this might still be true) and the 1992 Richmond Debate. Look to the controversies over Mitt Romney in his debates with Barack Obama. I can see why Republicans think the debates are biased against them, but they have the wrong reasons. The CPD debates are biased against democratic debate.

1. The CPD’s Existential Crisis

A lot has changed since the first CPD debate in 1988 and the CPD has not addressed any of these changes: Mobile phones, the internet, streaming devices, podcasting. The Republican withdrawal is excellent as it will force the CPD to get creative if they want to continue to exist. Since Minow is a party shill, there is a pretty good argument that the withdrawal of the Republicans is the end of the CPD since it’s sole purpose was to preserve a two-party debate event every four years. But under Minow’s leadership, and other leadership in the past 10 years, the CPD now helps foreign countries set up executive or party leader debates by request. Horrifying, to be sure, however one wonders why this is the only creative outreach of the CPD in its entire inception. They do little else other than continuously check in on the two parties like a helicopter parent. 

If the CPD wants to weather the storm, they are going to have to innovate with activities. They are going to have to stop highlighting the Presidential part of their event and start emphasizing the debate side. This is a great opportunity for everyone to stop all the normal frenetic political wrangling over elections and ask, “What is the point of having a debate in the first place?” 

I doubt they will. But I hold out hope that the panic over their coming demise might spark the commission to flail around in hopes of self preservation. The members of the commission are not experts on debating or argument. They are all party hacks. They are television journalists. Their imagination is limited to what they did for their careers. Only a threat of an existential magnitude is capable of getting them to admit they might not know what they are doing, and reach out for professional consultation – then the innovation has a shot. 

1. We’re Better off without them

Perhaps it’s time for the CPD to die. The person who founded the debate commission, Newton Minow, used to work for Adlai Stevenson, former Illinois Governor, who wrote two nationally published articles on the need to use new technology to have a national conversation about political issues, instead of regional or local conversations. The CPD is far removed from this vision, and I believe Stevenson would want a return to the drawing board. 

We don’t need the CPD to have a national conversation about issues, we need a forum of some kind to do so, one that is not driven by advertising revenue and algorithms to ensure every turn in the conversation makes us feel good about our ideas. Social media and the commercial podcast space provided a little hope until we realized how much our clicks are not our own – or perhaps too much our own, leaving little space for healthy reconsideration of our views in the light of the narratives of the experiences of others. This is what debate does. We have barriers on all sides to it based on the capitalist demand to profit at all times from whatever is presented, but there still could be a way to hold effective debates.

Instead of the CPD, or Congress, or the FCC controlling debates, podcasting and streaming allow incredible access to the issues. What’s needed is curation by those who are interested in democracy and debate to highlight what’s out there that might be really good. One thing that a national conversation about the issues does is that it provides ways of articulating the feelings people have based on their experiences that can reach other people. If I feel angry about an issue, I might have trouble talking about it with you in a way that will get you to listen. But if I can adopt and adapt an articulation I hear in a national discussion on the issue, I might be able to reach you better, or at least have a fighting chance to do so. 

The solution isn’t here, and my idea isn’t the best ever, but anything would be superior to the fake debate events the CPD hosts in the hopes of preserving the two party system, which they all believe to be democracy: Two choices, decided far away from you, will now randomly speak for an hour to help you feel like you have some say. This is not worth having, and distracts people from finding other sources of articulation out there that might help them articulate their own political beliefs.

Those are my three thoughts on this matter, and I hope that no matter what, the CPD really takes a serious hit. We need them to change, vanish, or significantly alter what they do. There are no shortage of ideas about what the Presidential debates should look like, but there is a shortage of good models and ideas, primarily because nobody in the media, the commission, or the two parties has any interest or any idea what a good debate should look like. They are all interested in preserving a particular relationship and distribution of power under the banner of democracy and debate. 

My new course on the history of Presidential Debates is now available from Academia.edu. Check it out if you want to learn more!

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Inspired by being asked by many people the question, “What is rhetoric?”

This isn’t my definition. That will be a later video. For now, this serves as my attempt to articulate the three major understandings you’d encounter in the university scene.

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Here are some thoughts I had the night that bell hooks passed away. I had just finished teaching and was in my classroom and thought I would share them orally. This is not exhaustive nor complete but reflects my feelings at the moment. Comments welcome!