The New York Sophist

Winning Arguments Podcast – starting before it starts!

My latest project is helping to build a podcast on argumentation that seeks to offer analysis of arguments circulating in the public to give people better ways of thinking about them while also suggesting ways these arguments could be made better.

I’ve never done the “build in public” thing before and so far so good. I like the idea that there will be an archive of how we built the show up. I think that I sort of have already done this in the past with courses – typing about and talking about the various choices I’m trying to make and decisions that will make the course work properly.

Of course build in public is quite popular among coders and IT types. It hasn’t hit education yet and might never. Teachers are notoriously insecure in having open conversations about teaching. It’s not really their fault. Society and government have made teaching a very difficult and low-compensated task indeed. Before it can move that way, coming up with a discourse about teaching that encourages open conversation, doubt, and failure as normal parts of the job has to happen. But this is another post!

Looking forward to seeing how this podcast goes. So far it’s been great. Loving the conversation and the things it has me thinking about.

We just launched our “Episode 1” on the 28th, see what you think of it. All comments welcome here or on the YouTube channel.

And here’s the behind the scenes version for the build and public piece of the project:

The last time I went to vote I went with my friend David the Poet Who Lives Next Door.

This time now I live in his house with him so he’s the Poet Who Lives Upstairs.

We take these opportunities to go vote to chat a bit about our view of politics, voting, and other random stuff.

I like to think of the act of voting as rhetorical invention rather than the conclusion of an argument or the stopping point of a debate. The day, the act, the afterward are all generative of more discourse and in that way are far more democratic than the casting itself.

Oh also David really is a poet. Check out some of his work.

Podcast

In this second episode of my experimentation with orality, I consider the relationship between social media and public discourse.

Facebook could do one easy thing in terms of standards that might go a long way toward stopping the infection that is spreading pretty quickly into public discourse.

Let me know what you think of this episode in the comments. Feel free to share the link wherever you’d like.

In the episode I mention this essay from the London Review of Books.

A Perspective on Class Creation

Years ago a conversation I had with a friend plunged into the question of what makes a college course memorable.

Our discussions were based on the following assumptions:

1. A course was good if we didn’t feel compelled to go to it but wanted to attend it and even looked forward to going to it.

2. The course was still something we thought about even now, years and years after undergraduate was completed.

3. We felt the course had meaning – that is, we were not “in school” but doing something much more meaningful in that space and time, something that might literally seem to apply to a broad range of systems of thought.

After determining this, we thought for a bit and tried to come up with commonalities. The thing we determined that was the only common denominator in all these rare cases was that the course was built around four books or less, no textbooks, with a few other readings here and there along side it. The course asked us to come up with our own opinions about the books and with the books for the others in the course using the direct instruction or class discussion as well.

I’ve tried to hold onto this with some restriction. I’ve added the idea that perhaps books for a course should be seen as resources or reference material (Sort of like assigning the AP Stylebook in a journalism course, or the MLA Handbook in a writing course). But the fundamentals of this are still solid in my mind: The course should be about making something out of resources and other texts rather than responding to, or trying to compose oneself out of what the readings offer.

One of the best natural resources that we do not take advantage of is what students bring with them to the classroom in terms of life experience, perspective, feeling, and ambition. These can be used as resources to add to the class – to help make sense of the material in ways that will help it make even more sense for others who are listening to and responding to what their peers are creating.

Podcast

Let’s see what this is like.

Hey Folks!

Since Substack allows seamless podcasting, I thought I would start experimenting with short-form podcasts on whatever is on my mind each and every Monday.

So Monday should be experiments in orality and Friday will be experiments in the written form. I’m becoming a full-service rhetorician in this space.

This podcast is some brief comments on my shift toward oral assessment and oral assignments in the last 2 years. There will be more about this in future short podcasts. Let me know your thoughts in the comments!