The New York Sophist

Not advisable, but I gave this lecture as a favor to a friend last minute. It went a lot better than I hoped it would.

The question I’ve been thinking about endlessly this year is: How do we recover a workable, everyday model of debate?

I explore some of these ideas here. It must be something that I’m working on quite a bit in my unconscious mind as I was able to go for the whole time.

There’s no video – most likely due to privacy concerns for students and such, but I captured the audio.

I’m a big supporter of recording all of your courses, and making sure you record and share whatever happens in the classroom with students who are in that class. There’s really no reason to miss a lecture given the technology we have these days. Students who don’t turn up in person can just listen to the audio file later on.

Also it creates some nice metrics for yourself as a lecturer; you can go back and compare what you talked about last time to this time, etc.

Comments on the lecture are welcome!

For some reason I have been reflecting on my career and work a lot lately, probably because I’m starting to feel strange about how the days are not broken up by wandering from room to room at the university. Those walks are so essential for clearing the head as you are preparing to teach, or wondering what that book you are going to get from an Interlibrary loan will contain, or going to meet a colleague to talk about a writing idea. These are important spaces where intellectual work goes on that remain unappreciated and unexplored (at least to my knowledge).

My career was very aptly summed up accidentally in a recent conversation I had where the phrase “big lift for small impact” was used – that’s been everything I’ve done here at my university.

Obviously this applies to the work I did for the debate program here – no need to post about that again – but also for nearly anything else that I write or post or create. It’s a lot of time and effort. But there is one aspect of it where this might not make sense, and that’s teaching.

The common view of teaching at the university is “Professors teach as part of their job.” Using a traditional rhetorical means of invention, I inverted that to see what could be said: “Teachers profess as a part of their job.” This didn’t seem accurate.

Teaching is professing, it is in the heart of rhetoric, because not only are you saying “this is important, you must learn these things,” you are simultaneously creating that reality for the students: “This is important, here’s how you know it is important, because of these feelings and thoughts.”

This is lost on most professors who believe that their external markers of expertise are enough to generate this desire to know and desire to learn among students. At the high school level, bad teachers use authoritarian power moves to communicate importance as well as mind-numbing activities that produce discipline rather than interest. 

What is the rhetorical mode of professing? The verb means to declare or avow something. This seems like the mode of making a case, a persuasive address that proves that the subject is vital, important, or significant. Since it’s rhetorical that should be to the audience you are addressing, which nearly all professors miss. The attitude of the professor is “they are the ones who need to work hard to get it, they are the students.” This is often couched in terms of responsibility, which is always lacking among students. A quick survey of the history of rhetoric would indicate that this is a common trait of most assembled audiences too. 

When teaching, you are professing, you are making a case for your declaration or your passionate avowing of the importance of a concept, some information, or whatever you are teaching that class. And since all classes are different audiences, each one needs adaptation. 

Is there a case-based, rhetorical theory of teaching out there? The closest I’ve found is in Buddhism, particularly in Tibetan debates, but there’s a debate pedagogy tradition in the early U.S. as well. 

What about Rome? It is known that from time to time the rhetoric teachers would take on the unpopular opinion on a declamation case to show the students how it’s done, but did any take on the position of how to craft oratory in a particular way?

I guess what I’m looking for is models of how to speak when you are pushing the value of a central text to students, and you cannot do this without your take being involved. You can’t assume they are there because they are interested. So how do you convert them from people who have to attend, and hope it won’t be miserable, to people who feel lucky to be there, and who look forward to the next one?

I thought I’d start out this semester by offering students a number of 10 to 12 minute videos on different topics. It did not turn out that way. Most of the videos I’ve made have been 20 minutes or more. And for my Argumentation course, the videos are always around 40 minutes.

I’m not sure this is good pedagogy at all for the online classroom, but I’m pretty certain I’m providing some good content. The trick is if the students will ever watch enough of the videos to see it.

In my imagination, students are scrubbing the videos a lot. That is, they are moving the playhead back and forth, looking for parts of the video that they are most interested in or curious about. At least I hope that’s what they are doing!

Here’s a video for my public speaking students on style and delivery, about 20 minutes long – and meant to be much shorter.

Well another week, another slew of video lectures to record. I much prefer doing it this way to doing it on Zoom live or something. At least this way I can say everything I need to, and the students can use it more as a reference rather than a one-off “I attended” check box sort of thing. By the way, it’s not their fault they would think of a class that way; it’s all the bad teachers they’ve had who trained them that you should get credit for being present that are responsible.

Pragmadialectics -I think it’s important to know this theory, but I’m not even sure I fully understand it. Sometimes trying to explain something to yourself might be considered to be pretty good teaching. At least I hope so.

All comments, thoughts and questions welcome, as always!

I have two things that I feel I have wasted years of my life on that I regret: The first is my time in intercollegiate debate, deluded that it was a place for teaching. It’s not. I either should not have done it at all, or done it at about 1/6th the amount of time and energy I put into it.

The second is Facebook. I spent a lot of time on that site, deluded that it was a place for engagement and conversation. it’s not. This one is new, and I’ll be happy to chat with you about it as well, but not on that platform.

While I was in Mexico teaching at the International Debate Education Association’s youth forum in 2012, I deleted my Facebook because I found it to be such a let down from places like LiveJournal and other blog-oriented sites. I felt that time people spent on Facebook could easily be spent on composing longer, more thoughtful, more rich sentiments about ideas. I thought that ending reliance on Facebook would encourage reflection and engagement rather than immediate switch-flipping or comments. Facebook was just like intercollegiate debate – it promised to be an international platform for the rich discussion of ideas but was more a place for people to show off what they already knew in unreflective ways.

I kind of wish I hadn’t deleted it because it would be nice to have some of those photos back, but it seems that once it’s gone it’s just gone for you, but Facebook keeps it somewhere on an old drive – I still can’t use my old email address on my current account because it is “in use by another account.” Strange stuff.

Instead of deleting my Facebook this time, I’m just going to use it as a portal to bring people here, where they can comment, or not, freely without the horrible social media environment.

Last time I re-created my account only because of intercollegiate debate (see how the life-regrets work together so smoothly?) because students would not respond to emails, or phone calls in a timely manner, but would respond to facebook messages nearly instantly. It was the preferred mode of communication about 5 years ago, now no students use it at all. Plus, I am not doing anything debate related anymore. So I’m not sure why I don’t delete it. I guess it might be to keep it open for some use I haven’t discovered yet. But Facebook probably will not become a good place; it will just continue to be the only place people share their political thoughts and simultaneously be the worst way to share your political thoughts.

Facebook is a place to windmill high-five yourself on your sick political takedown, or whisper to yourself “ooo burn” when you read your friend’s comment, 1 out of 271, on some thoughtless political statement uttered by someone you don’t know, or wish you didn’t know.

Oh it’s also making Mark Zuckerberg rich. It’s for that more than anything else. In the words of an old friend of mine years ago, “Why do people think Mark Zuckerberg should be the person who connects you to people you casually knew in high school?” It is strange that we are ok with putting this guy in charge of who is in our social circle instead of the better choices of time, geography, and fate. Relationships are kairos not chronos; Facebook is the latter.

There’s always the outside chance that Facebook won’t translate to traffic or conversation here, so then I’ll most likely delete it in 3 or 4 months if the numbers aren’t good.