The New York Sophist

It’s always usually at the 1/3 of the semester mark that I start to think about the class I’d rather be teaching, rather than the one that I am actually teaching. I keep a notebook of all these ideas for future ways to organize and orient the class, but these ideas never look very good when doing course planning.

I took this great picture today that I sent to my sister as it represents the combination of something she loves with something she despises.

For her this represents an uholy combination of much loved Harry Potter with the all-consuming horror of Legos which never fail to appear in her visual or physical presence anytime she is at home.

Assigning students to find images out there in their daily lives that represent something frustrating, impossible to accept, or other sorts of “aporia-istic” combinations might be a fun assignment. It also encourages them to look around in their daily lives in a new and different way. And this might be the purpose/function of education.

This isn’t the only thing you could do with this assignment, of course. You could assign a number of different kinds of photos and then the speech becomes “how do you account for this photo being representative of/an example of/or an instance of that concept or idea?”

This could be a number of words but it could also be quotes, aphorisms, and other things that, when placed by a photo, require some articulation. It is a good exercise in reason-giving, and a great exercise in what counts as evidence. These concepts are considered to be obvious to most students, i.e. “we’ll you know, it’s just an example of it.” or “it’s a fact.” In order to avoid these space-fillers and work on the development of reason-giving discourse assignments that are a bit off from the everyday kinds of topics might be required.

Again, public speaking is composition, which should be obvious by now. But what might be more challenging to accept is that evidence and reasons are composition. We compose evidence; we compose reasons and reason giving. This is particularly hard to accept in our current political climate.

One of my most read essays is one that was unanimously rejected from every editor who has had a look at it. I’ve imagined re-writing it recently in order to make it a bit more publishable. I figure since it’s circulated a bit it might be able to find a journal home for a while, before the next iteration of it comes along (there’s always another iteration of everything you write).

For now the paper lives happily here. It gets a lot of traffic every few months. I think that this original paper has some good thoughts in it, but I think I’d like to expand the argument to consider debate itself as a singularity, not as a matter of fact but as a matter of useful pedagogical metaphor. For example, the black hole, the most popular singularity out there (or perhaps the most familiar to people) isn’t a “real” thing or even observable, but is a mathematical model and an astronomical certainty in that way. Perhaps the discourse of debate can be thought of in the same way – we can only represent debate via a very particular sort of discourse (think legal rhetoric) and we can model it, but natural debates are not observable, they do not indicate themselves or take place like other discursive phenomena, but they certainly do exist because we can “prove them” by modeling them.

Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash

I think this is a very useful idea for a better distinction between argumentation and debate, usually lumped together in textbooks, textbook titles (as these books rarely teach anything on the cover properly), courses that we offer, and even in the professional speech of rhetoricians who probably should know to take care when lining up types of discourse as synonyms. I think a distinction between argumentation and debate is necessary and have worked to establish that distinction at my university with two separate courses in it. I want to further push the envelope by offering more composition within both too, as I feel these are modes of composition not just “angry, loud persuasive speeches” as so many of my colleagues appear to consider them through the way they are taught and written about in pedagogy.

There is also this other idea of the computer or internet singularity, the point where the artificial computer generated world is indistinguishable from “nature” and becomes the natural world for all intents and purposes. This might be a bit harder to think through. Perhaps it is useful to use debate as the singularity point for this, the point where we realize there’s no such thing as natural language, that language stands in for nature and the singularity begins and ends when we learn to speak, or when we accept speech as part of our lives (two very different points if you have ever been around children, many of which understand language, how to do it, and understand you but are very suspicious of getting too involved in speech – the smart kids really). That’s going to take some more thinking through, but might produce something worth reading.

Not a big fan of the livestreamed class, but I did one anyway yesterday.

I don’t really care for the livestream as there’s a lot of stuff that gets in the way of teaching here.

Typically I could do a 10 to 15 minute video on a reading and be fine with it. But the livestream is more like a traditional classroom. You could have 2 or 3 hours and not get through half the readings.

The goal, of course, is not to just get through the readings but to make sure the students understand the readings and can do something with them. The “something they do” should be a bit more than “get them” or “explain them back to you.” What we want them to do is incorporate them into a third, different perspective, something that has been created out of the teacher the reading and the position they bring to it from their lives.

The livestream allows for that but the interaction isn’t really there. I think I get better student interaction from the asynchronous videos. There they can write a comment about it to me privately and we can discuss it. That might limit what the other students can get out of the exchange, but I often ask students to post their questions on the Discord or other discussion board in order to answer it there for the whole class.

A live stream also must be broken up to be useful later. Haven’t done that yet, but not really sure how to do it because of how the stream turned out. If I just make some shorter videos, it might be better.

Maybe the livestream is like office hours? Hang out, publicly think and talk, see who comes by?

An archive of thinking out loud about the readings with some engagement and some interlocutors might be good.

Tomorrow I plan to make a bunch of asynchronous videos so we’ll see how they compare.

And a new way to describe it

This post originally appeared in September of 2020 on my old blog, progymnasmata. I’m reposting these here from time to time as I read through my posts over the years.

A friend of mine clued me into a new program called Gitbook, which is sort of like a blog, but more of a private journal/documentation site. I signed up for one, but not sure if I am going to use it. It might be a great place to keep notes on the classes I’m currently teaching.

When there’s not a global pandemic, I document everything about my courses. I audio record each one, and I also keep a notebook, usually a diary where I can write down things that worked or didn’t work for each day’s course. When things start to get busy what I normally document is just the weekly feel of the course, what’s working and what’s not. Might use it for that.

Something I thought might be good in there are course descriptions, however once I had a look at one I was working on for the upcoming course flyer for the undergraduates, I thought of this blog first. I prefer public-facing sort of stuff I suppose, or maybe GitNotes is too new for me to imagine how it will work in with what I’m doing here and in other places. Maybe GitNotes is a journal for me, and this is my social media replacement site. I think that works best for the way I’m thinking about things (kind of tired of looking at social media to be honest).

Anyway, here’s my revised course description for Argumentation:

What does it mean to argue? Have you ever been in an argument? How did you know? How did you know when the argument was over? What makes an argument happen? Is argument good or bad? 

These are the sort of questions we address in Argumentation. The concept of argumentation, even after thousands of years of people arguing about it, remains open. Nobody is sure what an argument is, how it works, or what the function of it really should or can be. The conversation about argumentation is international, involving experts from philosophy, law, history, sociology, languages, and rhetoricians. The only thing missing is you.

In argumentation we will read and examine the opinions of scholars, thinkers, and practitioners of argumentation. We’ll determine if they have a good grasp on what argument is. Then, after discussing, writing, and speaking about these ideas, it will be our turn. At the end of the course you’ll be able to advance your own understanding of what a good argument is, how to know, or even if you think that there’s such a thing as a good argument at all out there. 

This class is for anyone interested in the role of argument in society, be it political, social, or personal. This is a class for people who love to read and share their thoughts on the questions of why people act they way they do and say what they say. Argumentation is a difficult concept to grasp, but easy to do when we find ourselves in one. Come add your perspective to one of the oldest questions out there: Are we having an argument?

First, it’s a bit too long. Secondly, it doesn’t really communicate exactly what we do in the class. I think perhaps I should talk more about conversation or oral assessment in the course, but I really just want people who are interested in thinking about the role and nature of argument.

Maybe next week I’ll post a revised one, or perhaps this is the kind of thing that should go into the GitNotes? I think I sort of prefer working it out with you, whoever you fine people are. Having an audience in mind is far superior than just journaling to me. I already know what I’m going to say. But you are kind of a mystery. Who knows what you are thinking.

A friend of mine clued me into a new program called Gitbook, which is sort of like a blog, but more of a private journal/documentation site. I signed up for one, but not sure if I am going to use it. It might be a great place to keep notes on the classes I’m currently teaching.

When there’s not a global pandemic, I document everything about my courses. I audio record each one, and I also keep a notebook, usually a diary where I can write down things that worked or didn’t work for each day’s course. When things start to get busy what I normally document is just the weekly feel of the course, what’s working and what’s not. Might use it for that.

Something I thought might be good in there are course descriptions, however once I had a look at one I was working on for the upcoming course flyer for the undergraduates, I thought of this blog first. I prefer public-facing sort of stuff I suppose, or maybe GitNotes is too new for me to imagine how it will work in with what I’m doing here and in other places. Maybe GitNotes is a journal for me, and this is my social media replacement site. I think that works best for the way I’m thinking about things (kind of tired of looking at social media to be honest).

Anyway, here’s my revised course description for Argumentation:

What does it mean to argue? Have you ever been in an argument? How did you know? How did you know when the argument was over? What makes an argument happen? Is argument good or bad? 

These are the sort of questions we address in Argumentation. The concept of argumentation, even after thousands of years of people arguing about it, remains open. Nobody is sure what an argument is, how it works, or what the function of it really should or can be. The conversation about argumentation is international, involving experts from philosophy, law, history, sociology, languages, and rhetoricians. The only thing missing is you.

In argumentation we will read and examine the opinions of scholars, thinkers, and practitioners of argumentation. We’ll determine if they have a good grasp on what argument is. Then, after discussing, writing, and speaking about these ideas, it will be our turn. At the end of the course you’ll be able to advance your own understanding of what a good argument is, how to know, or even if you think that there’s such a thing as a good argument at all out there. 

This class is for anyone interested in the role of argument in society, be it political, social, or personal. This is a class for people who love to read and share their thoughts on the questions of why people act they way they do and say what they say. Argumentation is a difficult concept to grasp, but easy to do when we find ourselves in one. Come add your perspective to one of the oldest questions out there: Are we having an argument?

First, it’s a bit too long. Secondly, it doesn’t really communicate exactly what we do in the class. I think perhaps I should talk more about conversation or oral assessment in the course, but I really just want people who are interested in thinking about the role and nature of argument.

Maybe next week I’ll post a revised one, or perhaps this is the kind of thing that should go into the GitNotes? I think I sort of prefer working it out with you, whoever you fine people are. Having an audience in mind is far superior than just journaling to me. I already know what I’m going to say. But you are kind of a mystery. Who knows what you are thinking.