The New York Sophist

Professors, stop requiring reading.

Instead, require engagement. Require response. Require conversation. Require a challenge.

It seems incredibly sad that I have to say this, but requiring someone to do something because you are an expert or an authority is not how you teach. This is more along the lines of how to be a bad manager, or how to treat employees poorly. It’s how to be a disliked, irrelevant, and problem manager of a team rather than a leader or contributor to a team. Teaching isn’t – and has never been – the dictation of facts from someone who knows to a bunch of people who don’t. Instead, it’s modeling and practice in how to think along the lines of what constitutes good thought for a field.

Learning and evaluating the quality of claims is best done in groups where people are interacting with one another. Our reasoning does not work very well at all when we are sitting isolated and engaging a text. So reading itself is not learning nor is it the best way to develop a critical approach to information. Assigned reading must be considered a part of teaching and learning, but how significant is it?

Why do we require reading?

This is the first question that I have to ask when I’m assigning something to read. What is the point here? Why am I having them encounter this text alone?

For me the answer is that it becomes a commonplace, or a meeting place, or an ingredient we can all bring into the larger class discussion in order to have some common ground for a conversation.

I teach in the humanities, so I’m not sure what the approach might be in hard science. Perhaps something like a guide on how to approach a problem or how to understand what we know already about an issue or thing, as a basis for a more robust treatment of the theory, knowledge, or approach by the professor in the class. There is always the catch-all of having two different approaches to something helping you understand and retain it better.

I don’t assign any reading that I don’t plan to directly use in the construction of my own in-class speech, or video. I plan to model a response to the text if I’m going to give sustained comments. This is much more common in the pandemic. My typical way of teaching is to ask a lot of questions of the students to see what they thought about the reading. This encourages them to encounter the text at least a bit in the moment.

Assigning reading has to be incorporated by the professor in more ways than just a quiz or just some examination on the reading. It has to be the provision of some information, some material, for them to create something with. Most often this should be a response. The best way of doing this is for the professor to model the response to the reading themselves, performing the quality, standards, and approach that is accepted in their field. Education in all cases is the teaching of a discourse, and modeling that discourse is perhaps the best way to show students the difference between a field expert and a layperson on an issue or idea.

Eliminate Textbooks

Textbooks are a bane on education. They are distilled comments that would be made in class anyway, and don’t really help students with anything other than disciplining themselves to read and engage boring material that they have little interest in. The textbook is often just a flatter, less interesting version of the professor.

Some defend textbooks as a reference, and I think this might be the only defense out there that makes sense. But the web is a much better reference for the things we might find in a textbook, and the cost is often hundreds of dollars lower.

If you feel compelled to assign a textbook, you should consider assigning a reader instead. Cut right to the professional essays on the topic and show the students those. Have them read some bits of things you have found to be illuminating and inspiring. The reader will serve as a much better orientation to the course and the course topic than the textbook, which distills. The reader is more of a sampler, and also doesn’t insult the students’ intelligence like a lot of textbooks do.

Four Real Books

Several years ago I was chatting with a friend who was in graduate studies at Cornell University about why students today seem to have so much busywork to do for every class. There are blog responses, discussion boards, endless quizzes, etc. I believe this is because faculty are more insecure about their position and less prepared to teach than ever before. They don’t see the need to look to what the high schools are doing, and they feel that students should be happy to be in the presence of someone with a terminal degree and just accept what they have to say. There’s also the ease of the internet, and online instruction, where the presence of something like a discussion board feels like pressure to find a use for it. There are probably a ton of different reasons why faculty are assigning so much work per course, when I remember most of my courses were a midterm, a final, and perhaps a short review of a book somewhere in there.

The thing we found in common with our best class experiences in this conversation was that our favorite classes all had assigned four books, no textbooks, and had just gone through those books in conversation and with some short papers perhaps. I think this approach has many advantages over the required reading of the chapters of the textbook. It’s not insulting – here are some books written to a critical mind from one. It’s interesting: You get a concentrated approach to a set of ideas or problems, instead of a distilled covering of a number of ideas in a field. Most importantly, you get four arguments. These arguments call out to the students to respond either with questions, agreement, disagreement, or the desire for further framing.

You can assign four books and have students choose what to focus on, or have them read around in them, or do them in order. Most importantly, you are not assigning reading, you are assigning engagement here, assigning them to come to terms with a few different ways of thinking about your course and field. And most of these books are probably 14 dollars at the most, maybe 30 if they just came out, and students are pretty savvy at finding books online for free.

Don’t assign reading. Assign experiences. Don’t force reading with a quiz. Encourage conversation by introducing your students to a difficult text. Students don’t refuse to read because they are dumb. Students refuse to read because they don’t see the value, they feel it’s dumb, they feel that it’s ridiculous in the way it’s written, that it isn’t taking them seriously. Assign something that treats them like a valuable mind, and encourage reaction to the text in speech or writing. This is how reading becomes a part of a good course.

It seems that what COVID 19 won’t eliminate in terms of higher education, Google will. The recent announcement that Google will offer certificate training in technology jobs is not surprising. What is scary about the recent announcement is that Google will accept certificate training – basically those “badges” on Linked In – as the equivalent of a four year college degree.

Google isn’t to be blamed for anything, they are following along the ineptitude of our college and university administration. For years the discourse from university administrators has been “college matters because you can get a career and make money from it.” That has literally been the only thing that administrators have leaned on to defend the university. Who can blame Google if they take a look at this justification, take it as an honest argument, and then respond with, “we can do it cheaper and better.”

As other companies like Microsoft and Facebook, as well as some of the halfway-in companies like EdX start to follow Google’s lead, university enrollment in the things that keep revenue coming in will diminish. Most students are at the university because they want to work a corporate job. The university has taken the position of unquestioningly facilitating this, assuming that an 18 year old has a fully formed, fully explored vision of what they’d like to do with their life for the next 45 years. This business approach of giving the “customer” what they ask for is foolish, unethical, and anti-educational. But any other approach appears to threaten the revenue stream which funds both a bloated administration full of bureaucrats and also floats a lot of really great, really good programs that aren’t self-sustaining like languages, philosophy, anthropology – necessary modes of inquiry that can’t sustain themselves right now.

As Google’s move takes off and admissions starts to see students who are choosing to go the way of corporate certification, a defense will develop that will be terrible. Administrators are timid and easily panicked individuals. They like the trappings of an executive role – the suits, the meeting rooms, the cynical sneer and hallway conversations of those “in the know,” but they can’t face decision points, and can’t do anything in a crisis except repeat old arguments or backpedal. They enjoy the trappings and can’t do the work.

The defense we’ll get is one where the certificate is described as “not good enough” to secure the “best jobs.” Of course, this won’t be persuasive at all. People are already at their limit in what they will accept as the cost of university. They are at their limit in accepting the narrative that eccentric and mean professors are just part of the experience. The entire college experience seems to be accounted for with a ton of debt, a shrug, and the acceptance of a job and career path where paying off that loan is not something that will happen until retirement.

The defense against the Google move that the universities should make, but won’t, is to abandon the idea that the university makes a difference in career track. If you want a career, don’t come to college. If you are that sure, and that focused on what you want to do, go get the relevant certificates instead. But when you find your life to be somewhat shallow, when there’s nothing else to watch on Netflix, and when you are wondering about the purpose of all of this, then you can come to college to get a certificate in life, thought, citizenship, or inquiry.

The core curriculum is what the college should be doubling down on, that and the campus space. In COVID 19, we have lost the second one in totality. The first one though, that’s something that we all sort of feel, in the back of our minds, that the administration wishes we didn’t have. But here is what a job training program can’t get you: The practices in creating narrative, justification, and explanation that help you navigate everything from political polarization in the news to doubts about the nature and purpose of existence.

These conversations require time and space, and are probably best held when people are not panicking about what sort of job they are going to get. They are best when people have stories to share about their own experiences out in the world working with other people and experiencing life in a community. They are not taught at their best to 18 year olds whose experience with others in the world has primarily been under the draconian thumb of some high school teacher or principal.

The defense of the university should be to abandon the certification game in favor of the narrative game. The answer is in radically changing the narrative to one that plays on the strengths of college: Space, time, engagement, questioning, and conversation.

Teaching online this fall like so many others are. I have been interested in this challenge for years, and volunteered to teach public speaking and other courses online about five or six years ago.

What I learned then is that students respond very well to being given a list of tasks and dates they need to complete that work, and a basket of resources to help them put those assignments together. Having everything submitted digitally either in audio, video, or text helps too.

This term has several additional layers of challenge to it. First the prevalence of COVID 19 around the country means that students are feeling various sorts of impacts. Their parents might be between jobs, transitioning jobs, struggling to keep the family business open, or out of work totally. There might have been changes in family income that mean a student must be present to help with childcare for a younger sibling, or assist with eldercare. There might be less of the typical foods and entertainment that were an important part of their schedule. There is also the chance that family members can become ill, hospitalized, or die. Also there’s the presence of a lot of stress, about the current situation, friends and family, and the future – what sort of economy will we have? What sort of jobs will be out there?

Another challenge is the length of the term. We are altering the fall term, like a lot of universities, moving it from 15 weeks to 13. With holidays and other adjustment days, this makes the term functionally 12 weeks. So I have to adapt my comfortable and familiar 15 weeks of work, readings, and progression to something like 12 weeks. This has been a very tough challenge for me.

COVID 19 has permanently changed education by forcing us to be more comfortable and normalize the use of webcams and video conferencing, as well as social-cooperative hubs like Microsoft Teams. I think that there will be a lot more interest, demand, and availability of online courses in the future. It’s here to stay and will become more popular even though everyone is complaining about the quality of online instruction.

Here are my course outlines for the fall term, let me know what you think!

Public Speaking

Argumentation

I started this blog to future proof my old, expensive blog at Squarespace.

The possibility remains high that I will be leaving New York, so I gotta get ready.

Prepare for the chronicle of the last days of a rhetoric professor who might soon become something else! But since words are always changing with situation to fit audience, the rhetoric professor might still be there.

Why should an online course strive to match up with the classroom experience?

The classroom experience is an accident of historical, economic, and technological forces that made it the only game in town. But we learn all the time from a myriad of ways. Why are we not exploring that in terms of online?

Is it because we are seeing online education as a temporary thing? An emergency measure, like a fire sprinkler – normally everything in here should not be wet? 

I think that online education should be seen as a new addition to the university or the school, not some emergency measure we take on temporarily. We are going to need something that is up to the challenge or nature of the online medium, something that celebrates it and uses it to its capacity. 

In public speaking, which I’ve been reading a lot about, I’m very confused that instructors require an in-person audience for their students that has to appear on the video. They are also banning things like editing and multiple takes. Why? 

These are the habits of an instructor who thinks that online is deficient, and the class must continue along the lines of how it has always been. 

A quick look at YouTube would reveal that there are tons of people effectively addressing audiences of millions with their speech through editing and speaking to the audience of listeners online. They are asynchronous and they are much more active and interested than the people in a classroom would be. 

It’s hard for me to see the value of trying to preserve the university classroom experience in a speech class, particularly when the pandemic itself shows the need and importance of being able to speak effectively on camera. Why are we not taking this in instead of pretending that it’s not really there or happening? 

I think a lot of public speaking instructors have lost the connection of the course to the idea of human communication. I think that they are much more interested in going through the motions of a class – teaching weird modalities like informative, how-to, persuasive (which of these would be the category for the public health messages from governments we’ve been getting for months?) or teaching things like formal outlining where someone writes “General purpose” or “specific purpose?” Most of these things are created for the ease of grading and evaluation not because they translate into useful practice. Even the limits of topic selection for most instructors forbid the most common things people are asked to speak persuasively about, and under less than ideal conditions. When your ability to speak to others really matters and a lot is on the line, we choose to ban those situations from the practice room. It makes no sense.

This preservation of what people like and are comfortable with evaluating is not what speech courses should be. Instead, they should be places to practice articulations that are troubling and difficult. They should be places where students can really try to get it right and get some help along the way.