The New York Sophist

“Finger pointing at the Moon” is a famous koan that has been rewritten and offered so many times that the search for the origin of this early teaching lesson might as well be lost. As a koan we can accept it as a case that is worth our investigation, a case that everyone must investigate and try to answer. In Buddhism, the koan is a method of teaching that attempts to get students of Buddhist thought into the sort of thinking and attitude that Buddhism as a religion, or thought-system, requires. It’s a tool of critical thinking we could say, one that pushes on your ability to think in a new discourse or a new discipline.

I’ve often borrowed “finger pointing at the moon” to talk about teaching and pedagogy and every year, at the start of the year, my mind drifts back toward it for another go. Although there’s obviously a lot we can say about this koan right now it has me thinking about the relationship to grades and the privileged discourse of the teacher.

We talk a lot in pedagogy about the authority of the teacher and how the teacher can often be a source of disciplinary or other troubling power. I’ve written before – many years ago – about the great Chinese proverb “It is a pleasurable thing to teach.” This has an ambivalent sort of meaning, that the teacher can often be overcome by their own position, thinking they are doing a lot of good when they are really just causing a lot of suffering. There’s also the great Paulo Friere quote, “A teacher must be an authority without being authoritarian.” And Staughton Lynd’s great saying, “You shouldn’t be standing in front of your students, but shoulder to shoulder with them on the issues of the time.” These are all very meaningful teaching ideas to me, and I think about them a lot. I’m not sure what they all mean for my teaching practice, but they are definitely tools for me to reiterate it. The biggest block I find in my way though, is grades.

Grades are the ultimate finger, and most of the teaching authority relies on grades. The reason students attend to what you say and ask and do is because they are concerned about grades. In this sense you are the arm extending the finger, pretty far removed from learning or knowledge in that sense. Grades have too much authority and control in order to be valuable at all. They really best serve as a lighthouse that helps you and the student avoid the shoals.

The other concern with grades that I’m noticing is that they boost a real sense of confidence among students who probably should be a lot more humble and questioning of their own abilities. It’s like they borrowed a book about some topic, and they carry it around, thinking that their presence with the borrowed book is what learning looks like.

The university will not be able to compete with the rising certificate programs, particularly if major companies start to accept or prefer the certificate program over the traditional four year degree. Grades are thought about too much as the evidence of learning and not what they serve as, the payment for labor. The analogy needs to be rethought. Students think of grades as what they deserve for sitting though a class and doing what is asked of them. Professors think of grades as a way to control student behavior and judge student ability. Neither is a good way to think about grades.

Let’s get grades out of the way and move to a system where professors help students create a portfolio of work that showcases what they are best able to do. If you are teaching a public speaking class, like me, this means some sort of recordings. Wouldn’t it be a better use of a semester to help mentor students through a process of reiteration on a presentation to make it look and sound really good for larger audiences? Wouldn’t that be more valuable than giving them a quiz about some made up outline structure that only has value in a glossy, overpriced textbook?

What’s the moon here? What does it mean to get it in a class like public speaking? What should students be able to do at the end of such a course? These are the questions we should use to drive our course, not textbook chapters, quizzes, and midterm exams.

It’s Friday night and normally I’m pretty energetic and excited. Tonight I’m worn out, and I think it’s because I spent most of the week working on an essay that I should have done last month. With all the changes and the almost-taking-a-buyout business I can forgive myself the slip this time. After all it’s better than my typical writing excuses such as “video game” or “too much pizza.”

I’m frustrated because I am not sure why I’m so tired after working on that piece and getting it finalized. I really shouldn’t be. It wasn’t epic, didn’t require a ton of research, and was pretty easy to write and edit. I think it makes sense and will be helpful for the intended audience. So I shouldn’t be tired. Instead, I’m mad and tired.

My mind goes back to the start of the week and a Monday video call with a friend and colleague where we were discussing metaphors for kinds of writing. He was talking about the kind of writing one does on comprehensive exams: The kind meant to prove that you that you can move heavy ideas around properly and get them in position. I talked about how annoying that rhetoric is because it doesn’t soar, and it’s not particularly “cool.” He called it positioning and then I responded with, “It’s like being one of those guys with the orange lights who are moving the plane out of the gate and onto the tarmac.” Bingo.

Tarmac Rhetoric – the kind of rhetoric that moves extremely bulky powerful ideas into place so that someone else can soar with them. Someone else can see the 30,000 foot view, someone else can feel the rush of the ground moving away rapidly. But you get to move this majestic machinery – which cannot soar or be elegant on the ground – out of a tiny space and into a less tiny area so it can move to a narrow but long area so that it can take off.

Tarmac rhetoric isn’t heavy. Planes aren’t heavy really. They have a weight, but it has to consider fuel, luggage and passengers. Planes are pretty light. They are designed to stay aloft. But they are very bad at moving themselves around and into position to lift everyone on board into the sky and sail them toward a destination somewhere quick.

I’m pretty sure this piece I finished drafting today was tarmac rhetoric and a pretty good case of it too. It sets up the ability of others to take off and go in a lot of directions quickly, lightly, and impressively. But in order for them to do that, I have to wave the little orange lights, stand in the heat, and make sure it gets into position on the tarmac.

Do we teach tarmac rhetoric? Do we teach positioning the “Wings that give our weighted words flight,” to quote Kenneth Burke kind of? What does that teaching look like? Who are we in the relationship to lifting, transforming, transportive rhetoric when we are the ones who help move the awkward beast out of the space it doesn’t belong and into the place where it can sit for a bit before it launches up and away, shining?

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