The New York Sophist

What does it mean to have a good class?

I’m spending a lot of time – too much – staring at a Google document that has a bunch of dates and blank space. 

Whatever I choose to put there is going to be heavily influential in how this semester’s students wind up feeling and thinking about this class.

So obviously I want the class to be good. But what does that mean? Who gets to decide if it’s good? And how do we know they are the best judge of that?

The common approach to whether a course is good is to ask if the students learned anything. And most often, they ask the students in the form of course evaluations. It is now pretty obvious that student evaluations of teaching and courses are meaningless, as they are great measures of student perspective, but not of learning. If anything, a number of these evaluations could be used to support the idea that campuses need intensive, regular, and accessible anti-bias resources for everyone there. 

The modern move is to talk about assessment, which is the idea that good courses are those that create measurable outcomes. These outcomes are in the form of the student being able to do something that they were not able to do before the course. 

I’m simplifying it to be sure. But the assessment that I’ve seen is in the terms that the classroom needs to be this direct, transformative experience on the level of a specialized or a few specialized actions. These actions are thought of as high-level, or elite, or something like that – something that would carry with it the weight of college or university level education. 

Skill-discourse is limited and harmful, particularly in my field of rhetoric. The best example is in the treatment and teaching of fallacies of reasoning, a very important concept if your goal is to teach the reception and production of arguments. Treating fallacy detection and fallacy recognition as a skill communicates that once you’ve got it, you’ve got it. You can see the forms and types, and you are immune. This also happens in a very controlled and distinct environment like a class, or a situation that is class-like, where there is an arbiter of what is “really true” and “real.” Thinking about it like a skill, a thing you learn to do and then repeat the motions, could be a fallacy itself. That is, it might be a fallacy to believe that recognition of the structural form is all one needs in order to prevent fallacies from working. Furthermore, it might be a fallacy of reasoning to assume that understanding leads to immunity.

The other big error in rhetoric pedagogy is the assumption that argumentation is a skill. Based mostly on a bad reading of Stephen Toulmin, instructors encourage students to identify and create warrants – an element of the Toulmin model that is expressly suppressed by arguers and constructed by critics of argument – as the heart of argumentation. As anyone who has read Toulmin knows, the heart of argumentation for him is audience-in-context. The warrant is a way to understand the importance of this, not a validity test of a claim, which is how it is taught. Skill-based pedagogy here confuses an art for a mechanical practice.

I’m believing more and more that a good class is one that never leaves the student. A good class doesn’t teach a skill that can be performed on demand. Instead it haunts the student with the notion that their performances might never be enough. Good classes keep questions alive and kicking, they don’t provide the relief that comes with a professor saying “you’ve got it.” Good classes create fellow travelers who don’t want the journey to end because it is so interesting. Students realize in a good course that the only way forward is to practice the course.

Replacing the term skill and all its derivatives with the term practice would do wonders for learning and teaching. Practice means we do it regularly with an eye toward getting better at it. Practices are a part of our life, they are part of our process of being. They are returned to because you can never get it right, but you can get it better. And if you don’t practice, you are not doing the thing. Practice is the only relationship we can have to something like oratory or argument. Communication is a major practice we are all engaged in all the time. Instead of thinking about it as a set of firm and known skills, why not think about it as a chance to catastrophically fail every time? If we do, we need to practice and make sure we are tracing out all the ways we can get better as well as all the ways we can fail at it. Exploration over result, and result as exigence for the next practice are essential concepts.

A good course is one where the questions, methods, and theories of the course become things the students want to encounter again. They are not happy they are over or gone. Or perhaps they could be happy the course is over, but they continue to think about these things months or years later. Or whenever they are called upon to do the thing, they understand that they must do it  and cannot get it right. They can only get it good. And the determination of good, best, better, and such are only knowable through practice – a regular commitment to thinking through different ways of trying. 

As you can see, I am practicing with articulating this vision. The question that I keep returning to is this: Are you good at arguing if you are not in an argument? A skill-based assessment of an argument class would say of course you are if you can meet the metrics and rubrics. If we take the practice perspective, a successful course would be one where the students reach out after the class is done to continue their conversations, or seek out new resources to read or view or hear, look for places – or create them – where they can continue the encounter with the material with others in the quest to improve, or examine improvement since actually getting better is as difficult to determine as it is to accomplish. 

A commitment to process while engaging with questions might be the most succinct understanding of a good class that I have right now. The questions from this assumption determine what goes into those blank spots on my syllabus. What readings, writings, and presentations will make for prescient encounters that stick with students? What can help them realize that a class – any class – is just the beginning and the ending will not come anytime soon, if ever?

Had a great time at the Book Culture 20% off sale last weekend. It’s got to be my favorite New York City bookstore, but I haven’t done a YouTube video on it yet. I really only do the bookstore videos when I’m travelling but I should do my home city as well. There are a few good ones, but nothing is really as good as Book Culture. They feel to me like the London Review of Books bookshop, which I had one chance to visit, and on the day I went they were closed for inventory.

The closest I’ve come to the LRB Bookshop, 2016.

So yes that photo was taken on April 3rd. A sad time. But yesterday at Book Culture (of which I have no photos like this) was a good one. Got some great books and had a great conversation afterwards about the relationship of academia to the outsider, or the academic outsider, which might be a way to think about it because there are so many in the academy who suffer from crippling impostor syndrome. It’s really quite sad as these people are often very brilliant.

So there are a few relationships that academia has to the outsider:

1. Obsession – we continue to return to texts and ideas produced outside of the academy, using rules that are not the academy’s (and also not made transparent) in hopes we can explain them using our academic tools, but we keep returning no matter how good the explanation because the text’s “good” outstrips what theory can say about it.

2. It’s not bad to be an outsider – the academy and academia should be small and there’s a lot of great benefit to having really sharp, good writers taking on subjects in books and essays that are meant for a general, non-specialist audience.

3. Impostor syndrome – you are at a Q&A or wine reception for a guest speaker at the university and you don’t realize that you, and everyone else there, feels that everyone else in the room really “gets it” and should be there and you are just there by luck or will be found out soon.

So that was a good chat, and also a nice chat about writing and how it needs to be low stakes, low stakes all the time, everyday so that when the vital or high-stakes writing appears you are quite ready for it and can take it on. I think that the healthiest approach is to assume your writing is always a bit under-baked and needs some critique so you can bake it again. I think this is what I mean by low stakes, and also this is the reason for the post. I’ve been remiss on the daily blogging habit, and I think it’s so good for writing and for getting the day going in the right way, although my day has been going for a bit now and I am just now getting this thing typed.

a daily writing habit is writing and it’s important writing as it gets the norms and low-stakes attitude out there. I prefer this format because there’s an audience and they are going to read it, so I have to think about what I’m saying and how I’m saying it, which is the most interesting and important part of the process for me.

In closing, here are the books I bought! I have a massive (yet killer) reading list for December/January and I’m looking forward to a very wordy holiday.

What happens when your values cease to become incompatible with your university and start to become incommensurate?

I wonder if this is just my university, or all universities. But I feel more and more that the classroom – whatever that might be – is the last part of the university that resembles anything we assume the university to be about.

Throughout the university all resources and modes of power are turned toward self-preservation, increasing enrollment, and making those promises as real as possible through a career-oriented discourse that is delivered as unproblematic, natural, and good.

There is no time to consider the value or worth of any institution, whether it be a government, a college, or a company. If such considerations happen, they happen late at night when the sleepless student ponders the sacrifices they and their family made to place them in that dorm room. They review the many times they were belittled or insulted by faculty that week. And they wonder.

The daily attitude is one of cynicism. Student and faculty alike smirk and talk about cheating the system. What trick will they deploy today? What will be the cool and clever twist of the writing, of the presentation, of the discussion? What will the students not have read; what will the faculty buy as an excuse?

The classroom is the last place for a front to develop against what we commonly call neoliberalism, but I’m starting to see as a political extremist front of cynicism.

Cynicism isn’t a politics here, it’s mental health and survival. At every turn, we are told and sometimes we even teach that people are unpersuadable beings whose minds cannot be changed. It’s not even worth approaching them or trying to figure out how they think. Systems too cannot be changed, they are real. This is reality. You must prepare for the real world.

In the classroom we can question all this for sure. But even more so, we can perform an alternative to the workaday capitalist order by forwarding a different relationship between people there.

Removal of any and all late work penalties, point-based-grading, tardiness, and monitoring the discipline of bodies would be a good start.

Asking students how they would like to spend the time, and what they would like to investigate would be good.

Working through issues slowly and carefully for community satisfaction would be better than a quiz.

Faculty seem to be more invested in grades than students are. They seem to think points are a real, rare currency. They defend them through ridiculous performances of power and authoritarianism they call “respect.” Nothing needs to be said about the connection between respectability politics and authoritarianism. This has been detailed well in the politics that most faculty claim to be opposed to.

The classroom is the last place, boarded up from the neoliberal zombies or vampires. Whatever they are, they are coming, and the threat won’t be recognized till it’s too late. But as in most of these films, people bring their ideological truths about others into the safe space. They turn on those they think as doing less. We don’t practice how to care for one another, how to trust, and how to believe. We train students and one another how to resent, doubt, and scour for hermeneutic infidelity.

Is there an equivalent to an active-shooter drill we can perform in our classes to protect our students from the violence of the university’s discourse? The active-shooter training, like the discourse of careerism, pushes attention away from the violence in the daily experience of the university student, the violence shown toward those who ask for help, who question, and who seek assistance with understanding. Students are shown by faculty that they are resented and considered a waste of time. Faculty are happy being a boss, but the metaphor is a choice. There are no bosses at the university.

Perform in your class the world you’d like to see outside of it, where caring for others is how we arrange our political and economic system. We don’t twist and contort bodies to fit “reality” at the university, we prepare for its replacement by young, eager souls. Instead of teaching contortion, let’s teach hot yoga. Move yourself to improve yourself and by doing so, you improve others.

Fraught with a mix of disappointment, sadness, and anger I head to the university. Resistance still seems possible on a daily level, no matter how many stories of failure populate my days. But as long as teaching is teaching, we’ll have a place to mount alternative ways of thinking.

Last week I had the fantastic opportunity of sitting down with Tyler Poteet from Power of Public Speaking to record an episode for their podcast.

In this interview I talk about my classroom practices and my approach to public speaking. I think it’s probably one of the clearest articulations I have of the importance of public speaking and how limited our approach is as speech communication/rhetoric professors.

I think that the most important take away from doing this is that we have incredibly limited venues for the discussion and consideration of what the public speaking course is. Compare that to English composition, where they have book series at good university presses about their teaching. We are just embarrassed about teaching it, and often take that out on our students through our class and grading policies.

What will it take for us to embrace the importance of public speaking as a serious course?

Most dangerous teaching practices come from the assumption that the teacher is the source of knowledge in the class.

This seems like a no-brainer. Obviously, the teacher is there because the teacher knows the subject. But many processes and norms about teaching create some tension with this assumption.

First, most classroom teachers at the secondary level have a number of completed course hours in educational psychology and curriculum. They have the equivalent of two minors, or almost another undergraduate degree in courses on education itself. People who have great field expertise or knowledge in a subject are not called upon to be the regular instructor in courses.

There is a difference at the collegiate level between the professor and the practicioner, between the scholar and the artist. I tend to believe these divisions are better blurred, but the norms of the university suggest a difference that most people accept between studying literature and creating it. Although I think that literary criticism, or any criticism, is creating an art, just not the art it’s talking about.

The professor is in the class not to create, but to show students around what was created, what is being created, and so on. So the assumption that they are the source of knowledge is immediately in trouble if you think about the college course this way.

What about curation? This is my favorite metaphor for teaching college. I see myself as curating an exhibit of works that “go together to prove a point” which is what I think that curation is, as well as planning a concert program, or one-acts, or other artistic endeavors.

Not thinking through these metaphors – or considering the act of teaching as a metaphor – leads to danger, as one starts to think of oneself as both the source of information and the only source of information that the students will have on the subject.

This leads to a thin, rushed performance of the teacher at best. Obsessed with attention and control of time, the teacher believes that any missed attention is missed learning. They worry that not everything will be covered; they get upset when the students are not “where they need to be.”

The danger of the idea that you are “the teacher doing teaching” is that your commitment is to some construct of the material, not to the people right in front of you in the classroom. The commitment of the teacher must be to the students, the ones that you actually have, not the ones you wish you had, or the ones that these extant students would be if they had done better previously – or whatever narrative falls into place here.

To be a good teacher, realize that teaching is impossible when conceived of outside of metaphor. Teaching is always “as something else” because each class is an invitation to study more. Knowledge is fluid and relational; it is not a thing or a commodity to be traded between minds. It is something that is alive, it comes into being through relationships and continues to live when nurtured by memory and imagination as the student moves through life after your class. Teaching is always being an usher, a curator, or some other relationship to knowledge, anything but the source. There is always more to read and study and think about – the class is always an introduction and an invitation to learn more and to pursue new (or better) questions.

Teaching isn’t an art, it’s as an art. It’s as curation, it’s as ushering, it’s as a guide. It’s always “as something.” It is never transmission of knowledge as objects. When we think of it that way, the precious knowledge of our field comes first and students are left behind or worse – they do not feel they are a part of our field, they do not feel welcome and they do not pursue questions in the future. We lose out on the innovations they could provide to the field on questions of their own, or other’s, design.