The New York Sophist

I’m not sure how many of these there are going to be, but the more I think about it there are probably a lot of assumptions we make as teachers that are dangerous not only to the class you have right now, but to peoples’ conception of teaching and learning in the meta.

Every class and every teacher generates evidence and proof for what education “really is” for people. Every bad experience a student has encourages them to discount higher education or education in general and spin a narrative circled around things like “the only good teacher is experience” or “when you get a job, that’s when your real education begins.”

This dangerous assumption, as you have probably already guessed, is that you are preparing students for a life of work. That the things you teach them – or even the policies you have in your class – are essential to them being able to get and hold down a job.

This is usually easy for teachers to accept because teachers love exercising their authority. Most of the teachers I know enjoy being disciplinarians – making students do this or that, enforcing due dates and format of papers, shaking their head when students fail to read the details in a 15 page assignment description and make a mistake. They do not enjoy this because they are sadists, but because they really and truly believe they are serving the greater good of society and helping these students be able to function in the world.

Never does it cross the mind of the professor, upset that the syllabus wasn’t read, that the student might not automatically believe the class is important. What a shock that your class might not be the most important part of the students’ day or week?

This has to be communicated, and the idea that you are there to prepare them for a life of sitting in a cubicle, moving around files between different email servers, writing memos, and holding meetings isn’t going to cut it.

The assumption we should make is that student employment is not our business. That is between the university and the student, or even better, the student and the future employer. What we are here to do is introduce new, different, or discarded ways of thinking, feeling, and questioning to the student. Later, this expanded capacity for inquiry will lead them to a successful life, one that might not be centered around going to work at 8AM every weekday.

The university should argue that there is a strong correlation between a good job and attendance. But this is the only argument that is made these days. There is no attempt to convey that capacity to change one’s mind, to investigate ideas, and to expose oneself to difficult or unusual texts (either written or in other media) is valuable is totally absent. Instead, we demand medical excuses and funeral programs because we want the students to show respect and responsibility.

These two terms – respect and responsibility – are nearly absent from the professoriate. To assume you have a deep responsibility to your students never crosses the mind of the college teacher. Students are irresponsible, therefore I can mail it in. Ethics would question this: Why isn’t it that you now have to double down on your responsibility? Why don’t you have the charge to get the students interested in what you are having them do? Sadly though, most assignments are there just to generate points so a grade can be calculated. A mechanical operation doesn’t need to involve interaction between living people who care.

Respect is another one. This term needs deep exploration, away from the idea that one functions as a boss and an employee. When professors talk about respect, they use a corporate language. Why is this the assumed relationship? A teacher is not a boss – they have a relationship like a doctor or lawyer does with clients. This is uninvestigated, as we assume the teacher is the boss, they demand work, it’s done, and the students are “paid” with points. Disgusting.

It would be ok perhaps to prepare students for the working world if the working world were a valuable life, or if the metaphor did not expand to consume in totality all the possible relationships that teachers and students can have. “The syllabus is a contract” is a horrible phrase that thoughtless professors proclaim every semester, unaware that they are participating in the colonization of all relationships as if they were business ventures.

Abandoning this assumption leave the question open in an uncomfortable way: What are we preparing students for? This moves us immediately into the petitio principii: Should we prepare students? Is that what we are doing?

Other possible metaphors could be: co-creating, sharing, building, working, discussing, and inquiring together. Whether these are preparation or not, I am not sure. I’m not even sure if I’m interested.

What actions help students become better at inquiry? This is the question that frames the encounter of the class, classroom optional.

Teaching online has me thinking about the assumptions we make about the classroom and what happens there.

I still have a classroom, but it is distributed. The classroom and the class is a state of mind that can be constituted through various means. My students invoke themselves as part of the class when they are working on assignments, reading, or participating in group chat. But there’s not a physical space for them to enter and become the class.

One of the biggest assumptions we make when teaching is that the people entering the classroom are empty, or lack knowledge. They are missing something and they have come into this room in order to get it. They get it from us. We are responsible for giving them something they don’t have and they need.

That last line might be the only good assumption that we can make as teachers. The rest of it is a function of the class sitting there together, facing you, there for the sole purpose of being in the class. These assumptions about the location of the students and the physical space are extremely dangerous.

The first of these dangerous assumptions is that the students arrive empty-handed. We believe them to arrive to the classroom because they lack something or because they don’t have something. What this means is that we are supposed to supply it. This ignores the lived experiences, attitudes, and thoughts that the students arrive with.

This is throwing away a resource that can be used to educate. Assuming that the students know nothing is a favorite trope and source of complaining by teachers, which is a strange irony given that teaching is supposed to increase knowledge, according to these same people.

It’s dangerous because it indicates to the students that teaching is a pedantic sham, a power grab, a demonstration of authority, the practice of one-way flows of power. Assuming the students have nothing to contribute to your classroom or your lesson that day is to assume they have had no experiences with your subject that sparked a question, thought, or a general curiosity.

Everything we teach you can encounter, and probably have encountered, in daily life. I’m referring to all courses offered at the university. To assume that this is first contact is to engage in the rhetorical performance of the pedant.

This discounts the educational experience for students. They read the scene as an expensive hazing ritual that they have to engage in, or a puzzle they have to solve to make the arbitrary gamemaster happy in order to get their degree. Many students have been indirectly taught through this assumption that teachers are disconnected from reality, that school and the classroom are irrelevant, and that they just have to get through it in order to get a degree. We’ve taught them this by making the mistake of assuming they don’t know.

What about assuming you don’t know, and approaching the class this way?

What about asking the students to say what they believe to be the principles at play in the issue?

What about placing the readings on-par with student narratives (i.e. they all have the same level of credibility)?

These will be hard to get going as the students will immediately smell a trap and become reticent. They have been burned too many times by mistaking a question meant to prove the teacher’s superiority and student inferiority as authentic curiosity. One has to build that trust up again and avoid cynicism, sarcasm, and the like, and avoid the teacher tropes of talking about “stupid people” in the world or conveying a political opinion as “the most obvious thing.” You are inadvertently beating up on their friends, family, previous mentors, and loved ones. They assume they will be next.

The students are participants in the class not recipients of the teacher’s discourse. They are investors and co-creators in the space. To assume they are there because they are missing something is to have the worst read possible on the classroom (besides that small fragment of professors out there who think they are ‘too important’ to be teaching). Nobody enters a classroom to get something; they enter because they have to in order to live the life they imagine they want. WIth that in mind, they are probably thinking about a great many things. See if you can get them to share. As the teacher, your role is to make connections, develop, and push things around. Relationships and associations are not the delivery of essential content, but are the essential content. The idea that if students don’t get something there’s no teaching is the logical endpoint of this failed assumption.

This all will come together at the end of these posts in my favorite metaphor for teaching, that of encounter. The classroom as the clearing in the woods, the first contact of rich traditions of different societies, the dinner party of strangers, there are many other ones you can come up with. Rhetoricians are lucky; we have tools and practice for “audiencing” (Crosswhite) groups of people and bringing forth the intersections of lived experience and identity they share in order to give them the opportunity to be persuaded, to think again, or to feel differently about a subject. It’s too bad that rhetoricians are the least likely to do this in their classes. Just look at our embarrassing public speaking books. If the assumption is going to have to be that students come in with materials and experience that can help make the class, this one is easiest – they’ve spent days and days of their lives pleading with others to agree with them, and will continue to do so. As will we. As will I, here.

It is supposed to feel like 110 degrees outside today so I’m staying pretty mellow inside. Cleaning out some of my bookshelves was easier than I thought it would be. Still in process. Set up a new facebook page for my side business of speech teaching, we’ll see if it gets any attention.

Also Above & Beyond released a new album I hadn’t heard yet and it’s mellow, even for them.

I think this should help me survive the rest of the afternoon, which is supposed to be even worse.

Been slowly working through the videos I made in Houston and just finished this one about Kaboom books. Love that bookstore. Hope you like the video.

I was away for the weekend in Houston and had a great time with my family. Now that I’m back in New York I’m starting to realize that the summer is quickly coming to an end. Today represents really the halfway point for me, give or take.

I have to be back on campus for official stuff on September 3rd, so that gives me 6 weeks? 7? Something like that but who is counting. That’s the nature of the summer.

A lot of things happened in Houston that I wanted to write about, but I couldn’t find my Field Notes notebook which means I’m sure it got obliterated in the wash. It’s lucky that there’s a new shipment of them that I just got. Subscribing to the Field Notes was a great idea turns out unless I lose all the notes I take.

Here’s the first of a few videos I made about my trip to Houston that involves BOOKS. I decided to film some short videos at my favorite Houston bookstores.