The New York Sophist

Midterm exams are overhyped, stupid, and a mode of social control to remind students that they are in the “to be disciplined” category by a group of people (professors and such) that know more than them and will always know more than them. It’s such a waste of time.

Midterm elections are quite similar here in the U.S. where all my usually intelligent, critical, and thoughtful friends become hucksters of angry discipline, making fun of everyone who questions the need to vote, angrily shouting (if possible) across social media that voting confirms ones existence and is the only way to justify having any opinion on politics whatsoever. There’s even a number of people who believe that they are participating in the conversations that will steer the future of the country. I know, I know. You’ll just have to believe me when I tell you that they are normally very, very smart.

Moments of discipline are fantastic for reinforcing social control schemes under the rhetoric of “advancement,” “improvement,” or the more conservative modes of “duty,” “rights,” or “obligation as a citizen.” It’s funny that in any other given time of the year I would see posts about the absolute ridiculous ideologies held up by relations to the state and how those ideologies are best gone and forgotten. But not VOTING oh no. It’s the best thing ever. Ever I say.

Well enough about that. Herbert Marcuse has questioned such angry disciplinarity toward voting in a much more nuanced way than I ever could. And I’m sure you are tired of hearing me go on and on about how a simplistic, binary relationship to voting is exactly what the political establishment wants. All that money time and energy spent to give people a pittance of a selection of who will go to Washington or the State Capitol in their name and accept special interest money. What a waste.

Discipline is something that we teach more than anything else in formal education. Discipline, not creativity, not questioning, not curiosity – we complain that students don’t come to the classroom with these things and then we spend the whole time on 15 page writing guides that tell them how many points a misplaced comma will cost them.

In argumentation and speech we teach a discipline of tearing apart, something that Peter Elbow calls “the doubting game” in composition, but in rhetoric we teach the “cynicism game.” It’s the teaching that no set of proof will ever be enough to prove something, so tear it apart, the argument is meaningless.

I think the doubting game could be good if it were actually teaching doubt. What I mean is if it just hung out around the questions: How do you know? Where does that information come from? What’s the alternative?, etc. Instead we have to take these questions and militarize them toward the destruction of the argument in question.

Not accepting an argument doesn’t mean we have to destroy it. A moderate position is often the most critical and informative position that can be taken in politics. Being uncertain is a great way to approach most questions, but it also affords you the ability to see new possibilities. Instead of camping out on the destruction of the polar opposite of your view, you can pick up some of the other elements of the position and use them for other purposes.

Peter Elbow suggests in Writing without Teachers that we should teach a believing game to counter the most negative effects of the doubting game – namely, cynicism. I think this is the right move, but I prefer the uncertainty game, or the ambivalence game. In how many ways can we interrogate the position offered until we begin to feel the irresistible pull toward affirmation, negation, or a third way?

I think ripping ideas apart has chilled people’s desire to read new ideas, after all, they are probably all wrong. It has also chilled people’s creative urge to express themselves for fear they may be wrong (read: will be wrong). Without curiosity about what others are saying and the creative urge to assemble new texts, you cannot have a successful variant of any form of democracy. You have to generate texts upon texts, assess them, and create others. You have to be generating discourse, not just tearing it apart.

But we’d rather have the ease and familiar fear of discipline in our classrooms and hold those grades up high because then we won’t have to sit in a classroom on a warm afternoon at the end of the fall, silently stare at one another, and realize that we don’t know what we think we know. Maybe this is what it really looks like to be on the edge of Burke’s abyss?

Got back a little less than a week ago from the Center for CSPAN Scholarship and Engagement conference at Purdue University and it was super cool.

Brought my new GoPro7 along and shot a few videos. There’s one more coming but I don’t want to edit it tonight.

Vlogging is a pretty hard thing to master. I need to learn how to keep the camera more level with me, and also how to get some better audio. The aluminum handle I was using wasn’t any good at all, the mic picks up every single move of my hand on the surface. I have another tripod handle thing that I think will do a lot better.

Here are some videos!

Thinking about you . . . 

Didn’t really do much this past weekend, and now thinking about it on a Monday morning. I probably should have done a bit more in prepping for the week, writing, doing research, but I really just took it easy. I feel a little panicked about it, but that’s just holdover from a time when I would only have a weekend at home every 2 or 3 weeks.

I’m really starting to enjoy my position a lot more now that I’ve cut about 30 hours out of it. The biggest, and most surprising change to me is that I am never exhausted. Over the past 10 years or so my dominant feeling at work has been being tired. Too tired to do anything more than half-assed. After booking a trip, there’s another one to book. Or finances to reconcile. Or some form to complete. It really is the work of two people. The trade-off is now I’m teaching 3 courses, but I’m more alert, energetic, and engaged than I have been the whole time I’ve been a professor. I can see why people really like this job now.

I’ve got the CSPAN conference coming up in Purdue and I feel ready for it. That will be two weeks from today. After that is NCA, then the quick slide into finals and the holidays. The speed of the semester hasn’t changed at all. Once I accomplish a task, two more appear for completion. It’s nice, but I’m not quite back to the comfortable feeling of realization that I’m in charge of my days. I think next semester will be more like that, where if I’d like to spend the day reading a book or a series of essays, I could do that.

Long-time readers of this blog know I’ve been working on a book that attempts to reconceptualize intercollegiate debate. This is a very slow process, although many of the chapters are at about a 50% completion. The opening chapter feels like it’s going to be a slog where I have to set up the scene of debating and such, so I’m saving that for last. But in the meantime another project has popped up that is more time-sensitive, and I think I could write that book – a popular press book – very quickly and get it out in time for the 2020 election. It’s a book about election debate, something I’ve been thinking about a lot since writing this paper for CSPAN.

I’m also considering buying a GoPro 7 to increase or at least get some regular vlogging going. The YiCam is nice, but it’s not quite to the level I’d like it. I think the 7 has a lot of features that benefit a regular vlogging practice and make it a bit easier. I’m starting to think of vlogging as a compliment to the blog, which I’ve often thought of as a form of publishing instead of long-form social media – which is the style of this post.

Although I didn’t accomplish a lot this weekend I feel pretty rested and good about what I did do. My students have been concerned about the persuasive affect they feel from stories and conversation versus the lack of any feeling they have for well-researched statistics. I thought about giving them some Hayden White to read on this but Walter Fisher came to me and I think I found a couple of good essays to teach next week. I also wrote a bunch of recommendation letters in record time – not having debate to worry about makes the workflow so fast that I feel a bit bad about how easily I can accomplish my daily to-do list. It’s a really nice problem to have.

This week for bureaucratic reasons we have the same schedule for two days in a row, which helps nobody except some legal form filer who has to ensure we’ve had X number of hours in the classroom. At least we are doing speeches, so that makes the back-to-back make sense. Just another reason to file away in the stuffed folder of reasons why online higher ed is superior to the in person classroom.

Kenneth Burke has this great tool, or method or heuristic device – I’m not sure what to call it. He calls it “perspective by incongruity” and what it does it help you see something in a disturbingly new way. You use the wrong sort of heuristic or perspective in order to understand, or convey understanding about something that if you just did it the normal way you wouldn’t get your idea across.

When you put two perspectives or two terms together that do not match up or do not come from the same narrative, you get at the same time a lot of fog, but you also get a lot of movement – of trying to see through, around, and past it. This movement and the fog (metaphorical of course) gives you the chance to see things a bit differently than you would have normally.

When I teach public speaking I often teach this as a way of providing statistics so they won’t bore the audience. “Tell the audience how many Yankee stadiums on opening day that is,” I’ll say, “Or how many Manhattans.” These are images everyone has in mind and can easily scale and scope the harm or benefit of the idea being conveyed in the speech.

But the other day I had this happen to me in a way that surprised me, it was totally unintentional and it really opened up my thinking about teaching.

I had a student come to office hours to work on a speech. We were trading ideas back and forth and building arguments. It was a great meeting. I happened to notice his laptop was really cool looking, really light, and had a great screen. I asked him about it and he said it was a Macbook Air.

“yea it’s great,” he said, “My sister gave me this to use in college.”

After he said that, I saw him totally differently. He wasn’t a student working on a speech, he was someone’s brother, someone’s son, a friend, a cousin – someone his family was so proud of for attending college. Someone who was very close with his family, who wanted the best for him. The gift of the laptop opened up this new perspective that I was sitting with someone who really meant a lot to other people.

This small moment of contact -where I was forced into imagining my student as someone who was deeply cared about, and a source of pride for a family I’ll never meet – seems like something that can hedge against the common, cynical tales of students that ooze about the halls of academia.

I hate that students are talked about, then become, something in the way of our work, something lazy that we have to deal with, headaches who keep coming back, who won’t listen. Here’s a young person who is just doing his best. He’s trying, and people have invested in him. The gift of a laptop on top of the cynical student discourse is incongruous enough to let in the chance for some new identifications.

I wish there were easier, or even constructed ways to plan to humanize students for their professors. I think even the most caring of us grow a bit calloused after a few semesters on autopilot. But caring, really deep caring, is essential for excellent teaching. I’ve been convinced of that for a while. Caring about more than rules and policies or material and weeks left in the term. These students, who have made their families proud, who have been given special things to carry with them to help them on their journey, deserve an experience in higher education, an experience that will confront who they are and point to who they could choose to be.

The revolutionary educational experience will not come from cynicism, from re-enforcing the norms of the corporate world, from worrying about your students not being able to hold down a job. It will come from the recognition that they are here to get better. Whatever that means, it is not compatible with the idea that they are here to cheat and trick you out of points.

How do we encourage this perspective by incongruity? How do we increase the chances of this sort of encounter?