The New York Sophist

Interesting book that takes some sacred terms in composition theory (audience, objectivity, voice, etc) and critiques them from the lens of whether or not teaching is in line with composition theory and pedagogical approaches to writing. After admitting several times in the course of the text a well accepted idea that pedagogy lags behind theory about 20 to 30 years, the author critiques contemporary teaching for being too dependent on objectivity, authorial intent, liberal construction of audiences, and thin conceptions of proof.

Although the critique is well made, I think it would be great to see more of the book written like Chapter 6 which really had me going. It might be my own biases in terms of what I’m interested in, but this chapter on audience was great. I think that what set it apart was specific ideas for very radical assignments and classroom activities. I would have liked to see more of that throughout the book.

I like the idea of upsetting these God-terms, either tumping them over or literally making people who think they are good teachers upset. But the critique really doesn’t go as far as it needs to and also avoids some necessary complexity. For example, the chapter on objectivity is very good and very right about its criticism of fact-reliance in pedagogy, which honestly impacts the entire education system. But there’s little discussion of the importance of facts for issues such as holocaust denial, conspiracy theory (moon landing and 9/11 sort of stuff) as well as other strange ideas that often appear in American student writing. Making the critique of fact addiction more fuzzy with an analysis of the false-flag conspiracy regarding Sandy Hook, for example, might have really opened up the conversation between text and reader about what is possible in the teaching of writing today (as well as what is needed).

In the end the book was enjoyable to read, it just didn’t rock me the way I hoped it would. The critique is obvious and agreeable, the Audience chapter is amazing, and the rest of it seems, well, right – but not radically upsetting.

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The University of Southern California is a very, very pretty place. 

Aside from the inevitable technical issues on the video call – why can’t any university just make it easy to do this? Everywhere I go there is a camera that isn’t connected, microphones and speakers that are not connected, logins and other security measures that only keep out and frustrate legitimate users of the systems, and on and on and on. Not to mention that faculty and others at the university think it’s amusing that computer illiteracy is rampant and epidemic across the academy. Anyway, we’ll try again today and see if it works. It’s so frustrating that there aren’t just simple computer setups at universities dedicated to video conferencing. 

The conversation yesterday was pretty good. I presented a talk (I am just now realizing I forgot to record it) that I should post on Academia.edu. I argued two lines of thought about civic debate: First, that we should start anew in considering what civic debate is when we engineer it for student debaters. To do so, we should start with the Roman commonplace questions: Is it? What is it? And finally, What kind is it? These are questions for the generation of argument: Existence, definition, and quality. If you skip one, you open yourself up to trouble later on.  

The second thing was a discussion of Robert Newman’s passing, which really marks a moment in American debate history. Newman was (and is) a titanic figure in American debate education. He was called a subversive by his own university in the 1950s for hosting debates on the question of the United States government formally recognizing China. Serious stuff.  Anyway, I reflect on his brand of subversion and what it can teach us about what civic debate ought to look like. 

 You can read my draft of the comments here. 

We talked about a number of civic events with different partners that might be possible based on our connections. I’m more of an attendee rather than a planner at these events simply because my Univeristy, as you probably know by now, has zero interest in anything outside of itself. It’s a total “walls up” institution where rooms cannot be reserved for any purpose during final exams, and the idea of taking undergraduates places for their benefit is seen as a problem. It’s impossible to reserve rooms for events or host things on campus – you are treated by the staff as a huge waste of time, annoying, and a problem. The University claims to be interested in students and student transformation, but in the end they are really only interested in getting paid on time, and making sure that students go to class. Some transformation.  

I’m happy to take students to events though which is why I attend this. And I’m even happier to discuss pedagogy of debating. I just have to deal with feelings of jealousy when i hear about all the great stuff that other people are doing simply because their university functions normally. As professors, they can reserve rooms when needed for academic purposes. They can develop partnerships. When I bring a complete overseas program to my university’s study abroad office they say, “good luck developing that, here are the forms to fill out.” Nobody wants to do any work. They want to collect a check and share pictures of their children on the university email. They want their summers off; they consider tenure a retirement plan. Pathetic.

I’m actually interested in teaching although I’m terrible at it right now. The conference is really thought-provoking, and makes me think about the classroom a lot. The classroom’s status as a transformative space is undervalued. People, even thoughtful high-ranking university folks, have written the classroom off as a static space that has an absolute set of practices. Where’s the imagination? 

Today’s discussion will focus a lot more on best practices and ways of talking about and justifying civic debate as more than a firm “not that” directed at other types of debating. Then this afternoon I have nothing but time to kill as I wait for my midnight flight back to New York. 

A lot happened yesterday that involved good food and wine and a boat. I didn’t have the time last night (because I went immediately to sleep) to download and have a look at the videos I took of the boat but maybe I’ll do it tonight after the conference. 

Had an amazing dinner yesterday at a place called Sol in Newport Beach. Amazing food. There was a good conversation we had (it was happening on and off on the boat as well) about assessment.  

A big question to think about in assessment is how to be fair about evaluating student efforts. One of the difficult things to evaluate in rhetoric courses anyway, is how well students do with uncertainty or ambiguity. If we directly craft moments of ambiguity to help them deal with ambiguity, is that good? If we provide an ambiguous criteria for evaluation, is that helpful? There is an argument that one is often evaluated and judged on ambiguous criteria.  

I believe the rhetorical response here is to teach students how to cut through ambiguity and make a descriptive argument as to what should be judged and how. But by a descriptive argument, I mean they do not advocate for a change in an open and clear way. Instead, they place their advocacy as something that exists and is unrecognized. They point out that there’s a way to judge and evaluate right in front of us that is the normal and natural way to do it.  

Most students would have trouble with this since their school experience is 98% discipline and 2% creativity and ingenium. When we ask them to obey a rubric, even an ambiguous one, the impulse is to try to follow it to the best of their ability then prepare appeal-style arguments when the grade is bad. Trying one’s best is often a reason to increase a grade in the contemporary college environment.  

If one wanted to teach responses and handling of ambiguity, one would want to do it in cooperation with the students, not holding it over them or being someone in charge or something. We often forget that one of the roles of a teacher is to cooperate and help students. Thinking of the classroom as a site of encounter for everyone there – including the professor – helps us focus on this idea of cooperation and help as a central element in teaching practice. Too often professors believe their role is guard of some vault full of points (imagine Scrooge McDuck’s money bin) and they have to make sure that nobody steals any points or gets points they are not worthy of having. 

Instead of this metaphor the cooperation metaphor might increase performance in the course as the professor leads the class through different ways of approaching ambiguity and wrangling it. There is no correct answer but merely good approaches. There’s not much of a question of grading process or product here – what product would you grade? The process is the only thing on offer. This also addresses an old question of whether you grade performances or understanding in a course. What about those students who are brilliant public speakers yet understand none of the principles of the course? What about those who are terrible at speaking but understand the principles very clearly? This final question is the ultimate ambiguity that professors must wrangle as they attempt to create a fair and meaningful grading system for their course. 

In debate, we side with performance 100% of the time. There’s nothing else. But how would debate alter if we decided to judge debates on process rather than performance? This might be a question or idea that the civic debate conference I’m attending for the next two days could perhaps one day entertain. 

the race is on! Who will get to LAX first?

Flew in pretty early and arrived around noon. The last 30 minutes of the flight we were involved in a drag race with what looked like an American Airlines flight?

I have a few of these photos but I think one really is enough to show you how weird it was. 

Anyway, the flight was uneventful. Got a bunch of reading done, which is the sign of a good flight.

Took no time to get from LAX to my hotel which is in what some have called an ok area, some have said kind of “not great” area (I leave interpretation of that up to you, o readers). So far so good. Pretty quiet and the rooms are clean and inexpensive. Glad I found the spot. Although a police helicopter did circle the hotel for like 90 minutes this afternoon. 

I only brought my still camera and this action camera on this trip as I’m trying to pack light. Also rocking the iPad Pro again – still getting used to it and don’t really get it yet. There’s a lot of stuff I’m much more familar with doing on a laptop and doing it here on this IPad just doesn’t work the same way. But I’m learning. 

it was amazing.

After checking into the hotel here I examined my Facebook feed where my loyal and intelligent LA friends made a list of suggested spots to eat and check out. FIrst on the list was some Mexican food. I went to Al & Bea’s Mexican food. Amazing. 

This is a bean and cheese burrito with red sauce and it was really good. The thing about it that I thought was weird though was the tiny bits of cheese that are somehow evenly distributed throughout the beans. I’ve never had a burrito like this before, it was great. Very different than Texas and a vast improvement over the horror-show of Mexican food that exists in New York City.

I was finishing eating and messing on my phone when the strangest thing to ever happen to me (most likely) happened.

A woman was getting burritos and she started staring at me. She approached me and asked me if I was from New York. I said yes. She then identified herself as the mom of one of my students who is graduating on Sunday. We were supposed to meet on Sunday but I guess fate, the spirit of Los Angeles, or some other force deemed that we should meet today. Of course we took a selfie and tagged her daughter in it and put it on Facebook. Los Angeles, what a small town.

This seriously has to be one of the strangest things I’ve experienced. It was pretty great though, and we get to meet again on Sunday!

I told her I was planning to head to a place called The Last Bookstore downtown and she offered me a ride, so off we went. After saying goodbye (“See you Sunday!”) I went to check out the Last Bookstore. I’ts seriously one of the best bookstores I’ve been in!

I only bought 4 books so that’s doing pretty well considering they had some great stuff and most every book was $5. Got some weird ones too but also a couple that are actually pretty good. This footage is from my Snapchat specs, version 1. 

I found a lot of great old pals in this bookstore. Love that Watson translation (he did several good ones across religious texts). Of course Sophist and Vico. This was a great bookstore.

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Had some coffee after that in a great spot suggested by someone who knows where to get good coffee. Waited there to get hungry and explore some dinner options downtown, but I never got hungry so I returned to the hotel and did some writing (including this post).

So that’s the day so far. Now time to go have a drink or two where Bukowski drank (supposedly!). Very excited to see some more spots.

Thankfully this semester is over and I can slowly, over time, forget the terrible course that I just “taught.” In trying to figure out what went wrong I’m looking for various theoretical explanations. I want to avoid any and all explanations that blame the students, I.e. “You didn’t spoon-feed them the material,” “Where is your active learning?” “Where are the group assignments?” “I make my students post 2 comments a week on Blackboard to one another,” etc.  I don’t think such activities do more than replicate a mid-level job in a corporation where one is told by a boss of some kind to accomplish disconnected tasks by a certain date. They have no need to, and no desire to, ask why, or what is it for, or how does this fit in with who I am and what I do. They aren’t good for students or for professors. Students don’t understand and pretty much hate the work they are assigned; professors don’t like the lack of engagement on assigned tasks and dismiss the students as incapable and beyond teaching. So we have students who dismiss professors as weird bosses that just make arbitrary demands and professors dismiss students as beyond teaching who just expect points and grades for doing the basics. 

I think I’m just going to have to provide my own analysis. If you don’t like analysis of teaching then I have some sad news about this blog: There are going to be a lot of posts about analyzing failed teaching for a while. I have to figure out what went so terribly wrong with what I thought was a pretty well-designed class. The first question that comes to mind is the petitio – well-designed for who?

This leads me to the Roman point of view, something I’ve been reading a lot about in the hope that my public speaking course in the fall will be a mix of Roman pedagogy and modern declamation (tech conference unveilings, CES, and of course TED talks). So Roman pedagogy has a lot to say about how to get people motivated and interested in something that they might not be. It’s the basic elements of a good declamation that can prove what I did wrong as a teacher. 

Exordium: The Way In, the Attention Part, the Getting everyone On Board Part

I took absolutely no time in the course to connect what I had laid out, what was motivating this course, and what the reasons for sustained attention would be. I didn’t try to hook anyone, and I didn’t try to get anyone excited or connected in a state of interest or worry that the course might be vital to them. I just talked about rhetoric from my own point of view and what questions I had. I didn’t consider one of the central ways to get a class going: Treat your course as a petitio principi – the fallacy of the Begged Question (eg. Why is this a course?)

Narratio: The story so far, the facts of the case, the narrative frame for what’s happened before you got here leading up to the current moment when I’m giving this speech.

I should have spent a few days on the history of rhetoric, why it matters, and such. Or I could have started with the big questions about persuasion and argument and what the responses have been up to the 1940s or so. Or I could even narrate my own life and experiences up to this point and why I’m now standing where I’m standing and thinking what I’m thinking. It doesn’t matter, but there needs to be a backstory and there needs to be a plot. The students need to see what’s happened before they walked into the room. And I’m not against lecture and direct instruction to accomplish this part. I did not do this. I assigned a book and said, “Let’s read it!” – this was a huge mistake. There needs to be a story that leads us up to the reason why this is the book to read. 

Divisio – this is where the speaker brings their point of view in from the less controversial, more agreed upon narrative of the “facts” or the “story so far.” They start to weigh in on parts of the story they don’t agree with, or they lay out a decision or a derivative from the story that must be decided upon. 

This would be the elements of the course that take that story and challenge it from the texts that are read and discussed. This is where we decide, as a class, what our intervention is going to be in this story and this set of knowledge. This is the part where we advocate for the things in the story that are most or least important (depending on how you read those terms). This is also where the teacher can lay out the “quest” for the students, the completion goal, whatever that big question or decision should be. The important thing here is that there is a break in what the expected conclusion of the story might be. This is where the professor might also establish their point of view on what the class is doing or being or studying but it’s done in a way that assumes possible challenge.

Confirmatio – Where the speaker supports and expands on the arguments laid out in the divisio. This is the place where proof lives and the convincing arguments are made. 

This is the part where professors should “profess” their views on things. I didn’t do this so much as I’m concerned about setting an expectation for repetition. Maybe at other universities it’s not this bad but where I work there’s a very deep and very disciplined tie between student opinion and the professor’s perception being on the same page. If a student writes or speaks an assignment that goes against the professor’s view, the professor will most likely fail that student, even if the argument is well made. Furthermore, they will call the student “disrespectful” and really lay into them. Any question or challenge of professor opinion is treated as if it were treason. That being said, I do think there’s value to the professor advocating for an interpretation or a point of view on the course and the readings. The trick is to figure out how to establish that great environment to begin with. Once you get that going, over time, you can be a bit more confirmatio in the sense of being an advocate. A page from the Roman declamation instructors would be to take the position no student wants to take and invite challenges from every student in the room. This also feels like martial arts to me. But the environment must be set up properly first for this to work. Make your case, profess your art, and use examples that are persuasive and make contact with the students. I did not do this at all, I let them express views that I questioned. They probably felt pretty adrift. 

Digressio – Where the orator takes opportunity to use the case he or she is arguing to make larger social commentary, or investigate the roots of a value or principle, or to praise or blame the ethics of an age or era. 

This is more of the metaphorical section of the critique of pedagogy, but I think of this as the place where the students inject their own material into the course – things happening on campus you might not be aware of, popular culture trends, music, film, etc. and the controversies around it. This is a place where connections to the current are made from the arguments that you establish from your field, from research, from the principles of the art that you profess. It’s a planned digression, but one that shows the importance of the case as either a metonymy or a synecdoche. The particular thing you are studying in the course is a container or a part for a larger whole, that is, society, the state, life, thought, whatever it might be. A good teacher plans for digression which is not a contradiction: There is time reserved to make and explore the connection to the big questions as the audience (the students) sees them playing out. I failed to do this at all, thinking the students would pick up my questions, or find things interesting in the text themselves, decontextualized, or offered as self-contained readings. This is really where the course broke down. 

Peroration – the conclusion, where judgement is asked for and how judgement should be arrived at, where the speech and the case fit into thought on society and personal responsibility. What duties are and how to carry them out. What is the role and charge of a judge? 

This is the end of the course – what did we accomplish, how did we know we accomplished it, and what does it mean? How are we to judge the course, the materials in it, and what we produced? This is the end of any course – and I used to be much better at this years ago – where you go meta. I think that beyond a teaching evaluation, the audience should be called on to judge the merits of the case, i.e. is this course necessary and valuable? Does it matter? If so, how? If not, what points to what should be offered? Nowhere in my course did I call for judgement on what was happening. The only thing I called for was understanding – as vague and useless a term as any. Assessment people will always say, don’t ask if they understood. Ask them something more specific. I didn’t do this and should have asked for a vote on whether or not these theorists advanced work on the vital questions, and whether or not I was able to defend them (or prosecute them) in my role as professor/advocate. 

Reading back over this I feel depressed. So much opportunity wasted because I was careless. A course is much harder to put together and maintain than a book or a pet. You have to constantly nurture it. I really wasted this term and I’m very glad it’s over. But now the challenge is to protect from this happening again. I think that practice is central, as well as a daily awareness and daily engagement on the focus of what you are doing. If the Roman metaphor holds up, it seems to me that the attention should be that of a trial attorney. This trial lasts 14 weeks, and at the end of it the quality of the jury’s deliberation and verdict will be your fault, whichever way it goes. As Miyamoto Musashi wrote, “An accident that happens or is committed by your opponent should not be counted as a victory.” Relying on the situation is not enough. Clear focus on making a good case for the class is a must.