The New York Sophist

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. 

I was asked by the English Speaking Union to come out to NEST and judge the final debate of their middle school competition yesterday. Seems like a good way to end the semester. The middle school debates by the MSDP are always of a good quality (I’ve judged a couple before, one at the Hackley School up in Tarrytown, NY and the other was held at the Morgan Library). 

It was incredible to see how many family members and other supporters had gathered for the event. I wondered if they had been there all day. It was full of people. I only came in for one debate, but these people had to have been there for the previous 5 debates. Doing 5 debates in one day seems to be a lot in my view, but I think maybe with middle school students they have the energy and the desire to do that much in one day. I do wonder how much time they have for thinking about what they’ve said, what was said to them, and what they heard. I’m much more in the less as more camp on number of debates. 

The final round was about the US government providing a universal basic income to all citizens. I think this is a great topic since it’s something that circulates a bit in the press and has a lot of research that’s pretty accessible. It hits the marks for me on a good topic. But what was strange to me was how the debate played out. 

The proposition side indicted the welfare system saying that it was corrupt and holds people back. A universal basic income would solve this problem because it would allow people to choose what they would want to spend their money on – meet their own needs. The opposition argued that the universal basic income would be expensive to administer and could be exploited by people. They argued instead that we should take the money for universal basic income and use it to repair the broken welfare system because that system has restrictions on use. 

It was good for me to come see this debate since I’ve been rethinking my whole approach to public speaking, which is a much more important class than people think. I believe it to be the class that teaches invention for the whole university, helping students figure out what to say across the different classes they would take. This debate indicated to me just how much we as a society think that debate is about fidelity to the truth rather than fidelity to persuasion and audiences. The difference is in what we teach about the world: Are we to teach students how the world operates and how to conform to that world, or are we to teach them how to imagine something better than what we have now? Of course, the easy answer is somewhere in the middle. But conformity is pretty easy so I figure it doesn’t need a ton of classroom time. 

Here’s an example: The proposition team provided “evidence” that universal basic income works – all statistics from the Alaska permanent residency fund which indicated that people like the fund and that malnutrition and illiteracy rates go down with the application of these funds. It seemed to me they thought their work was done by providing this information. The opposition also provided the idea that people take advantage of welfare systems and could cheat, and that seemed like enough. Both teams got a lot of applause and cheers from the audience. This sort of speaking is fidelity to the fact, fidelity to the information, or state-of-the-world speaking that we all recognize as the function of debate – to convey what is right and true, etc. 

But neither of these teams provided any perspective on what it was they were asking us to judge. For the proposition side, it would have been great for them to give a bit of a story about what our values are and how we best enact those values in our policies. There’s a great story about individual choice, or putting family first, or any number of narratives that could be provided here. Then they can contrast that value story with whatever the other team offers. If the opposition, like in this case, says we should repair the current welfare system, fine. The welfare system goes against the value of choice and allowing people do to what they think is best for their children.

It’s an old idea from the teaching of oratory – which might be why it’s left out in contemporary post-Cartesian models of debating – where Quintilian (who didn’t come up with it but his writings are preserved) teaches that the narrative should be followed by the division – you tell the story of what you are all about until you reach a point where it makes sense to tell the audience how and why you disagree with your opponent. Narratio is followed by partitio. The what-we-stand-for and the who-we-are is followed by the what-we-must-stand-for. This goes beyond the team: Any good orator would try to constitute the audience as being a part of the team as well. Making your judges your co-conspirators against a great and powerful, but wrong, opposition is very persuasive.

The opposition could have benefitted from some oratorical pedagogy as well. Instead of saying that universal basic income is expensive, let’s use the money to repair welfare they should have told a story about caring. About how society must be protected, and that American society is about equal opportunity. Let’s use that money to repair and better our collective social good. They mentioned the schools as well – which should have been the whole case – and then they could talk about what free choice really is: Being educated and being able to make a critical choice when it counts the most. 

What was really missing from the debate was clash – serious disagreement on identity and values. Instead, the debate was about whether people will cheat in welfare or on universal basic income more. I think that fidelity to facts instead of fidelity to persuasion makes arguments like this more frequent. Fidelity in debate education should be toward creation – what can we make up? What can we create? What can we imagine? Opposed to the Cartesian tradition of folding argument into inductive or deductive “knowns:” We know people cheat on things like taxes, so they will cheat on universal basic income too. This is true, and probably will happen. But is this something that should be considered a good debate argument? Or something that should be offered in debate at all? 

The question of what debate teaches and what should be taught in debate is always that debate should teach creative invention of argument. That means that finding evidence that conforms to a known position in the world is less than half of what should be happening. Instead, students should be encouraged to tell a story about why their side of the debate matters, what it connects to and with, and what they imagine is the good that comes out of agreement with their side. From there, it is a simple matter to talk about things like workability or mechanism – because who cares? There are always bumps on the road to enacting and supporting our deepest values as a society and community. Teaching students how to string together a good narrative, then how to differentiate their position from the position of opponents are two of the most important parts of debate pedagogy – both absent – from the debate I judged. 

It was good to see. They all spoke very well. Now I am wondering how to teach and reinforce these practices among my own students. It’s not really clear at the moment, but I’m sure I’ll update here when I think of some assignments. 

Kate, who runs the MSDP, said before the final to the assembled crowd that we approach debate in a “spirit of abundance,” so there’s no reason to be angry, jealous, or mean to a team who is speaking if you feel that you should be up there instead. This is a good point to make, but I’ve been thinking about this abundant spirit since yesterday.

Perhaps argumentation studies and debate scholarship itself should approach things with a “spirit of abundance” due to the incredibly vast array of potential arguments out there, potential ways to say them, and potential ways to be wrong. Instead of focusing our research attentions on good and bad arguments, right and wrong arguments, how about more focus on the ways to make and take arguments, the ways to break and reset them?

Too much attention and energy is spent on being argument critics and not very much energy is spent on helping others produce and learn to produce them. Events like what I saw at NEST represent a type of politics, a politics of “let’s see what they say.” This is very different from “They’d better say what I like,” which passes for political practice today. More fidelity to imagination and less conformity to what we think we know is the politicization of the classroom that debate pedagogy brings, and should bring, anywhere it’s taught.  

So incredibly relieved that I no longer have to deal with my Modern Rhetorical Theory class which was in every sense a total failure. I thought I would feel happy about the end of the term, but the only feeling I have is relief. Relief in the sense that something you were close to is no longer suffering. I do so wish though I could go back to January and somehow “fix” things. Might be something beyond my fixing, might be that it’s 90 degrees outside yesterday. 

One of my theories about the term is that students are bright and well prepared by the core classes to advocate for themselves in bureaucratic battles. They learn quickly that the language of the syllabus is there to entrap them and they learn how to use it to bend things to their favor. The other result of bad professors merely enforcing point and percentage limits on dry assignments is there’s no practice in imagining or sharing opinion. They get no practice for the harder things that I might want them to do (or expect them to be able to do) at a higher level course. With the syllabus being absent the codes of numeric resistance and the texts being books for discussion, the students in this course would rather just not show up than risk saying the wrong thing.

Where I work there is a premium on making fun of and talking down about student ability. I call it the cynical pedagogy. You show someone what you are going to have the students do, they sneer, chortle, and express some trope about students being lazy or unwilling to do things. Recently I was at a meeting by a publisher who was showing us a new web suite they have designed for teaching. The professor next to me offered, in his best cynical tone, “What are we going to do about the students who just don’t buy a code, don’t want to log in, can’t log in, blah blah blah?” The company rep was very kind and thoughtful: “We understand that many students at the start of the year have no money, so we can do a 3 week grace period where no login is required. I get how student loans are late and paychecks don’t come in until the end of the month.” The professor replied, “Oh I didn’t think about that. I was referring to their laziness.”

Yes, a faculty member assumes that poor people are lazy. Just another day on my campus, honestly.

This cynical pedagogy comes out in two ways: First, the syllabus is designed for the students who can’t do anything. It’s limited and asks little of them except route work. Secondly, the professor has a haughty attitude toward questions. The students are frequently made fun of or belittled for asking questions in class (I was led to believe this was the function of class). So by the time they come to this late course on Modern Rhetorical Theory, they understand it’s better to be quiet and absent than invested and wrong. This is the fault of my colleagues.

But are they colleagues? The university’s insistence on treating teachers like contract employees develops a sense of community and investment in the community just shy of an Uber driver’s investment in the workplace community. Developing tenured or long-term 3rd way relationships with professors is the way to fix this. But that’s a whole other issue. We need more people less worried about whether they will have a job in 2 years and more worried about how they will teach their subject over time for the community they are a part of. 

The term is ending sadly for me. It’s a false sense of closure. The problems are still here even if the class is blissfully out of its misery. I feel like such a disappointment. I couldn’t adapt to what the students needed. I spent all term reading books and taking notes just to show up to a barely full classroom who had not read much of anything. I tried to adapt by lowering the assignment burden and making them more open. The results were still not that great, as people were not reading. They were not coming to class to ask questions. When they did come to class, they were silent. 

My solution is to return to the core curriculum and teach there. This might help a few people question the limited and rather stupid position most core teachers take on the side of discipline: “They have to learn what college is about.” I stand on the side of imagination: “They have to craft a valuable college experience.” One provides tools, the other provides limits. I can’t do anything in a course where the people were actively shamed from sharing ideas and engaging in difficult texts. I can teach a course that is supposed to activate those tastes and attitudes: Public Speaking. More on this later. 

Today I am going to work on my RSA paper, do some reading, some grading, and then I’m meeting with a couple of seniors to talk about Foucault. Not such a bad day honestly. The end of the term is not an end at all, but a mile marker. 

This semester has been the worst semester I’ve had in my whole career. 

When I started teaching in 1997, I thought I didn’t do a very good job then. Makes sense, since I was new. But that year looks amazing compared to the dumpster fire of shit teaching that I have accelerated this semester. I really thought I had a good plan going in and some really innovative things to offer. But I made such a simple mistake I’m almost embarrassed to write about it.

I assumed the topic of the course was interesting. I didn’t consider why it was interesting, or what would be interesting about it to the audience. I assumed they were all there to read and discuss texts. 

This is a rookie error. Any good sophist knows that one has to read the audience for these assumptions. Then they use these assumptions to construct the audience into what they want – a group of people constituted around a question, a set of problems, or a concern that needs – and must – be addressed.

There’s nothing naturally interesting about anything. That phrase “you should be interested” is always normative. When teachers claim students are bad because they are “not interested,” it is a point of self-criticism. It is the failure of the teacher-as-rhetor to generate that interest.

Part of the challenge here is that often when we teach we have to reach beyond and outside of what interests us as teachers. This means we have to extend our reach into areas that are uncomfortable for us and have no connection to why we got into the subject in the first place. Such a challenge makes the rhetorician think of the topics and the invention of arguments based on these general areas where one can make connections between what one knows and what one wants the audience to know. 

There is little to no teacher education on this rhetorical practice. Educational design is always aimed at rational, deductive claims about humans. It is rarely about the uncertainty or the fluidity of moments of encounter. Encounter is a word that does not appear in education theory in any way related to the classroom. What does appear are terms like objective, assessment, plan, rubric, etc. But what about that initial encounter? 

There’s a lot to say about that but to wrap this post up, the major error I made that turned this semester into a nightmare was to assume the students were interested in the same way I was in the course.

The second error I made was to not take the temperature of the course through regular writing assignments. I had in my mind large writing projects that I thought would be challenging and interesting. But I didn’t think about how to prepare for that large ending through a number of smaller tasks that led up to it. I think the big, final project is overblown and is probably a part of the larger ideological demand that education be productive in a material sense (20 page papers) and a commodity sense (is this assignment on-brand for students? Does it help them in their career?). The new approach I’ll use is small writing prompts through the semester. There’s no need to assign a larger paper if the smaller assignments, strung together, could create a nice narrative.

Finally, there’s also the issue of corruption from the university’s insistence and faculty acquiescence  to the idea that upper-level courses are somehow “better” or a “reward” for doing a good job. This means that the best faculty are not distributed across the curriculum as they should be. Everyone deserves an uninvested instructor now and again, but a steady diet of uninvested, overstressed, unsupported people like adjunct faculty only serves to reinforce the idea that the material isn’t going to be important after the term. Having more invested, less stressed faculty in these positions by either distributing adjuncts broadly or just hiring them on in ways where they feel comfortable and invested in the university would help so much. You’d be less likely to get a group of students in an upper level course who are tuned into the semester-long knowledge model and are not seeing connections to something they learned 2 years ago. If something is burned, you aren’t going to fix it by adjusting the oven temperature. The way to fix it is in the preparation long ago. And monitoring it before that point.

I think that teaching the basic courses is a real honor and something that we should do more often. Why have we allowed this disconnect between upper level and basic? Why do we like and revel in our list of upper-level courses? At the same time, we complain about student performance in those courses too. This is more than an assessment issue; it’s an issue of having someone in the basic courses who is invested in the university because it supports them, and they can see the long path ahead and how things interconnect. What will they need now in order to be able to enjoy and engage in the more complex material to come?

It’s nearly time for me to go teach and wander around the wasteland I’ve made. I really hate this semester and it hates me back. But hopefully I can avoid these problems in the future by actually thinking about what I’m doing in the classroom, not assuming without the topics nearby, and spending more time in the basic courses. 

This semester has been the worst semester I’ve had in my whole career. 

When I started teaching in 1997, I thought I didn’t do a very good job then. Makes sense, since I was new. But that year looks amazing compared to the dumpster fire of shit teaching that I have accelerated this semester. I really thought I had a good plan going in and some really innovative things to offer. But I made such a simple mistake I’m almost embarrassed to write about it.

I assumed the topic of the course was interesting. I didn’t consider why it was interesting, or what would be interesting about it to the audience. I assumed they were all there to read and discuss texts. 

This is a rookie error. Any good sophist knows that one has to read the audience for these assumptions. Then they use these assumptions to construct the audience into what they want – a group of people constituted around a question, a set of problems, or a concern that needs – and must – be addressed.

There’s nothing naturally interesting about anything. That phrase “you should be interested” is always normative. When teachers claim students are bad because they are “not interested,” it is a point of self-criticism. It is the failure of the teacher-as-rhetor to generate that interest.

Part of the challenge here is that often when we teach we have to reach beyond and outside of what interests us as teachers. This means we have to extend our reach into areas that are uncomfortable for us and have no connection to why we got into the subject in the first place. Such a challenge makes the rhetorician think of the topics and the invention of arguments based on these general areas where one can make connections between what one knows and what one wants the audience to know. 

There is little to no teacher education on this rhetorical practice. Educational design is always aimed at rational, deductive claims about humans. It is rarely about the uncertainty or the fluidity of moments of encounter. Encounter is a word that does not appear in education theory in any way related to the classroom. What does appear are terms like objective, assessment, plan, rubric, etc. But what about that initial encounter? 

There’s a lot to say about that but to wrap this post up, the major error I made that turned this semester into a nightmare was to assume the students were interested in the same way I was in the course.

The second error I made was to not take the temperature of the course through regular writing assignments. I had in my mind large writing projects that I thought would be challenging and interesting. But I didn’t think about how to prepare for that large ending through a number of smaller tasks that led up to it. I think the big, final project is overblown and is probably a part of the larger ideological demand that education be productive in a material sense (20 page papers) and a commodity sense (is this assignment on-brand for students? Does it help them in their career?). The new approach I’ll use is small writing prompts through the semester. There’s no need to assign a larger paper if the smaller assignments, strung together, could create a nice narrative.

Finally, there’s also the issue of corruption from the university’s insistence and faculty acquiescence  to the idea that upper-level courses are somehow “better” or a “reward” for doing a good job. This means that the best faculty are not distributed across the curriculum as they should be. Everyone deserves an uninvested instructor now and again, but a steady diet of uninvested, overstressed, unsupported people like adjunct faculty only serves to reinforce the idea that the material isn’t going to be important after the term. Having more invested, less stressed faculty in these positions by either distributing adjuncts broadly or just hiring them on in ways where they feel comfortable and invested in the university would help so much. You’d be less likely to get a group of students in an upper level course who are tuned into the semester-long knowledge model and are not seeing connections to something they learned 2 years ago. If something is burned, you aren’t going to fix it by adjusting the oven temperature. The way to fix it is in the preparation long ago. And monitoring it before that point.

I think that teaching the basic courses is a real honor and something that we should do more often. Why have we allowed this disconnect between upper level and basic? Why do we like and revel in our list of upper-level courses? At the same time, we complain about student performance in those courses too. This is more than an assessment issue; it’s an issue of having someone in the basic courses who is invested in the university because it supports them, and they can see the long path ahead and how things interconnect. What will they need now in order to be able to enjoy and engage in the more complex material to come?

It’s nearly time for me to go teach and wander around the wasteland I’ve made. I really hate this semester and it hates me back. But hopefully I can avoid these problems in the future by actually thinking about what I’m doing in the classroom, not assuming without the topics nearby, and spending more time in the basic courses.