The New York Sophist

The wall that is always hit when teaching critical thinking is the “school assignment” wall, that limitation that says that doing these things is valuable in a classroom, but not outside of the course. Even students who master the arts of critical thinking during a course where it is a significant part of the workload have no connection to performing those acts outside of the classroom. Students believe they are acquiring something there, and once authorized, might not need to practice it again.

Critical thinking also becomes like most taught things today, the study of trying to say what they think the instructor wants to hear. 

What we need to do is focus our attention on the productive bias – that judgement that students are not able or do not need to be the creators of original content when students in the academy. And no – reaction and response papers are not what I would call original content. Something new is not original content either. Original content is the engagement with unknowns, making something for others to evaluate. It’s the thing that most young people come to university to do – express their ideas in order to find gaps in their knowledge. It is too often that the university says, “Later. Right now we evaluate.” And they make the students read and react to the point where they forget that they wanted to make. Now they have become consumers, and even more consumeristic than they were before entering the university. Instead of critical thinking, the average university course provides a pattern and system of proper consumption of ideas, brought forth by the right vendors in the right ways.

Original content is the abandonment of such things as the “necessary” things the course has to cover in favor of spending more time on student reaction to the texts and ideas. When these are in conflict, often over the amount of time left in the course, it should be student questioning and student reaction that is given precedent. There also should be some element of student interaction beyond the classroom. Not sure if this is service-learning, but that model has the potential to push through the wall and indicate to students the importance of critical thinking as a practice done daily as a part of normal, daily life.

The wall between classroom critical thinking and critical thinking in daily life will be bridged when the university stops believing its own advertising, that it is a job creation and job training facility. This can be a part of university work, but the larger part is the creation of people that provide capacity to society. Subjects that can critically approach daily life and be able to engage with it, create from it, respond to such creations, and provide the substance of life – not work – are the sort of things that the university should work on. The critical thinking wall exists simply because we have come to believe in the classroom as a space of authorization of ability rather than a place to develop comfort and commitment to life long practices of speech and thought.

Lecturing again at Cornell University on Monday. The topic is an introduction to rhetorical studies; the audience is mixed undergraduates. 

The central problem is how to provide a good introduction that will make these students feel confident in their exploration and study of rhetoric for the remainder of the term without creating something too solid, too complete, and therefore incorrect. 

Aristotle tells us that rhetoric is at its best when it is not about itself. How do you provide a foundation in the understanding of rhetoric? Keep rhetoric off the table so they can see a good example of it in practice? 

There seem to be a few strategies of approach:

Plan 1: Offer all of the conceptions of rhetoric to them at once, like a giant, general strike. Explain that everyone is in agreement that rhetoric is an incredibly powerful and vibrant area of study. This would have metaphorical connections to talking about “the X movement” and showing a variety of videos of people demonstrating for a number of incompatible, or at least distant, causes. 

Plan 2: Talk about something other than rhetoric – music, art, film, etc. Get the class involved in a discussion of meaning. Try to get them to nail meaning down for various things such as genre, or quality. Turn the discussion toward how those decisions were made – who persuaded who – and with what facts – get a proper panic started about the lack of fundamentals in these very accurate and very good definitions that we wove out of the air.

Plan 3: Show various examples of the rhetorical. Claim that some of these examples are not rhetoric. Discussion ensues as the students try to guess what is not rhetoric or what is. The students enact the struggle of naming that rhetoric’s contemporary work is predicated upon. The naming and deciding of the rhetorical is the rhetorical in two ways: the naming process, and the struggle to maintain that name in a world that is aloft in the winds of the stripping of names and the re-affixing of labels.

I will probably hit somewhere in the middle. My lecture is oriented around different definitions of rhetoric through time. I will try to keep those alive and current through the discussion; no labeling of “old theories” or “what people used to think.” They are all present, at once. 

Also James Wichelns was a professor at Cornell when he devised the English/Rhetoric break. So I’ll be giving a lot of attention to him. Couldn’t have it any other way.

Lecturing again at Cornell University on Monday. The topic is an introduction to rhetorical studies; the audience is mixed undergraduates. 

The central problem is how to provide a good introduction that will make these students feel confident in their exploration and study of rhetoric for the remainder of the term without creating something too solid, too complete, and therefore incorrect. 

Aristotle tells us that rhetoric is at its best when it is not about itself. How do you provide a foundation in the understanding of rhetoric? Keep rhetoric off the table so they can see a good example of it in practice? 

There seem to be a few strategies of approach:

Plan 1: Offer all of the conceptions of rhetoric to them at once, like a giant, general strike. Explain that everyone is in agreement that rhetoric is an incredibly powerful and vibrant area of study. This would have metaphorical connections to talking about “the X movement” and showing a variety of videos of people demonstrating for a number of incompatible, or at least distant, causes. 

Plan 2: Talk about something other than rhetoric – music, art, film, etc. Get the class involved in a discussion of meaning. Try to get them to nail meaning down for various things such as genre, or quality. Turn the discussion toward how those decisions were made – who persuaded who – and with what facts – get a proper panic started about the lack of fundamentals in these very accurate and very good definitions that we wove out of the air.

Plan 3: Show various examples of the rhetorical. Claim that some of these examples are not rhetoric. Discussion ensues as the students try to guess what is not rhetoric or what is. The students enact the struggle of naming that rhetoric’s contemporary work is predicated upon. The naming and deciding of the rhetorical is the rhetorical in two ways: the naming process, and the struggle to maintain that name in a world that is aloft in the winds of the stripping of names and the re-affixing of labels.

I will probably hit somewhere in the middle. My lecture is oriented around different definitions of rhetoric through time. I will try to keep those alive and current through the discussion; no labeling of “old theories” or “what people used to think.” They are all present, at once. 

Also James Wichelns was a professor at Cornell when he devised the English/Rhetoric break. So I’ll be giving a lot of attention to him. Couldn’t have it any other way.

A new semester is like a new start. Things have little to no association with the course that came before (unless you are one of those teachers who uses the same old yellowing notes for each class). There’s a bit of anxiety, and a bit of happiness, and a bit of confusion. The start of the semester has a lot in common with the start of the human experience.

I mentor a few people here and there into the world of intellectual work, the “life of the mind” and teaching. This process benefits me a lot more than them. It forces me to reconsider not only my positions on various teaching practices and principles, but to reconsider how I articulate them. This space of reconsideration is something that is not only vital to developing good teaching, it might very well be good teaching itself.

In talking with someone who is going to teach formally for the first time this term, I said, “Whatever you bring with you is there.” This struck me, days later, as an excellent candidate for a first principle of teaching. Assumptions, beliefs, what-the-students-need, it will all come true if you bring it into a classroom.

This is not a good thing at all. Formal teachers, as professionals, are in a weird position. They are professionals who are rarely, if ever, evaluated by their peers for the quality of work they do. There is no “bar association” for teachers (although I strongly believe there should be). What often happens is the teacher looks to student attitudes, either formally or informally, to see if they are doing a good job. The results are easy to use for whatever purposes one wants. Students are happy? Good teaching. Students are unhappy? Good teaching. Both are equally true and can be rationalized as such with little room for rebuttal.

There is no good solution here – it is nearly impossible, and definitely unlikely, that the teacher can enter the classroom without assumption. Even entering that class with the idea, “I have no assumptions about this class, I have no idea of who they are” is an assumption. That will be there. The ideas, the ideology, the ontology of the instructor pushes out the possibility and potential for something organic to arise between both teacher and student, student and teacher. Paulo Freire was the first to write about this, about the need for students and teachers to blend their formal identities in order for a space for transformation to occur. But this is a much more difficult thing than it appears. To enter the classroom with this assumption is to make sure that the possibility is there in a fixed and immutable way – the teacher will determine that the students are teachers; the students will determine they are teachers; all will occur in a way knowable and observable as such by the teacher and the students in their appropriate roles.

Also working against this idea of bringing nothing into the classroom but an absence is the ideology of consumerism that permeates all educational activity, from pedagogical models to testing to the accreditation of universities. There must be evidence, evidence in the strictest, most scientifically derived sense of the term, that something “is being given” that something “is being made here” in order for there to be recognizable teaching. The model of the student arriving to acquire skills and abilities is only the tip of how deep this ideology permeates contemporary teaching. Teachers pride themselves where I work on assigning 20 page papers to undergraduates, of assigning huge amounts of textual production, ignorant of the very clear connection between this sort of pride and the pride of the captains of industry in the early 20th century making sure to get every ounce of productive labor out of those in the mills not because it benefits them in any way – but because it benefits the factory owner, or in this case, the classroom-owner, the teacher. That feeling of accomplishment is a dangerous one as it is indeed no different from other forms of surplus-value in capitalism. In fact, many professors I have encountered rely on explication so much they construct a very long syllabus that students must initial each page as if it were a contract, a binding agreement between teacher and student, where services will be rendered and performed in a way or all bets are off. This contract metaphor is praised as an excellent way to communicate to students the “seriousness” of the college classroom. It appears as novel metaphor encouraging better understanding. It is, in actuality, a move designed, through exposure, to conceal exactly how the institutions of education have hollowed out teaching and learning, drying them up. This appears to deepen the understanding of the importance of learning but all it does is serve to eliminate any unique features of the educational moment, putting it on par with renting a meeting space, or ordering office supplies. Contractual agreements are not rich enough to capture the possibilities of classroom “production” – to use a limiting metaphor.

The option of abandonment comes to mind when faced with a system that controls the possibilities so tightly and so well as to appear to be an open, even revolutionary, order. But abandonment is not an option for those who wish to engage in the formal art of teaching. Teaching is also labor coded in a way to allow for scholarship – in many places it supports the work of scholarship where there would be no other discernable way to make that work possible. The creation and articulation of differing ideas would halt, or occur in ways that would take a long time to gain the marks of credibility.

The only solution for now, without radical abandonment or complicity, is to enter the classroom with emptiness – sunyata, the term from Buddhism. Emptiness is not an absence, not a presence. It is assumption in suspended-animation, it is the concept of the potential for possibility. Emptiness is not an absence in Buddhist thought, but a beginning. It is a place that can be used productively, but it requires careful maintenance. It is not a default position as it is in the west for something to be empty, then filled. Emptiness, as a concept here, is full.

The politics of emptiness in the classroom are simple: Avoid explication at all costs. This is the most difficult thing, as everything about the system of schooling wants explication to occur. This is the root of pleasure for the teacher and comfort for the students. The teacher will make sense of it. The teacher will tell us what to do to get an A. This reliance on explication is to be replaced with questioning and engagement on those questions.

Be aware that explication – telling someone what something means, and explanation – helping someone understand something, are different things. A bad teacher is one who only offers explication. A dangerous teacher is one who believes he or she knows the difference, and refuses explanation to the confused student on the grounds that it is explication. This sort of teaching has captured the popular imagination, reducing the labor of teaching to little more than a few knowing glances and arrogant smirks across a classroom. Confusion cannot be solved by either explication or explanation, but explanation provides the grounds by which the student can begin to construct scaffolding to climb to reach a perspective. Often confusion arises at the point where the ground one assumed was below you is no longer visible. This point is simultaneously a great success, an end – but also a starting point for teaching. There is no gap between these two reads; it really is both, as many teachers know the difficulty in reaching the point where the ground no longer holds.

A teacher is not someone who provides, but someone who provisions. A teacher doesn’t race toward answers but tries to slowly focus the questions. A teacher doesn’t relish getting it right, but getting it. What will you bring with you into that auspicious place, the classroom? Whatever you bring will take on dangerous qualities. It’s the nature of the place.

A new semester is like a new start. Things have little to no association with the course that came before (unless you are one of those teachers who uses the same old yellowing notes for each class). There’s a bit of anxiety, and a bit of happiness, and a bit of confusion. The start of the semester has a lot in common with the start of the human experience.

I mentor a few people here and there into the world of intellectual work, the “life of the mind” and teaching. This process benefits me a lot more than them. It forces me to reconsider not only my positions on various teaching practices and principles, but to reconsider how I articulate them. This space of reconsideration is something that is not only vital to developing good teaching, it might very well be good teaching itself.

In talking with someone who is going to teach formally for the first time this term, I said, “Whatever you bring with you is there.” This struck me, days later, as an excellent candidate for a first principle of teaching. Assumptions, beliefs, what-the-students-need, it will all come true if you bring it into a classroom.

This is not a good thing at all. Formal teachers, as professionals, are in a weird position. They are professionals who are rarely, if ever, evaluated by their peers for the quality of work they do. There is no “bar association” for teachers (although I strongly believe there should be). What often happens is the teacher looks to student attitudes, either formally or informally, to see if they are doing a good job. The results are easy to use for whatever purposes one wants. Students are happy? Good teaching. Students are unhappy? Good teaching. Both are equally true and can be rationalized as such with little room for rebuttal.

There is no good solution here – it is nearly impossible, and definitely unlikely, that the teacher can enter the classroom without assumption. Even entering that class with the idea, “I have no assumptions about this class, I have no idea of who they are” is an assumption. That will be there. The ideas, the ideology, the ontology of the instructor pushes out the possibility and potential for something organic to arise between both teacher and student, student and teacher. Paulo Freire was the first to write about this, about the need for students and teachers to blend their formal identities in order for a space for transformation to occur. But this is a much more difficult thing than it appears. To enter the classroom with this assumption is to make sure that the possibility is there in a fixed and immutable way – the teacher will determine that the students are teachers; the students will determine they are teachers; all will occur in a way knowable and observable as such by the teacher and the students in their appropriate roles.

Also working against this idea of bringing nothing into the classroom but an absence is the ideology of consumerism that permeates all educational activity, from pedagogical models to testing to the accreditation of universities. There must be evidence, evidence in the strictest, most scientifically derived sense of the term, that something “is being given” that something “is being made here” in order for there to be recognizable teaching. The model of the student arriving to acquire skills and abilities is only the tip of how deep this ideology permeates contemporary teaching. Teachers pride themselves where I work on assigning 20 page papers to undergraduates, of assigning huge amounts of textual production, ignorant of the very clear connection between this sort of pride and the pride of the captains of industry in the early 20th century making sure to get every ounce of productive labor out of those in the mills not because it benefits them in any way – but because it benefits the factory owner, or in this case, the classroom-owner, the teacher. That feeling of accomplishment is a dangerous one as it is indeed no different from other forms of surplus-value in capitalism. In fact, many professors I have encountered rely on explication so much they construct a very long syllabus that students must initial each page as if it were a contract, a binding agreement between teacher and student, where services will be rendered and performed in a way or all bets are off. This contract metaphor is praised as an excellent way to communicate to students the “seriousness” of the college classroom. It appears as novel metaphor encouraging better understanding. It is, in actuality, a move designed, through exposure, to conceal exactly how the institutions of education have hollowed out teaching and learning, drying them up. This appears to deepen the understanding of the importance of learning but all it does is serve to eliminate any unique features of the educational moment, putting it on par with renting a meeting space, or ordering office supplies. Contractual agreements are not rich enough to capture the possibilities of classroom “production” – to use a limiting metaphor.

The option of abandonment comes to mind when faced with a system that controls the possibilities so tightly and so well as to appear to be an open, even revolutionary, order. But abandonment is not an option for those who wish to engage in the formal art of teaching. Teaching is also labor coded in a way to allow for scholarship – in many places it supports the work of scholarship where there would be no other discernable way to make that work possible. The creation and articulation of differing ideas would halt, or occur in ways that would take a long time to gain the marks of credibility.

The only solution for now, without radical abandonment or complicity, is to enter the classroom with emptiness – sunyata, the term from Buddhism. Emptiness is not an absence, not a presence. It is assumption in suspended-animation, it is the concept of the potential for possibility. Emptiness is not an absence in Buddhist thought, but a beginning. It is a place that can be used productively, but it requires careful maintenance. It is not a default position as it is in the west for something to be empty, then filled. Emptiness, as a concept here, is full.

The politics of emptiness in the classroom are simple: Avoid explication at all costs. This is the most difficult thing, as everything about the system of schooling wants explication to occur. This is the root of pleasure for the teacher and comfort for the students. The teacher will make sense of it. The teacher will tell us what to do to get an A. This reliance on explication is to be replaced with questioning and engagement on those questions.

Be aware that explication – telling someone what something means, and explanation – helping someone understand something, are different things. A bad teacher is one who only offers explication. A dangerous teacher is one who believes he or she knows the difference, and refuses explanation to the confused student on the grounds that it is explication. This sort of teaching has captured the popular imagination, reducing the labor of teaching to little more than a few knowing glances and arrogant smirks across a classroom. Confusion cannot be solved by either explication or explanation, but explanation provides the grounds by which the student can begin to construct scaffolding to climb to reach a perspective. Often confusion arises at the point where the ground one assumed was below you is no longer visible. This point is simultaneously a great success, an end – but also a starting point for teaching. There is no gap between these two reads; it really is both, as many teachers know the difficulty in reaching the point where the ground no longer holds.

A teacher is not someone who provides, but someone who provisions. A teacher doesn’t race toward answers but tries to slowly focus the questions. A teacher doesn’t relish getting it right, but getting it. What will you bring with you into that auspicious place, the classroom? Whatever you bring will take on dangerous qualities. It’s the nature of the place.