The New York Sophist

Walking across the Cornell Campus talking with a colleague of mine about teaching, our conversation turned to the question on the minds of all faculty these days – how do we get students to read more, and to read better, than they do. 

I started to think that perhaps university students today are overwhelmed by reading assignments. The Productive Bias, as I call it, is an ideology that makes professors feel like they aren’t teaching unless there is a quantity of work being done that appears to be massive. This substitutes itself for quality teaching quite frequently. Long papers, endless reading assignments, and pop-up homework and tests are some of the things that create panicked students and therefore are indicators of good teaching and a quality class.

There’s little time for reflection or thought. Dan Melzer’s study indicates that the least common writing assignment given to students is for reflection, consideration, or inquiry. My students tell me they wish they had time to sit around and participate in a book group. Maybe the answer is that we are assigning too much reading, and not because it is reading, but because it looks like good work.

My colleague and I started talking about our favorite classes. She said one of the best courses she ever took only consisted of four books that were read and discussed throughout the term. That, plus a few writing assignments, was the course – a course that stayed with her years later. 

Could I do this? Plan a course with only four books? I was thinking about my Argumentation course and came up with the following. 

1. Rhetorical Argumentation by Chris Tindale

2. Arguing and Thinking by 

3. Uses of Argument by Stephen Toulmin

4. The New Rhetoric by Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrects-Tyteca

It’s much more than four books with Chaim and Lucie in there, but technically I have done it. I think this would be great, and we wouldn’t read every bit of course. 

What about our senior seminar here at St. John’s? I’ve taught it (when I’m allowed to teach something other than public speaking) about epistemology and method. The books I would assign for that seminar would be:

1. The Order of Things by Michel Foucault

2. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

3. Against Method by Paul Feyerabend

4. Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier

This is a tough one, as I usually like to assign the Colson Whitehead novel The Intuitionist at the end as it’s an investigation of epistemology on the political level plus is performs an alternate epistemology by being a narrative itself. 

Ok so now do your class in four books – post it in the comments.

Walking across the Cornell Campus talking with a colleague of mine about teaching, our conversation turned to the question on the minds of all faculty these days – how do we get students to read more, and to read better, than they do. 

I started to think that perhaps university students today are overwhelmed by reading assignments. The Productive Bias, as I call it, is an ideology that makes professors feel like they aren’t teaching unless there is a quantity of work being done that appears to be massive. This substitutes itself for quality teaching quite frequently. Long papers, endless reading assignments, and pop-up homework and tests are some of the things that create panicked students and therefore are indicators of good teaching and a quality class.

There’s little time for reflection or thought. Dan Melzer’s study indicates that the least common writing assignment given to students is for reflection, consideration, or inquiry. My students tell me they wish they had time to sit around and participate in a book group. Maybe the answer is that we are assigning too much reading, and not because it is reading, but because it looks like good work.

My colleague and I started talking about our favorite classes. She said one of the best courses she ever took only consisted of four books that were read and discussed throughout the term. That, plus a few writing assignments, was the course – a course that stayed with her years later. 

Could I do this? Plan a course with only four books? I was thinking about my Argumentation course and came up with the following. 

1. Rhetorical Argumentation by Chris Tindale

2. Arguing and Thinking by 

3. Uses of Argument by Stephen Toulmin

4. The New Rhetoric by Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrects-Tyteca

It’s much more than four books with Chaim and Lucie in there, but technically I have done it. I think this would be great, and we wouldn’t read every bit of course. 

What about our senior seminar here at St. John’s? I’ve taught it (when I’m allowed to teach something other than public speaking) about epistemology and method. The books I would assign for that seminar would be:

1. The Order of Things by Michel Foucault

2. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

3. Against Method by Paul Feyerabend

4. Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier

This is a tough one, as I usually like to assign the Colson Whitehead novel The Intuitionist at the end as it’s an investigation of epistemology on the political level plus is performs an alternate epistemology by being a narrative itself. 

Ok so now do your class in four books – post it in the comments.

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.