The New York Sophist

Had a great time at the Book Culture 20% off sale last weekend. It’s got to be my favorite New York City bookstore, but I haven’t done a YouTube video on it yet. I really only do the bookstore videos when I’m travelling but I should do my home city as well. There are a few good ones, but nothing is really as good as Book Culture. They feel to me like the London Review of Books bookshop, which I had one chance to visit, and on the day I went they were closed for inventory.

The closest I’ve come to the LRB Bookshop, 2016.

So yes that photo was taken on April 3rd. A sad time. But yesterday at Book Culture (of which I have no photos like this) was a good one. Got some great books and had a great conversation afterwards about the relationship of academia to the outsider, or the academic outsider, which might be a way to think about it because there are so many in the academy who suffer from crippling impostor syndrome. It’s really quite sad as these people are often very brilliant.

So there are a few relationships that academia has to the outsider:

1. Obsession – we continue to return to texts and ideas produced outside of the academy, using rules that are not the academy’s (and also not made transparent) in hopes we can explain them using our academic tools, but we keep returning no matter how good the explanation because the text’s “good” outstrips what theory can say about it.

2. It’s not bad to be an outsider – the academy and academia should be small and there’s a lot of great benefit to having really sharp, good writers taking on subjects in books and essays that are meant for a general, non-specialist audience.

3. Impostor syndrome – you are at a Q&A or wine reception for a guest speaker at the university and you don’t realize that you, and everyone else there, feels that everyone else in the room really “gets it” and should be there and you are just there by luck or will be found out soon.

So that was a good chat, and also a nice chat about writing and how it needs to be low stakes, low stakes all the time, everyday so that when the vital or high-stakes writing appears you are quite ready for it and can take it on. I think that the healthiest approach is to assume your writing is always a bit under-baked and needs some critique so you can bake it again. I think this is what I mean by low stakes, and also this is the reason for the post. I’ve been remiss on the daily blogging habit, and I think it’s so good for writing and for getting the day going in the right way, although my day has been going for a bit now and I am just now getting this thing typed.

a daily writing habit is writing and it’s important writing as it gets the norms and low-stakes attitude out there. I prefer this format because there’s an audience and they are going to read it, so I have to think about what I’m saying and how I’m saying it, which is the most interesting and important part of the process for me.

In closing, here are the books I bought! I have a massive (yet killer) reading list for December/January and I’m looking forward to a very wordy holiday.

What happens when your values cease to become incompatible with your university and start to become incommensurate?

I wonder if this is just my university, or all universities. But I feel more and more that the classroom – whatever that might be – is the last part of the university that resembles anything we assume the university to be about.

Throughout the university all resources and modes of power are turned toward self-preservation, increasing enrollment, and making those promises as real as possible through a career-oriented discourse that is delivered as unproblematic, natural, and good.

There is no time to consider the value or worth of any institution, whether it be a government, a college, or a company. If such considerations happen, they happen late at night when the sleepless student ponders the sacrifices they and their family made to place them in that dorm room. They review the many times they were belittled or insulted by faculty that week. And they wonder.

The daily attitude is one of cynicism. Student and faculty alike smirk and talk about cheating the system. What trick will they deploy today? What will be the cool and clever twist of the writing, of the presentation, of the discussion? What will the students not have read; what will the faculty buy as an excuse?

The classroom is the last place for a front to develop against what we commonly call neoliberalism, but I’m starting to see as a political extremist front of cynicism.

Cynicism isn’t a politics here, it’s mental health and survival. At every turn, we are told and sometimes we even teach that people are unpersuadable beings whose minds cannot be changed. It’s not even worth approaching them or trying to figure out how they think. Systems too cannot be changed, they are real. This is reality. You must prepare for the real world.

In the classroom we can question all this for sure. But even more so, we can perform an alternative to the workaday capitalist order by forwarding a different relationship between people there.

Removal of any and all late work penalties, point-based-grading, tardiness, and monitoring the discipline of bodies would be a good start.

Asking students how they would like to spend the time, and what they would like to investigate would be good.

Working through issues slowly and carefully for community satisfaction would be better than a quiz.

Faculty seem to be more invested in grades than students are. They seem to think points are a real, rare currency. They defend them through ridiculous performances of power and authoritarianism they call “respect.” Nothing needs to be said about the connection between respectability politics and authoritarianism. This has been detailed well in the politics that most faculty claim to be opposed to.

The classroom is the last place, boarded up from the neoliberal zombies or vampires. Whatever they are, they are coming, and the threat won’t be recognized till it’s too late. But as in most of these films, people bring their ideological truths about others into the safe space. They turn on those they think as doing less. We don’t practice how to care for one another, how to trust, and how to believe. We train students and one another how to resent, doubt, and scour for hermeneutic infidelity.

Is there an equivalent to an active-shooter drill we can perform in our classes to protect our students from the violence of the university’s discourse? The active-shooter training, like the discourse of careerism, pushes attention away from the violence in the daily experience of the university student, the violence shown toward those who ask for help, who question, and who seek assistance with understanding. Students are shown by faculty that they are resented and considered a waste of time. Faculty are happy being a boss, but the metaphor is a choice. There are no bosses at the university.

Perform in your class the world you’d like to see outside of it, where caring for others is how we arrange our political and economic system. We don’t twist and contort bodies to fit “reality” at the university, we prepare for its replacement by young, eager souls. Instead of teaching contortion, let’s teach hot yoga. Move yourself to improve yourself and by doing so, you improve others.

Fraught with a mix of disappointment, sadness, and anger I head to the university. Resistance still seems possible on a daily level, no matter how many stories of failure populate my days. But as long as teaching is teaching, we’ll have a place to mount alternative ways of thinking.

Last week I had the fantastic opportunity of sitting down with Tyler Poteet from Power of Public Speaking to record an episode for their podcast.

In this interview I talk about my classroom practices and my approach to public speaking. I think it’s probably one of the clearest articulations I have of the importance of public speaking and how limited our approach is as speech communication/rhetoric professors.

I think that the most important take away from doing this is that we have incredibly limited venues for the discussion and consideration of what the public speaking course is. Compare that to English composition, where they have book series at good university presses about their teaching. We are just embarrassed about teaching it, and often take that out on our students through our class and grading policies.

What will it take for us to embrace the importance of public speaking as a serious course?

Most dangerous teaching practices come from the assumption that the teacher is the source of knowledge in the class.

This seems like a no-brainer. Obviously, the teacher is there because the teacher knows the subject. But many processes and norms about teaching create some tension with this assumption.

First, most classroom teachers at the secondary level have a number of completed course hours in educational psychology and curriculum. They have the equivalent of two minors, or almost another undergraduate degree in courses on education itself. People who have great field expertise or knowledge in a subject are not called upon to be the regular instructor in courses.

There is a difference at the collegiate level between the professor and the practicioner, between the scholar and the artist. I tend to believe these divisions are better blurred, but the norms of the university suggest a difference that most people accept between studying literature and creating it. Although I think that literary criticism, or any criticism, is creating an art, just not the art it’s talking about.

The professor is in the class not to create, but to show students around what was created, what is being created, and so on. So the assumption that they are the source of knowledge is immediately in trouble if you think about the college course this way.

What about curation? This is my favorite metaphor for teaching college. I see myself as curating an exhibit of works that “go together to prove a point” which is what I think that curation is, as well as planning a concert program, or one-acts, or other artistic endeavors.

Not thinking through these metaphors – or considering the act of teaching as a metaphor – leads to danger, as one starts to think of oneself as both the source of information and the only source of information that the students will have on the subject.

This leads to a thin, rushed performance of the teacher at best. Obsessed with attention and control of time, the teacher believes that any missed attention is missed learning. They worry that not everything will be covered; they get upset when the students are not “where they need to be.”

The danger of the idea that you are “the teacher doing teaching” is that your commitment is to some construct of the material, not to the people right in front of you in the classroom. The commitment of the teacher must be to the students, the ones that you actually have, not the ones you wish you had, or the ones that these extant students would be if they had done better previously – or whatever narrative falls into place here.

To be a good teacher, realize that teaching is impossible when conceived of outside of metaphor. Teaching is always “as something else” because each class is an invitation to study more. Knowledge is fluid and relational; it is not a thing or a commodity to be traded between minds. It is something that is alive, it comes into being through relationships and continues to live when nurtured by memory and imagination as the student moves through life after your class. Teaching is always being an usher, a curator, or some other relationship to knowledge, anything but the source. There is always more to read and study and think about – the class is always an introduction and an invitation to learn more and to pursue new (or better) questions.

Teaching isn’t an art, it’s as an art. It’s as curation, it’s as ushering, it’s as a guide. It’s always “as something.” It is never transmission of knowledge as objects. When we think of it that way, the precious knowledge of our field comes first and students are left behind or worse – they do not feel they are a part of our field, they do not feel welcome and they do not pursue questions in the future. We lose out on the innovations they could provide to the field on questions of their own, or other’s, design.

I’m not sure how many of these there are going to be, but the more I think about it there are probably a lot of assumptions we make as teachers that are dangerous not only to the class you have right now, but to peoples’ conception of teaching and learning in the meta.

Every class and every teacher generates evidence and proof for what education “really is” for people. Every bad experience a student has encourages them to discount higher education or education in general and spin a narrative circled around things like “the only good teacher is experience” or “when you get a job, that’s when your real education begins.”

This dangerous assumption, as you have probably already guessed, is that you are preparing students for a life of work. That the things you teach them – or even the policies you have in your class – are essential to them being able to get and hold down a job.

This is usually easy for teachers to accept because teachers love exercising their authority. Most of the teachers I know enjoy being disciplinarians – making students do this or that, enforcing due dates and format of papers, shaking their head when students fail to read the details in a 15 page assignment description and make a mistake. They do not enjoy this because they are sadists, but because they really and truly believe they are serving the greater good of society and helping these students be able to function in the world.

Never does it cross the mind of the professor, upset that the syllabus wasn’t read, that the student might not automatically believe the class is important. What a shock that your class might not be the most important part of the students’ day or week?

This has to be communicated, and the idea that you are there to prepare them for a life of sitting in a cubicle, moving around files between different email servers, writing memos, and holding meetings isn’t going to cut it.

The assumption we should make is that student employment is not our business. That is between the university and the student, or even better, the student and the future employer. What we are here to do is introduce new, different, or discarded ways of thinking, feeling, and questioning to the student. Later, this expanded capacity for inquiry will lead them to a successful life, one that might not be centered around going to work at 8AM every weekday.

The university should argue that there is a strong correlation between a good job and attendance. But this is the only argument that is made these days. There is no attempt to convey that capacity to change one’s mind, to investigate ideas, and to expose oneself to difficult or unusual texts (either written or in other media) is valuable is totally absent. Instead, we demand medical excuses and funeral programs because we want the students to show respect and responsibility.

These two terms – respect and responsibility – are nearly absent from the professoriate. To assume you have a deep responsibility to your students never crosses the mind of the college teacher. Students are irresponsible, therefore I can mail it in. Ethics would question this: Why isn’t it that you now have to double down on your responsibility? Why don’t you have the charge to get the students interested in what you are having them do? Sadly though, most assignments are there just to generate points so a grade can be calculated. A mechanical operation doesn’t need to involve interaction between living people who care.

Respect is another one. This term needs deep exploration, away from the idea that one functions as a boss and an employee. When professors talk about respect, they use a corporate language. Why is this the assumed relationship? A teacher is not a boss – they have a relationship like a doctor or lawyer does with clients. This is uninvestigated, as we assume the teacher is the boss, they demand work, it’s done, and the students are “paid” with points. Disgusting.

It would be ok perhaps to prepare students for the working world if the working world were a valuable life, or if the metaphor did not expand to consume in totality all the possible relationships that teachers and students can have. “The syllabus is a contract” is a horrible phrase that thoughtless professors proclaim every semester, unaware that they are participating in the colonization of all relationships as if they were business ventures.

Abandoning this assumption leave the question open in an uncomfortable way: What are we preparing students for? This moves us immediately into the petitio principii: Should we prepare students? Is that what we are doing?

Other possible metaphors could be: co-creating, sharing, building, working, discussing, and inquiring together. Whether these are preparation or not, I am not sure. I’m not even sure if I’m interested.

What actions help students become better at inquiry? This is the question that frames the encounter of the class, classroom optional.