The New York Sophist

We just had graduation here on our beautiful Queens campus. It’s been a while since I attended commencement, and I was immediately reminded of the joys of coming to these university-wide events. The most important joy, the thing I like the most, is meeting professors from the far-reaches of the University and hearing what they have to say.

The conversation among a number of them at first was about our contract negotiations, now looking like they will extend into a second year. But the person sitting next to me on the stage sparked the most interesting question for me. She kept talking about how various graduates, when they crossed the stage to get their diploma, were “good students.”

I wondered what she meant by calling someone a good student. It wasn’t clear (“you know, good students!”) and seemed to involve a number of traits such as being prepared, doing excellent work, and the like. The more I heard about it the more I drew the conclusion that a good student is someone who has already learned. There’s not much else for them to do or learn in the class. Therefore, there’s little for the teacher to do but to stamp this passing judgement on them: “They were a good student.”

It feels extremely dangerous to me to think of a good student this way, someone who doesn’t require anything more from the instructor other than the certification that they arrived in the class fully baked. This conflates being a student, on the whole, with being an autodidact. Someone who is quite good at teaching themselves probably shouldn’t be thought of as a student at all, much less the model for what all students should be.

As I said to my friend at the ceremony, “good student” seems like a goal we should strive to reach as instructors rather than some trait or status we wish were present in the classroom on day one. Instead, the teacher’s role might be to make someone into a better student. What does that look like?

Here’s a great quote about being a student from the Buddhist tradition:

I have this quote on my door and look at it every time I enter my office, which might be a good reminder. This reminder isn’t often enough though, as it is easy to feel that as a teacher we are no longer a student – they are out there, they are others. By making the flow of epistemology one-way, I feel comfortable in knowing what needs to be known and dare I say it, superior to them in the sense of “what matters.” If we take this quote seriously though and decide to see them as teachers, the impact is overwhelming in good and bad ways. A fresh look at a reading, idea, or approach is all it takes to be taught.

Taking this approach we learn what students learn. We are now shoulder-to-shoulder with our class in the start of what Staughton Lynd has suggested we should do. They teach us what the world looks like to them. From this point, we can then share what we think has helped us to become better students.

A good student is a student who works to improve their ability to be a student. Since that is all there is to be, one is always, intentionally or not, working on one’s capacity to learn from ‘teachers’ out there – events, people, moments, or encounters in the world. Taking on this perspective of “what does this teach me?” versus “What do I have to deal with now” is the only way to approach students as a student in order to increase everyone’s practice of being students.

Unfortunately, teaching, like a lot of other professions, attracts those who want to bask in their self-importance, who want to correct others through harshness and discipline, and inform those in front of them that they have no business being there, and are lucky to be in the presence of a teacher. The seductiveness of being in control, having power over others, and having captive attention for an hour a day is too attractive to the elements of society that probably should be doing something else with their time.

The definition of good student from those who probably shouldn’t be teaching will have more in common with what an autodidact does. From those who should be in the role of teacher, it will have nothing in common with it. Instead of the idea that a student who needs nothing from a teacher is a “good one,” the good student is a goal, a position or identity we aspire to be. We work to get there with our students as a shared experience, one that sees the classroom or the institution as a place to practice this and watch the practice happening – although practicing this will be with us for the rest of our lives.

The good student is one who is confused, asks, answers, discusses, and tries to practice these elements: confusion, inquiry, assistance, and discourse with others and tries to improve their practice of them. The good student is an aspiration not an inherent quality, and like many things if we don’t use it we lose it.

The fallacy of the begged question is not an error in argumentation but a powerful tool for the construction of good arguments.

In a previous post, I asked: what debate format was appropriate for a social justice themed debate course? The begged question there is “what is appropriate for any course to do?”

Is there a right thing a course should teach, no matter what the subject?

Recently I have been adjacent to some school board election discussion where one candidate is running on a predictably old and outdated platform: Teach the controversy! (Intelligent Design vs. Evolution, or 2004 called and wants their controversy back). Students need moral guidance (shades of my awful experiences as a high school teacher in Texas where colleagues believed this in a simple way: Do as I do) including dress codes and time for prayer, etc. Of course living in New York insulates me from the very worst of this, where it is not only being proposed but passed with large margins.

One theory behind these strange ideas is that school is a place where one forms the system of beliefs that will aid and support one through their life, both professional and as a citizen. As Tik Tok Millenials continuously remind us the personal is on you – school will not teach you how to balance a checkbook or budget. The public school is there for the public – do we have a shared set of texts, experiences, and the like to have a basic grounding from which we can do the democratic thing, talk about our desires, fears, problems, and hopes?

The investment in citizenry and career benefits the state and the state alone. The investment in practical skills for a consumer capitalist world will do nothing but sustain and advance the aims of a system designed to limit imagination and choices to that which can be consumed pleasurably. The resistance to such status quo, or conservative models of schooling must come from the instructors. The classroom is one of the only spaces left to imagine the tools and practices that are used to imagine alternative orderings of society.

For my class then, what should be taught starts with the distinctions that are known by the members of the class between debate and justice. Investigating these distinctions, as they are held in society, might reveal the need for deeper research method – after we move from the what debate and justice are we can then wonder about the why they are what they are. This might be a move into dialectical analysis, rhetorical analysis, historical investigation including the archive, and other such activities. From that we can model debate and justice in ways that are connected to that discourse but depart from it and, most importantly, can justify their departures.

Looking broadly, the question of what a course is supposed to do might be deeply rhetorical: How did these meanings come to be in the audience, and how can I use them to advance what is good, beneficial, or just for that audience? This question is one of the most basic in rhetoric, but it’s also one of the deepest and defining of what rhetoric might be as a subject. In the classroom we look out not to see what we should be teaching, what we lack, or what we need to be able to do, but instead we look out in order to ask “what is that and why did it get to be that way?” From there we can work on what Herbert Marcuse called the distinction between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is,’ or more broadly, dialectical analysis.

What I was listening to while writing this.

Anger is like a man who wants to hit another and picks up a burning ember or excrement in his hand and so first burns himself or makes himself stink.

Resentment is like swallowing poison and waiting for your enemy to die.

~ Attributed to Buddha

It’s a busy time of year at the university. I had let a nice, not-so-important email languish for six days in my inbox due to being distracted by writing deadlines, class preparation here at the end-times, and other odds and ends.

Now that class was over at 5PM on Monday it was time to address this email. Someone is being nice; someone is looking out for me and doing a favor. I can’t believe it’s been six days.

I open the web browser and hit the wrong tab, and fall through a time vortex. Since I was testing my new linux build on an old desktop, I’m using the web email interface – all emails on the system are present. I land in 2011.

Looking around, I can’t believe these emails. All are from an ancient and foreign time where people are contacting me about debate tournaments, trips and partners confirmed and denied, and all sorts of questions and plans are being made. It is bustling. And familiar. And foreign as can be.

After clicking through these for a bit the tone of all administrative emails – actually most of these tournament-related emails is one of demand. Why are you doing this? What have you done? You haven’t done this. Why did you do this? The underwhelming support from administrators was everywhere; the overwhelming tone of mistake and error was everywhere.

It really made me angry. I sat there for a few minutes once again angry at the whole situation. I’d sacrificed my own time and money for years for a whole bunch of stupid people.

I could so clearly see the evidence in all these emails that the colonization of the tournament had completely corrupted debate as a rhetorical practice. It simply did not exist. I was willing myself to see it there even though it had been eaten up long ago. There was no debating going on only the tournament.

Over the past couple of days, the vibrations of that anger have come back to me, as I’ve been in a few conversations where people I wish I wouldn’t have to think about ever again were randomly brought up to me. All those awful tournament people. What a waste of time. These are the people who relish the tournament; it gives them meaning and defines who they are as people. They have nothing else. They only have value through the equivocation that the tournament and debate and being intelligent are all the same thing.

The anger is really directed at myself and the realization that confirmation bias gets all of us, in the end, in the beginning, and all throughout. I spun all the red flags and bad vibes into challenges that had to be put up with in order to do the sort of teaching I wanted to do. What a fool I was. I wasted so much of my time going to events, spending a ton of money, and encountering people who were not interested in much other than the inflation of their egos.

Like the blooming of plants anger comes around from time to time but we don’t think of it as a blooming at all. We don’t experience it as anything more than something like allergies, a force like a sneeze that takes over and has to come out. But in Buddhism it’s said that it should be treated more like a blossoming, something to experience and check out.

It wasn’t a pleasant experience but did get me thinking about rhetoric a bit. First, the difficulty of reaching anyone with this message from the world of debate. They will only read this as sour grapes. Most of my criticisms and suggestions about transforming debate were read at the time by debate people as things I was suggesting simply because they would help my team win more. They thought this because they could imagine no other motive for wanting to change the operation of debate contests.

Secondly it strikes me how incredibly difficult it is to write about waste in a way that makes the audience feel the waste. This too should be obvious given the climate crisis. The difficulty of persuading anyone that waste is destructive and damaging is beyond challenging. The existence of the fallacy of waste – known as the sunk cost fallacy – shows how difficult it is for people to accept waste. They will reason themselves into generating more waste in order to not let waste “go to waste.”

Anger blooms and blossoms. It’s suddenly there after the absence, like spring. Here it is. What happened to the time; where did this come from?

These lessons are good meditations. They hardly compensate for 10 years of misplaced time and energy. I am the only person on my campus who thinks about tournaments from time to time. Good. I’m always thinking about theorizing debating. Good too.

I told the email program to take all emails from 2009-2019 and delete them. It did it. I responded to the 6 day late email and went home.

I believe in science. Trust the science.

What do these liberal dicta mean? Immediately for most people they mean “anti-Trump” in some form or fashion. They might also mean “not a conservative.” These phrases are polarized and perhaps worse than useless – harmful without their nutrients, like Wonder Bread rhetoric – stripped of the fiber of their being in order to gain attention at a lower price point.

These phrases are fantastic if made a bit more complex than “I’m intelligent and you are not, O sad conservative!” If we look at what we are meant to trust and believe, we get a shocking insight: Scientists are not results-driven, at least in the way we imagine – they are not after the truth per se, but after everything related or assumed to be in there with the truth.

Scientists love failure and success in experimentation and research because it all adds up to . . . well something. Something is better than nothing and definitely better than assuming or guessing. Science’s truth is not the outcome that works, it’s the process that produces all outcomes.

This is all, to quote President Obama, above my pay grade. I’m a humanities professor but I can’t help but think about “trust the science” in relation to the big threat of the hour, ChatGPT. My colleagues across the country in the humanities and any subject that uses writing as a form of assessment or grading bemoan ChatGPT as a criminal. It’s a grifter, it takes and takes and never pays anyone back; it’s a home invader, knocking at the door for help then keeping you prisoner in your own space while it robs you; It’s the unscrupulous politician, sounding great and deep but never able to act on anything it utters. It just utters and utters and can’t seem to understand that it’s bloviation has unintended meanings all over.

Kenneth Burke reminds us that humans are “nervously loquacious.” I feel ChatGPT is a very good reflection of that. It isn’t looking at data but human discourse, siphoning it and churning it and re-presenting it (and representing our collective utterance quite well I might add). AI isn’t anything other than a skimming off the bottom, middle, top, and the sides of human discourse – like this post – that is hovering as a magnetic field in some disk in some server miles from where you and I are.

The solution to ChatGPT’s criminality is to remove what it profits from. Students believe that writing a paper is a result-oriented task: That is, their whole lives as students they have been assessed on the final paper. They are deeply worried about getting it wrong. It also doesn’t help that most professors grade grammar, syntax, punctuation, and even word-choice, arguing that a particular vocabulary is necessary for a “college paper.” These same people turn around and decry the colonial and classist university curriculum, oddly enough.

Approaching students as I have with “I really just want your opinion on these readings” isn’t good enough to stop them from associating with the criminal ChatGPT. It offers a perfect product, so long as you double check the sources it cites and also make sure to take out the self-depreciations (“As a language model AI, I am not able to . . .”). I have been using ChatGPT quite a bit to see how it would put together phrases about theories, relate them to one another, and what examples it would use for an argument theory from sport, something I am notoriously bad at knowing anything about. These moments help me with my process, with what rhetoricians call invention and arrangement, and sometimes style. They are not a substitute for what I write and what you read, but they help out a lot – like a kitchenaid or a bread machine, two things my mother couldn’t praise enough when she attained them. They didn’t do the work for her; they assisted her immensely in the work she enjoyed, and allowed her a “discount” to try new, complex things to bake.

Humanities professors freaking out about ChatGPT only need to return to the nutrient-full phrasing of trust the science. Perhaps we can tell our students to trust the method – the putting together of the ideas about the readings or the class need not be perfect, and a failure of an essay (origin French, from “to attempt” by the way) is a possible A. One has only to communicate, to try to get across the thoughts and feelings they have about a complex text. That’s a challenge enough. Making it more a process of engagement rather than an evaluation of what comes out will put ChatGPT in its place, a resource for invention that sometimes helps you figure out what you want to say about something, or give you examples your audience could connect with.

ChatGPT means to give up assessing and grading the final essay, and becoming much more interested in process. This is the gift of ChatGPT, it allows us an immediate reason to change our too comfortable and often questionable pedagogy. Why is writing a final essay in isolation for a professor to read and evaluate the best way to understand understanding? Does it even make a top 10 hermeneutic list? Breaking that assignment up into various reaction and reconsideration parts help students see that essays are, like their French origin, tries. If we emphasize that not just in our kind words to nervous students in office hours, but in our rubrics, we will find the threat of ChatGPT to be no more devastating than a student talking to others about their writing ideas.

Focusing on the final essay as the thing instead of believing in the process regardless of the outcome is the reason ChatGPT causes us so much trouble. Change the focus, change the meaning. We’d like our students to be as loquacious as the rest of us, and, understand we are all scribbling away nervously at the edge of an abyss.

Reflection and Refraction on the Semester

The end of the spring semester is always a difficult time for me where I spiral into a slug-like state of sitting around until 4pm for a couple of days wondering what I’m supposed to be doing. More realistically: I fret about what I should do first. I have a long list of things that, between September and May, I write down and grumble to myself that if I didn’t have to teach on this particular schedule I would have so much time to accomplish all these things. Well here we are in the earliest of early days of summer 2023, and I feel a bit out of focus (not the world, me).

Often this time of year is one that calls for people to call for reflection, which is a “bending back” or sending back of the light by formal definition. Refraction though seems more interesting where light is deflected, broken, and courses are changed. I wonder if rhetorically one can move into the other? As we reflect we suggest refraction? Perhaps the rhetorical move is to shine the light back, see what it shows us, then redirect the light going forward. It seems that in speeches many people keep this sort of attitude, particularly this time of year when we are awash in commencement speeches.

Let me reflect on the semester’s teaching then suggest how to refract that information to change what appears.

Moving Speeches out of the Classroom in Public Speaking

Reflection

This was something I thought would free up class time for conversation about things rather than about modalities. The trouble with teaching public speaking is that all the resources focus on modalities – types of occasion speeches rather than issues. My theory was that if I assigned particular books it would not only spark some good classroom discussion but good speech topics as well.

The topics the students chose had little or nothing to do with the readings. The class discussion used the readings to launch into tangents from the readings that connected deeply and well with the supposed subject, rhetoric (public speaking as I see it). But there was little depth to the reading conversation and no connection at all to the speeches, which we did through software called GoReact.

Refraction

Specific speech assignments – maybe 2 to 3 minute total reactions as opposed to larger 6 to 7 minute assignments – might be a good way of connecting the readings more to rhetoric. Asking particular questions about rhetorical concepts in the books would be good.

Keeping the speeches outside of the class is great. Going to continue it for a while, but I need to figure out who the audience is and what the style is for these speeches recorded on webcam. I might have to encourage them to do a few different kinds: Sitting at a desk, walk and talk, sitting outside, public place, etc.

There is also the question of accessibility. I have confronted this before in terms of offering some non-spoken assignments for equity purposes like quizzes or short writing assignments. The more I think about it, accessibility is vital but this might not be the way to go for it. I still need to think forward about how to do this, maybe weekly oral assignments is the way?

No Textbook only Books

Reflection

I seethe with jealousy when I look at compositionists’ courses, full of interesting books about vital and fascinating topics. I thought the tradeoff was rough: 60 plus essays to grade pretty frequently can cut into your weekends. I wondered if the best of both was possible: Could it be that I could assign a thematic set of readings and teach public speaking based off of that?

I tried in earnest now that I found GoReact. Earlier this wouldn’t have been possible since in the classroom it can take 4 to 5 class days to ensure everyone delivers their speeches. This is time wasted, as the classroom doesn’t really provide anything but anxiety and avoidance behavior from the students. Doing it as videos online seems like a better way to teach how to present more efficiently.

I assigned four books this term: Joe Sach’s translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric with Plato’s Gorgias in one volume, David Bohm’s book On Dialogue, American Dialogue by Joseph Ellis, and finally On Time and Water by Andri Snær Magnason.

I chose these because they represented ideas and topics I thought students would engage with automatically: Climate Change, U.S. centered rights discourse, and the role of dialogue versus overt persuasion. It seemed good and we had some nice discussions about the readings, but the course wasn’t readings focused as it should have been.

The students seemed to like the reading and did ask questions about it, the conversations went all over the place however and I wish it had been a bit more focused.

Refraction

Organizing the readings around key themes would be the way forward. I think I’ll keep Gorgias and Rhetoric as a good contrast to Bohm’s focus on dialogue as a sort of anti-rhetoric discourse. This could be a good way to open up the term since on everyone’s mind is the question “Why do I have to take this course and pay for it?”

Posting textual or audio responses in Discord or the LMS (we use Canvas, but Blackboard, Moodle, Google Classroom are all the same thing in my view) would be a two-birds maneuver – non-speech oriented assessment and feedback would be great to add.

One of the things we all shy away from these days is lecturing – it’s a villain! It’s not a great defense considering his politics and viewpoints, but Woodrow Willson had some amazing thoughts about lecturing in his writings about Adam Smith. I have re-sold those volumes or I’d quote it here. Needless to say these are not the people you want defending lecturing. However, given the podcast and YouTube future of public address, maybe lecturing can be re-imagined here as something that is done outside the class, and the classroom space is the forum or place of conversation about it. This is something to experiment with for sure. And time intensive for the instructor.

The other books I’m not sure of yet. Maybe something about rights and the Supreme Court? Students seem to be interested in claiming their rights all the time, so maybe we can send things that way.

Assignments and Artificial Intelligence

Reflection

A much bigger post to come here on this topic but I took the attitude of designing assignments and student work that pushed hard on the idea that I want their personal opinions. This is the solution to AI generated assignments in my view.

What I got was some very interesting writing that wasn’t very good by University writing standards, but great in the realm of sparking my imagination, giving me pause, and helping me rethink some of the ways I teach.

This course was called Foundations of Rhetorical Theory, or for those of you who are from the life, Classical Rhetoric. I had some great writing responses that resonated with me and it was a relief to not read the formulaic “correct college paper” essay that Jasper Neel savagely dragged years ago and Dan Melzer revived in a creative way not too long ago.

Thinking about the role of assignments in the land of AI had me think about fighting the huge wave of pedagogical history the students have about writing: It has to be professional, good, well cited, and correct. The anxiety is such that most students sit down to write a paper the night before and try to hammer it out without looking back at it – there’s too much that could be wrong with it, so better to just hope and type on! It is a challenge to fight against how they have seen writing papers over time, and on face they really don’t believe me when I say I want their opinions. But it worked out ok for those who gave it a go!

The paper assignment can seem like nature is upside down to them, what they thought they were approaching to climb transforms and threatens to drown them. Not preparing at all seems reasonable in a situation where the geography can alter without warning.

Refraction

Sharing a philosophy of writing or paper composition might be the way to go in the future. I remember once sharing my half-page, bullet pointed assignment guide for a paper that was incredibly general with a colleague who gave me a 17 page paper assignment guide that was mostly the basic rules of grammar. No wonder students turn to AI tools for some relief and manageability when they are assigned a scary paper. More repetition and more reinforcement of what I’d like to see through some shorter assignments might be good.

Students also write continuously, all the time via text messages and social media. Incorporation of images in writing might make the form more comfortable and push them toward a way to plan out for the kind of writing we’d prefer. Learning a language is best done in relation to the language you know already. And that’s what we are trying to do isn’t it? Not evaluate their attempts at something new as if they’ve been doing it a while? I’m very guilty of this too; a few years ago I gave some comments on some papers that I wish I hadn’t. Redesigning the assignment was more prudent to get the sort of insight that I want for them and for me. AI’s quick spread – like a spill across a table – has been great motivation to really work on what this could look like.

Communicating disappointment with a correctly written college essay might be the move too: “I like the grammar and the citations here but this feels empty; where are you in all this?” This might be the best way to get a re-write if someone has aptly used an AI tool to write. The detectors are no good; and the professors are worse than any cheating could be. Suggesting using AI as a co-pilot is good, but then they have to add themselves into the mix. I might try to write an assignment guide like this for my fall courses. If I do, I’ll post it.

Reflection and Refraction done! Now summer can begin in earnest, right? I won’t spend my mornings messing around with nonsense and start writing and reading at 3PM, right? right??