The New York Sophist

I’ve become a very bad teacher recently and I’d like to figure out why.

Reflecting on what a bad teacher is, I’ve come up with the following ideas

1. More interest in the material and the value of the material outside of the students’ interest
2. Dismissal of student concerns as equaling in importance to the course material or events
3. Inability to make easy, meaningful connections between course material and the sphere of student engagement (i.e. what’s on their minds)
4. Inability to create meaningful assessment experiences for the students

All of these things are elements of bad teaching and being bad at teaching, but perhaps the bad teacher is someone who just disregards these and doesn’t worry about them popping up in their pedagogy.

The bad teacher might not be bad teaching, but bad teaching is still a problem.

What can be done?
Perhaps more attention to what students think and concern themselves with would be helpful. More supplemental material for the course would be good too, such as audio and video recordings that help support class time.

Trying to reconstruct narratives of the teacher’s first contact with the material to determine how it made an impact on them, then considering ways to make that same sort of connection today with the situation we face.

Distributing power over the course activities to the students in a major way without any intervention or refusal to accept what they propose.

Maybe these things will work. I might try to return to Neil Postman’s 4 declarative sentences and 30 questions rule for having a class – what that means is that is all you are allowed to say if you are the instructor.

Known as the “grease trap” or “drip tray” or “Spill tray” of employment, the University Athletic department is one of the things that needs to be eliminated from the university in totality.

Why?

University athletics is like an addictive drug to the administration. They see it as easy mode, a way to attract tuition-paying students to the university and attract donations from wealthy alumni. These elements are unhealthy and damaging to a University ecosystem. Students who choose to go to a university for the sports team diminish the quality of instruction and education overall for all their peers. Furthermore, they receive a degree and dilute the power and respect for that degree once they go out into the world and show that the university accepts them. It’s better to not rely on that stream of revenue at all.

Alumni who have become wealthy have done so not via merit, because nobody becomes wealthy via merit. They also didn’t do it by following the rules – that is also not how it’s ever accomplished. By accident they have achieved a high level of success, making one decision instead of another, or moving an investment here or there. Most of it is just taking advantage of a market opportunity, something that a degree has a very, very low percentage in assisting. The idea that they became wealthy because of their degree is a non sequitur. It’s never researched very hard by any university.

Relying on these two sources of revenue makes the University lazy. It doesn’t have to look in the mirror and say, “What is our social value? What good do we bring to the world?” Instead, they define the good through alumni donations and new student applications. We are popular; we have wealthy alumns; we must be good. A more challenging approach would be to try to run a university without sports, and without taking money earmarked for sports.

A university without athletics will survive the coming superstorm of admissions and enrollment. Gen Z students don’t care about the athletic team except as a distant sort of entertainment when desperate. Instead they are interested in trying to help the world, trying to understand others, and genuinely learn something. This is quite a bit different from the Boomers and the Gen Xers that are funding intercollegiate athletics now out of a sense of masculine desperation as they age.

A university that would eliminate athletics would thrive, avoiding all the oversight and expenses of having these terrible athletic coaches, staff, and players on campus. They would be able to angle those resources toward study and collaboration spaces. They would be able to focus on the hard question of what to learn and why. No more nonsense. The university is often now the program that athletics sponsors. What the hell are we doing?

The biggest problem in teaching right now is students. Not the people in the classroom who have paid (or someone paid) for them to be there, but the idea or conception of student itself. The notion of “students” as distinct from “teacher” is obvious but there are deeper implications here, such as student as different than adult, worker, person, neighbor, etc.

Having a conception of “students” that is not different from nor in opposition to other modalities of being and identity is the biggest barrier to empowering higher education. Currently, the notion of “student” is shorthand for “proto-careerist” or something like that (not exactly pleased with this naming; took a bit to settle on this naming). It reminds me of being 23 in my first job as a teacher in high school chatting with another young teacher about how difficult it was to keep conversations going with women after you answer the question “what do you do?” We tried to come up with a good synonym for “teacher” – which for a lot of good reasons really turns people off as it’s identification with a type or a kind of person out there; a stereotype perhaps but with a powerful grip on the mind’s eye – so a stereotype then. We settled on “manufacturing semi-furbished replacement parts for American society.” At the time hilarious but now the standard motive as revealed in the way that universities talk about students, each other, and themselves as institutions.

Faculty aren’t much better, spending a lot of time chatting to one another about how their students cannot seem to do anything that they would like them to do. Ironically, most faculty wish themselves into irrelevance in these conversations, most notably when teachers of writing, critical thought, or reading are upset that their students cannot do the things that it seems they are in the class to learn how to do. The “students” are incapable of assumed basic abilities and tasks that somewhere someone has assumed they would be able to do when they arrive in class. Often this seems to spill over into the job of the professor-as-teacher, which these conversations reveal most professors would be happy not to do.

Faculty talk about students as a vulgar herd of frustration punctuated with little stories about some people in the class who are “the good ones,” often only because they were obedient, or had some power to determine what the professor really wanted by being able to interpret overwrought assignment instructions, often written in a style or manner that would not pass that professor’s own standards. The idea that faculty can and often do discuss the silver lining popping through the cloudy sky of teaching should give us hope, but too often these narratives are used to reinforce this idea that the vast majority of students are problems who interfere in their own education to a point where the faculty can’t do anything about it. In short: Students come predestined for failure or success.

Is there a way to think about your students, or students, or those who are the reason the University exists – hard to hear for most faculty but perhaps the truest thing you’ll read today – that is inclusive of other identities and motives rather than exclusive? We tend to think of the student as lacking capacity and ability. Could there be a way to think of the identity of student as containing capacities rather than being the marker of an empty space?

The re-conception of the classroom as a place that is not meant for correction but construction is my favorite approach: What can we build together from what we brought with us to this place? Another way would be to ask what we can do, as an assembled group, with the time and place given to us?

These questions move us away from the diminutive “student” identification and towards the shared identification of a community, where everyone has capacities and incapacitates, abilities and inabilities, and through the mix of these various things we develop something that all the members of the community can benefit from. Of course, the nature of this thing, it’s benefits and harms, and its longevity are always the subjects of deliberation and debate in healthy communities. Since they are not known capacities, not really measurable in a way that would immediately satisfy everyone (for these joys and deficits always come to us and others in mediation) so they must consistently be discussed when the exigence is identified and made known to everyone. In this way, the class is the “diorama” of larger community behavior and practice where most of what goes on is discussion about things done and things that need to be done.

Seems like learning to me.

“We are all teachers of writing,” is not only a good principle of education, or a good mantra of focus for teachers overwhelmed my the irrelevant minutae of state requirements and Common Core, but it is also a political statement – it’s the phrase of victory of rhetoric and composition, who conquered the educational world with this phrase. In many ways, it’s a rhetorical meytonomy – container and thing contained. This phrase speaks for the entirety of how we see and evaluate education. There’s no escape from the prevalence of writing in education, and there’s no escape from the consideration of writing as education.

Photo by William Moreland on Unsplash

In speech communication rhetoric, to say we’ve dropped the ball would be to understate how poorly we have fared in expressing such importance for public speaking, argumentation, and debate. I think perhaps it’s because most of us don’t believe public speaking, argumentation, or debate matter at all. Public speaking matters because it funds our departments. Argumentation is an elective that fills seats regularly. And debate is an esoteric after-hours sport that occasionally allows the name of the department to circulate on internal PR lists, making sure that the Communication department blips on the Dean’s radar rather regularly. That’s pretty much the extent of the vision of speech communication rhetoricians, whose attention is so thinly distributed across other fields that they can’t be bothered attending to the heart of their own.

Recently it has become a universal claim of fact that the United States, and the world, have lost the ability to engage one another civilly. Not a week goes by that you don’t see an article or a new book that claims that we have lost the once vibrant and common practice of engaging one another with civil and calm tones, evaluating evidence, and allowing reason and rationality to guide our way.

A quick glance at history, particularly American political history would immediately defeat this belief. The vast history of U.S. politics has involved muscle and weapons in the persona of street gangs that were regularly courted to perform voter intimidation and violence against groups who parties thought best out of sight, sound, and mind. But historical reality has never been very influential to human minds. Why are we not using this claim of the loss of civility as a way to boost our courses in the university, community, and country?

It’s a given that any course requires speech. Even if professors are not assigning formal presentations as class assignments or assessment (hard to imagine), the need for class discussion, participation, and verbal engagement is a given in every American higher education classroom.

Yet public speaking frames itself as some odd historical reenactment of the 19th century model of city hall, the Chautauqua circuit, or some fantasy of civic engagement where anyone could stand up in front of 20 people in a room and speak about anything they like without interruption. It’s an homage to historical fiction about the United States in the tune of Normal Rockwell at best, and at worst it could not be better designed to ensure our students do not and can not participate in meaningful contemporary politics.

The Argumentation & Debate course suffers from several problems, first being the conflation of two distinctly different rhetorical forms. We would never teach a course called Zoology & Botany or Poetry & Novels. There would be some distinctions that would take up most of the class time if we did. Not so here. More to come on the importance of dividing these two forms from one another.

Debate – confined to the late-night session in the basement classroom of the communication building – is just as important as writing for all university students. We are all teachers of debate in the sense that we are all preparing our students how to present conviction to uncertain others, and how to evaluate the speech of a convinced person in relation to the speech of someone convinced in some other, exclusive way.

Professor Lionel Crocker’s many books on these arts from the 1940s

Debate is not an afterthought to consideration and research and neither is writing. Both are ways to explore meaning and certainty. Debate often will leave you less convinced of your initial position even if the listener is more convinced of it. Debate also calls to account notions of fact, dissolving them into evidence, and further dissolving them in to support. This softer read on proof is essential for critically thinking your way through political, social, business, and scientific problems.

Debate, like writing, isn’t final, but in the realm of expression. When you argue you express a commitment, but it’s not a permanent identity. You are expressing what you feel and think at that moment, given the context and situation around you. Debate involves risk but no catastrophic loss. If you are proven to have a bad idea, perhaps it was your advocacy that allowed exploration of a seemingly good idea to the point of reconsideration. Without an advocate for a position that might not be great, we cannot fully explore ideas on their own terms, and always accept them with the blind spot of our initial approach. Debate forces us to defend the obvious with well-formed words. When we teach writing we are always asking for more explanations and more detail from the writer. We don’t want to see what’s true; we want to see how it gets there and how it is made.

Writing is the most common form of evaluation in higher education today, and students are doing more writing than ever with their devices. They are negotiating the space between expression on the page or screen and who they imagine that they are. Debate does the same thing, but with the voice and immediately with others. Teaching students how to debate an issue is not teaching them how to fight, get loud, or shake their head at their opponent. It’s teaching them that taking a stand is an essential part of being human and ironically, losing a point doesn’t lose the self, it helps create it. Debate is risky because it is creative. It’s constitutive of self in surprising ways. It helps us figure out how to know what’s out there. Just like writing, it’s a practice that helps us understand our mind’s relation to self, the world, and what we think is worth sharing.

A friend of mine clued me into a new program called Gitbook, which is sort of like a blog, but more of a private journal/documentation site. I signed up for one, but not sure if I am going to use it. It might be a great place to keep notes on the classes I’m currently teaching.

When there’s not a global pandemic, I document everything about my courses. I audio record each one, and I also keep a notebook, usually a diary where I can write down things that worked or didn’t work for each day’s course. When things start to get busy what I normally document is just the weekly feel of the course, what’s working and what’s not. Might use it for that.

Something I thought might be good in there are course descriptions, however once I had a look at one I was working on for the upcoming course flyer for the undergraduates, I thought of this blog first. I prefer public-facing sort of stuff I suppose, or maybe GitNotes is too new for me to imagine how it will work in with what I’m doing here and in other places. Maybe GitNotes is a journal for me, and this is my social media replacement site. I think that works best for the way I’m thinking about things (kind of tired of looking at social media to be honest).

Anyway, here’s my revised course description for Argumentation:

What does it mean to argue? Have you ever been in an argument? How did you know? How did you know when the argument was over? What makes an argument happen? Is argument good or bad? 

These are the sort of questions we address in Argumentation. The concept of argumentation, even after thousands of years of people arguing about it, remains open. Nobody is sure what an argument is, how it works, or what the function of it really should or can be. The conversation about argumentation is international, involving experts from philosophy, law, history, sociology, languages, and rhetoricians. The only thing missing is you.

In argumentation we will read and examine the opinions of scholars, thinkers, and practitioners of argumentation. We’ll determine if they have a good grasp on what argument is. Then, after discussing, writing, and speaking about these ideas, it will be our turn. At the end of the course you’ll be able to advance your own understanding of what a good argument is, how to know, or even if you think that there’s such a thing as a good argument at all out there. 

This class is for anyone interested in the role of argument in society, be it political, social, or personal. This is a class for people who love to read and share their thoughts on the questions of why people act they way they do and say what they say. Argumentation is a difficult concept to grasp, but easy to do when we find ourselves in one. Come add your perspective to one of the oldest questions out there: Are we having an argument?

First, it’s a bit too long. Secondly, it doesn’t really communicate exactly what we do in the class. I think perhaps I should talk more about conversation or oral assessment in the course, but I really just want people who are interested in thinking about the role and nature of argument.

Maybe next week I’ll post a revised one, or perhaps this is the kind of thing that should go into the GitNotes? I think I sort of prefer working it out with you, whoever you fine people are. Having an audience in mind is far superior than just journaling to me. I already know what I’m going to say. But you are kind of a mystery. Who knows what you are thinking.