The New York Sophist

I thought I’d start out this semester by offering students a number of 10 to 12 minute videos on different topics. It did not turn out that way. Most of the videos I’ve made have been 20 minutes or more. And for my Argumentation course, the videos are always around 40 minutes.

I’m not sure this is good pedagogy at all for the online classroom, but I’m pretty certain I’m providing some good content. The trick is if the students will ever watch enough of the videos to see it.

In my imagination, students are scrubbing the videos a lot. That is, they are moving the playhead back and forth, looking for parts of the video that they are most interested in or curious about. At least I hope that’s what they are doing!

Here’s a video for my public speaking students on style and delivery, about 20 minutes long – and meant to be much shorter.

Not a big fan of the livestreamed class, but I did one anyway yesterday.

I don’t really care for the livestream as there’s a lot of stuff that gets in the way of teaching here.

Typically I could do a 10 to 15 minute video on a reading and be fine with it. But the livestream is more like a traditional classroom. You could have 2 or 3 hours and not get through half the readings.

The goal, of course, is not to just get through the readings but to make sure the students understand the readings and can do something with them. The “something they do” should be a bit more than “get them” or “explain them back to you.” What we want them to do is incorporate them into a third, different perspective, something that has been created out of the teacher the reading and the position they bring to it from their lives.

The livestream allows for that but the interaction isn’t really there. I think I get better student interaction from the asynchronous videos. There they can write a comment about it to me privately and we can discuss it. That might limit what the other students can get out of the exchange, but I often ask students to post their questions on the Discord or other discussion board in order to answer it there for the whole class.

A live stream also must be broken up to be useful later. Haven’t done that yet, but not really sure how to do it because of how the stream turned out. If I just make some shorter videos, it might be better.

Maybe the livestream is like office hours? Hang out, publicly think and talk, see who comes by?

An archive of thinking out loud about the readings with some engagement and some interlocutors might be good.

Tomorrow I plan to make a bunch of asynchronous videos so we’ll see how they compare.

Following in the footsteps of Marshall McLuhan, I have used Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Maelstrom” as a way to describe rhetorical strategy, kairos, and how argument really works away from all the too-firm theories that are floating around out there.

Now I’m thinking that the Maelstrom is a useful metaphor for universities and university instructors to plan for the rough times ahead. Just like in the story, universities cross a dangerous stretch of water every year, hoping that they will be able to make it out and back before the storm arrives. To be caught in the storm certainly means that you are going to be pulled directly to the bottom.

Fritz Eichenberg, U-M Library Digital Collections

The narrator of the story is caught in a maelstrom and there doesn’t appear to be a way out. For a moment, the character can see the wall of water around him, and notices that things he thought would sink are moving up the column, and things that he believed would float are heading to the bottom. He decides to lash himself to a heavy object in hopes that this will be pushed to the top of the whirlpool.

For rhetoric, the meaning is pretty obvious, at least to me. It’s much more valuable to look around and make use of the way things are floating around you in your situation and encounter with topic and audience than it is to stay committed to the things that you brought with you. Things you prepare alone are always going to be persuasive for you. But the audience has their own assumptions and feelings, and those might work in ways that make little sense to you, but still work. The goal isn’t to be right; the goal is to persuade, or at least to bring the audience closer to your point of view (which is often what persuasion ends up being, realistically).

For online teaching, what instructors have been doing is panicked grasping to things that they think will keep their class afloat in this mess. Quizzes, daily discussion, handing in various reading reactions, etc on a near daily or weekly basis is much more frequent than would be assigned in an in-person course. The panic of not being able to see the students makes instructors think that they have no idea if the students are engaged, learning, or “paying attention” – whatever that means. Often this last one is just “looking at me while I’m talking.” Not the best measure of student engagement quite honestly.

These measures are all comfortable and familiar and we believe they tell us something. We believe they have the power to keep the objectives of the class floating. But in this unusual situation, frequent daily or weekly stress of doing a bunch of work that isn’t clearly connected to a larger goal in the course is just going to continue to pull the course to the bottom.

The panic that there are not comfortable ways or familiar ways to take stock of a class and see if people are engaged is very real, but we can’t just replicate the in person online and think that it will provide the same value or information. Honestly, the in-person metrics are more comfortable than valuable; I wonder if they actually float in any circumstances.

Looking around to what engages and works in the online space is what’s needed, even if it’s not familiar or comfortable. What we are looking for are things that communicate value to students. Things that make them feel that they are part of something educational, meaningful, and valuable.

For me what has gotten the biggest response are short podcasts just checking in with everyone that I post to our class chat about once a week. These are just audio recordings where I address questions I’ve received 2 or 3 times, mention a comment that someone left that I think is good, or general guidelines or thoughts I have about upcoming readings and assignments. The students really like these because they give them the sense they have something to hold onto that helps them stay afloat. Notice this doesn’t require them to do anything – it doesn’t add to an already stressful and over-assigned term.

One of the things I’m most frustrated by is how much of my ability to adapt is connected to professors who do not think – never think – that they need to adapt to the students. They think the students should be grateful to be able to hear the professor speak. They think they are transmitting the best information to the students. They also think they are defenders of “real” knowledge, and are noble for looking out for cheaters and those who trick the professor into giving out precious undeserved “points.” Nobody feels engaged or helped by seeing a bad laptop camera professor telling them that they need to read the syllabus.

I’m just hoping that by associating myself with the things that feel like they would sink I might get a chance to rise to the edge of the storm and be picked up by someone else. I think that the scramble for the things that appear to work, because they fit a shallow and undeveloped model of what it means to know or teach, is to ensure that your entire crew will be consumed by the maelstrom.

My last post was about losing the thread, and losing the focus of what the course is about in the sea of technology available to us. I pretty much lost my way 2 days ago working on these very nice powerpoints for my courses.

I realized I was spending hours on one reading. How was this going to help anyone understand the readings, or the point of the class? Where was the value? What was the aim or purpose of that instruction?

I decided I needed powerpoints because that’s how online teaching looked to me from other sources. I realized that if I were in the classroom, I probably wouldn’t have made any for this lecture. I would have written terms as needed on the board or typed them into a blank word document on the screen.

I decided instead to adapt what I do to online and just put a blank document behind me to write things on. I think the result was pretty good in terms of a lecture that wasn’t too polished, and had many access points of engagement for students. The only concern I have is that it’s a bit long – I’ve been shooting for under fifteen minutes, but in this case I felt like it was warranted to go a bit longer.

This video is about 30 minutes which is one of my longer ones for teaching, but I chose to do it this way in order to capture the interplay of the various readings for the unit. I think a longer video is ok depending on what you are trying to do. The only time it wouldn’t be ok is if you think that since a normal class is an hour long, your video has to be an hour long. It’s probably better to do videos on concepts that last around 7 to 10 minutes (but much closer to 7).

I could have broken up this talk into 3 talks but the interplay would have been missed, and what the aim here is to get the students thinking about how the readings interact. Perhaps the next unit I’ll break it down more by reading and try to hit that sub 7 minute mark on those.

Yesterday I started making Google Slides presentations for various reading assignments for my courses. I planned to video some lectures with these, but also providing them as documents on the learning management system (we use Canvas in my shop).

As I started making the slides, the amount of work I needed to do kept increasing. For every slide I made, I felt like I needed to make five more because of what making that slide revealed or what it indicated to me needed to be added next to help explain the readings.

I started to get worried. How long was it going to take me to create all of these slides for all of these readings?

What happened was that I lost the thread of the course. My role in the course is not to explain every reading, every argument, every page. My role is to place the reading into the context of the class that I created.

Photo by Sam Balye on Unsplash

The role of the teacher is not to elucidate the text but to illuminate the text. The function of a good lecture or presentation for students is to provide the light and perspective by which they can read and interpret the text within the context of the course. So I was pretty out of line with what I was trying to do.

The course should be designed as an investigation that requires the students to take what they get from the text and use it to address or add to the questions the course is set out to pose. The course should be structured in a way where the students add their own response and reaction to the reading toward the major aim of the course.

I know all this, and always try to structure my courses around inquiry and keep the spirit of inquiry as the attitude of the course. But yesterday I sort of fell into the social pressure of having to explain the readings, of transmission or transfer of what I think rather than creating the space of exposure and encounter for them to generate their own experience.

Why is teaching so difficult? It always feels like I’m starting over, every semester. It could be that I’m not that great at it, or it could be that it’s just that hard. Or it could be my favorite answer: Good at what? What is there to be good at? Does teaching really exist in terms we can talk about this way?