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.

Still thinking about what makes bad teaching/good teaching. I found this atrocious lecture from “debate coaches” supposedly teaching the best and brightest young debaters at an exclusive “forum” for debate at Emory University.

The Barkley Forum doesn’t seem to have any quality control standards. We get a route lecture that is thin, vapid, and incorrect by most people’s read of the things that these two are teaching (“teaching”) about.

It’s sad to me. I see the immediate sediment of people who think that their tournament debating experience has made them more intelligent, more educated, more well-read, more brilliant than other people in the population. This means that when they instruct people on one of the most “complex” forms of tournament debate argument they feel they have to really dumb it down so that the regular people, the uninitiated, can understand the complicated nature of what is going on here.

Instead, debate should teach humility, respect for doxa, respect for people’s daily thinking, and try to improve it in some way – or at least call attention to it. A good kritik lecture would be to set up the scene: You are debating with a group of people about public assistance, welfare, unemployment, whatever it might be. One of the people in the group is making arguments that are good but their tone and the terms they use to describe those who are on public assistance is offensive – they are speaking about them like they are a disease, like they are animals. What should the response be?

That’s all you need to start off an educational conversation about kritik arguments. But these two clowns treat it like it’s some kind of precious and holy discourse that can only be understood through an incredibly bad reading of the ancient world. I don’t think this lecturer has ever read or probably heard about the essential books for discussing the sophistic situation in Athens. It’s so bad that I wouldn’t even call it an interpretation, I would call it plain ignorance.

The most incredible thing is that Emory put this video out for the public to see, clearly unaware at the incredibly poor teaching in the video, the ridiculous interpretation of quite interesting/serious/well researched subjects, and the demeaning way that philosophical argument is being characterized to high school (I’m assuming) students who make philosophical arguments all day, every day with teachers, friends, and family.

The ignorance of hubris here is astounding. And it’s one of the many reasons why I dislike debate coaches, never liked being called one, and think that debate coaches and tournaments have obliterated any value that comes from a serious study of debating.

I thought the class would be great. Why was it so bad?

First of all, what’s a bad class? Definitions abound! I would say for me a bad class means:

1. I could have talked more in depth about the material adding deeper value to it but didn’t.
2. I didn’t connect the material to the students on the terms and ideas they were thinking about or brought into the classroom.
3. I didn’t conclude with a question or something for them to take with them as they left the class.

I should have prepared differently. I should have spent more time thinking about the material, which was very familiar to me. The death of good teaching is familiarity, either perceived or actual, with the material for the class. What I typically do is I meditate with the material meaning I try to think about it as if I were looking at it the way the students might. Then I try to write down, on paper, some of the major ideas I want to communicate about the topic/readings. I leave a lot of time at the end for the students to question or add in what they thought was meaningful.

Today I typed up my notes the night before and didn’t print them. I didn’t read them over just before class. I also read the material a couple of days ago. Not a great look.

I should stick to the plan and keep doing what works. Students are a mess these days – COVID and looming global disaster don’t make one eager and positive to think about tough ideas for the future that might not come. Still, I believe that offering a high-quality class every time can help them see the value even given this generally reasonable attitude about humanities courses.

Photo by Kajetan Sumila on Unsplash

I was asked by the people at Power of Public Speaking if I would like to be a guest host on their POPs Community podcast. In thinking about what to talk about for 45 minutes or so, I thought a great topic would be why we are obligated to allow students to speak about very real, very immediate controversies in the world.

Here’s the podcast. I think it went really well and I had a great time. Makes me think I should do some solo In the Bin episodes once in a while. Might be a good way to mix up the modality of shared ideas.

As always let me know your thoughts, questions, comments, and of course opposition to my ideas in the comments here or over in the POPs Community. Would love to hear what you have to say.

In this new episode of In the Bin, I chat with Will Silberman who has tabbed a ton of British Parliamentary format debate tournaments here in the United States.

We talk about the past 13 months of online debate, what questions about debate it raises, what mistakes were made, and what benefits came out of this necessary and dramatic shift of practice.

All comments welcome down below, on the Anchor site, or wherever you see this post!