The New York Sophist

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?

“Finger pointing at the Moon” is a famous koan that has been rewritten and offered so many times that the search for the origin of this early teaching lesson might as well be lost. As a koan we can accept it as a case that is worth our investigation, a case that everyone must investigate and try to answer. In Buddhism, the koan is a method of teaching that attempts to get students of Buddhist thought into the sort of thinking and attitude that Buddhism as a religion, or thought-system, requires. It’s a tool of critical thinking we could say, one that pushes on your ability to think in a new discourse or a new discipline.

I’ve often borrowed “finger pointing at the moon” to talk about teaching and pedagogy and every year, at the start of the year, my mind drifts back toward it for another go. Although there’s obviously a lot we can say about this koan right now it has me thinking about the relationship to grades and the privileged discourse of the teacher.

We talk a lot in pedagogy about the authority of the teacher and how the teacher can often be a source of disciplinary or other troubling power. I’ve written before – many years ago – about the great Chinese proverb “It is a pleasurable thing to teach.” This has an ambivalent sort of meaning, that the teacher can often be overcome by their own position, thinking they are doing a lot of good when they are really just causing a lot of suffering. There’s also the great Paulo Friere quote, “A teacher must be an authority without being authoritarian.” And Staughton Lynd’s great saying, “You shouldn’t be standing in front of your students, but shoulder to shoulder with them on the issues of the time.” These are all very meaningful teaching ideas to me, and I think about them a lot. I’m not sure what they all mean for my teaching practice, but they are definitely tools for me to reiterate it. The biggest block I find in my way though, is grades.

Grades are the ultimate finger, and most of the teaching authority relies on grades. The reason students attend to what you say and ask and do is because they are concerned about grades. In this sense you are the arm extending the finger, pretty far removed from learning or knowledge in that sense. Grades have too much authority and control in order to be valuable at all. They really best serve as a lighthouse that helps you and the student avoid the shoals.

The other concern with grades that I’m noticing is that they boost a real sense of confidence among students who probably should be a lot more humble and questioning of their own abilities. It’s like they borrowed a book about some topic, and they carry it around, thinking that their presence with the borrowed book is what learning looks like.

The university will not be able to compete with the rising certificate programs, particularly if major companies start to accept or prefer the certificate program over the traditional four year degree. Grades are thought about too much as the evidence of learning and not what they serve as, the payment for labor. The analogy needs to be rethought. Students think of grades as what they deserve for sitting though a class and doing what is asked of them. Professors think of grades as a way to control student behavior and judge student ability. Neither is a good way to think about grades.

Let’s get grades out of the way and move to a system where professors help students create a portfolio of work that showcases what they are best able to do. If you are teaching a public speaking class, like me, this means some sort of recordings. Wouldn’t it be a better use of a semester to help mentor students through a process of reiteration on a presentation to make it look and sound really good for larger audiences? Wouldn’t that be more valuable than giving them a quiz about some made up outline structure that only has value in a glossy, overpriced textbook?

What’s the moon here? What does it mean to get it in a class like public speaking? What should students be able to do at the end of such a course? These are the questions we should use to drive our course, not textbook chapters, quizzes, and midterm exams.

It’s Friday night and normally I’m pretty energetic and excited. Tonight I’m worn out, and I think it’s because I spent most of the week working on an essay that I should have done last month. With all the changes and the almost-taking-a-buyout business I can forgive myself the slip this time. After all it’s better than my typical writing excuses such as “video game” or “too much pizza.”

I’m frustrated because I am not sure why I’m so tired after working on that piece and getting it finalized. I really shouldn’t be. It wasn’t epic, didn’t require a ton of research, and was pretty easy to write and edit. I think it makes sense and will be helpful for the intended audience. So I shouldn’t be tired. Instead, I’m mad and tired.

My mind goes back to the start of the week and a Monday video call with a friend and colleague where we were discussing metaphors for kinds of writing. He was talking about the kind of writing one does on comprehensive exams: The kind meant to prove that you that you can move heavy ideas around properly and get them in position. I talked about how annoying that rhetoric is because it doesn’t soar, and it’s not particularly “cool.” He called it positioning and then I responded with, “It’s like being one of those guys with the orange lights who are moving the plane out of the gate and onto the tarmac.” Bingo.

Photo by Zamir Yusof on Unsplash

Tarmac Rhetoric – the kind of rhetoric that moves extremely bulky powerful ideas into place so that someone else can soar with them. Someone else can see the 30,000 foot view, someone else can feel the rush of the ground moving away rapidly. But you get to move this majestic machinery – which cannot soar or be elegant on the ground – out of a tiny space and into a less tiny area so it can move to a narrow but long area so that it can take off.

Tarmac rhetoric isn’t heavy. Planes aren’t heavy really. They have a weight, but it has to consider fuel, luggage and passengers. Planes are pretty light. They are designed to stay aloft. But they are very bad at moving themselves around and into position to lift everyone on board into the sky and sail them toward a destination somewhere quick.

I’m pretty sure this piece I finished drafting today was tarmac rhetoric and a pretty good case of it too. It sets up the ability of others to take off and go in a lot of directions quickly, lightly, and impressively. But in order for them to do that, I have to wave the little orange lights, stand in the heat, and make sure it gets into position on the tarmac.

Do we teach tarmac rhetoric? Do we teach positioning the “Wings that give our weighted words flight,” to quote Kenneth Burke kind of? What does that teaching look like? Who are we in the relationship to lifting, transforming, transportive rhetoric when we are the ones who help move the awkward beast out of the space it doesn’t belong and into the place where it can sit for a bit before it launches up and away, shining?

Professors, stop requiring reading.

Instead, require engagement. Require response. Require conversation. Require a challenge.

It seems incredibly sad that I have to say this, but requiring someone to do something because you are an expert or an authority is not how you teach. This is more along the lines of how to be a bad manager, or how to treat employees poorly. It’s how to be a disliked, irrelevant, and problem manager of a team rather than a leader or contributor to a team. Teaching isn’t – and has never been – the dictation of facts from someone who knows to a bunch of people who don’t. Instead, it’s modeling and practice in how to think along the lines of what constitutes good thought for a field.

Photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash

Learning and evaluating the quality of claims is best done in groups where people are interacting with one another. Our reasoning does not work very well at all when we are sitting isolated and engaging a text. So reading itself is not learning nor is it the best way to develop a critical approach to information. Assigned reading must be considered a part of teaching and learning, but how significant is it?

Why do we require reading?

This is the first question that I have to ask when I’m assigning something to read. What is the point here? Why am I having them encounter this text alone?

For me the answer is that it becomes a commonplace, or a meeting place, or an ingredient we can all bring into the larger class discussion in order to have some common ground for a conversation.

I teach in the humanities, so I’m not sure what the approach might be in hard science. Perhaps something like a guide on how to approach a problem or how to understand what we know already about an issue or thing, as a basis for a more robust treatment of the theory, knowledge, or approach by the professor in the class. There is always the catch-all of having two different approaches to something helping you understand and retain it better.

I don’t assign any reading that I don’t plan to directly use in the construction of my own in-class speech, or video. I plan to model a response to the text if I’m going to give sustained comments. This is much more common in the pandemic. My typical way of teaching is to ask a lot of questions of the students to see what they thought about the reading. This encourages them to encounter the text at least a bit in the moment.

Assigning reading has to be incorporated by the professor in more ways than just a quiz or just some examination on the reading. It has to be the provision of some information, some material, for them to create something with. Most often this should be a response. The best way of doing this is for the professor to model the response to the reading themselves, performing the quality, standards, and approach that is accepted in their field. Education in all cases is the teaching of a discourse, and modeling that discourse is perhaps the best way to show students the difference between a field expert and a layperson on an issue or idea.

Eliminate Textbooks

Textbooks are a bane on education. They are distilled comments that would be made in class anyway, and don’t really help students with anything other than disciplining themselves to read and engage boring material that they have little interest in. The textbook is often just a flatter, less interesting version of the professor.

Some defend textbooks as a reference, and I think this might be the only defense out there that makes sense. But the web is a much better reference for the things we might find in a textbook, and the cost is often hundreds of dollars lower.

If you feel compelled to assign a textbook, you should consider assigning a reader instead. Cut right to the professional essays on the topic and show the students those. Have them read some bits of things you have found to be illuminating and inspiring. The reader will serve as a much better orientation to the course and the course topic than the textbook, which distills. The reader is more of a sampler, and also doesn’t insult the students’ intelligence like a lot of textbooks do.

Four Real Books

Several years ago I was chatting with a friend who was in graduate studies at Cornell University about why students today seem to have so much busywork to do for every class. There are blog responses, discussion boards, endless quizzes, etc. I believe this is because faculty are more insecure about their position and less prepared to teach than ever before. They don’t see the need to look to what the high schools are doing, and they feel that students should be happy to be in the presence of someone with a terminal degree and just accept what they have to say. There’s also the ease of the internet, and online instruction, where the presence of something like a discussion board feels like pressure to find a use for it. There are probably a ton of different reasons why faculty are assigning so much work per course, when I remember most of my courses were a midterm, a final, and perhaps a short review of a book somewhere in there.

The thing we found in common with our best class experiences in this conversation was that our favorite classes all had assigned four books, no textbooks, and had just gone through those books in conversation and with some short papers perhaps. I think this approach has many advantages over the required reading of the chapters of the textbook. It’s not insulting – here are some books written to a critical mind from one. It’s interesting: You get a concentrated approach to a set of ideas or problems, instead of a distilled covering of a number of ideas in a field. Most importantly, you get four arguments. These arguments call out to the students to respond either with questions, agreement, disagreement, or the desire for further framing.

You can assign four books and have students choose what to focus on, or have them read around in them, or do them in order. Most importantly, you are not assigning reading, you are assigning engagement here, assigning them to come to terms with a few different ways of thinking about your course and field. And most of these books are probably 14 dollars at the most, maybe 30 if they just came out, and students are pretty savvy at finding books online for free.

Don’t assign reading. Assign experiences. Don’t force reading with a quiz. Encourage conversation by introducing your students to a difficult text. Students don’t refuse to read because they are dumb. Students refuse to read because they don’t see the value, they feel it’s dumb, they feel that it’s ridiculous in the way it’s written, that it isn’t taking them seriously. Assign something that treats them like a valuable mind, and encourage reaction to the text in speech or writing. This is how reading becomes a part of a good course.