The New York Sophist

Just finished assessing the first round of student speeches for the term and the average grades were around an 88 to 90, high B to low A. This is atypical for me; most first speeches are closer to a C and slowly move up to this point over a course of four to five speeches.

Speech quality increases the less restrictions you give students on topics and the more instruction you give them in terms of how to develop a topic. Public speaking instructors suffer from the idea that in order to increase the quality of speeches they must police the nature of the topic, banning a number of topics that they associate with poor quality orations.

Photo by Jouwen Wang on Unsplash

This is the most common fallacy of the public speaking professor, the fallacy of causation between particular topics and bad speeches. It isn’t the topic choice that causes the poor speech, nor is it the nature of the topic. There are a few causes of this – namely three problems with topic approach that the instructor should address through teaching rhetoric instead of teaching orientation toward the “right position” on an issue or “a better topic” or even “good sources.” These things won’t address the core of the problem.

First, most of the topics that are associated with bad speeches – abortion, drug legalization, gun restrictions – are huge topics that cannot be taken on just as they are. They require a walk through the stasis in order to discover what the best point of contention is. They require examination through the general and specific topics of Aristotle and Cicero. They require acknowledgement that a young person is speaking on the topic, someone with little to no credibility. All these things are usually ignored by the instructor in favor of “get good sources.” But speech should be a lot more than a way to measure someone’s ability to evaluate research sources.

Another issue with these topics is that instructors might consider them “too real” and inappropriate for the classroom. this defense makes little sense to me. It’s one thing to criticise the university for not teaching “real world” skills or having applicability outside the gates. It’s another for instructors to deliberately restrict the content of a course to be removed from the things that people are speaking about and attempting to persuade one another about most often. Even moreso, consider that the course is meant to help people become better at such speech, and the instructor saying “There is no point in discussing these issues since persuasion is impossible.” This seems like a reason to reconsider the necessity of a speech course in totality, not an adaptation to make the course better.

Audiences are audiences. A university student audience brings with them into the classroom the assumptions, ideology, and values they have. A speech on a controversy is a wonderful way to gain class attention and connect the principles of good oratory into something they are experiencing directly and can connect to their life experiences. Of course, nobody should feel compelled to change their mind on an issue, but that’s an important consideration for oratory as well. These principles of democratic engagement are really not taught anymore. We teach young people that they are fools if they do not dissolve their opinions in the light of the facts. Instead, why not discuss how difficult it is to understand the fact, understand ideology, and negotiate the feelings and thoughts that surround any controversy they might face. Giving students a plan for future encounters with oratory might be more important than practice in making the same old designs on safe topics.

Speaking of safe, this word is probably the centerpiece of the most serious objection to particular topics, and that is the concept of the “safe space.” The trouble with safe spaces has been argued to death all over the internet, and I won’t rehearse those arguments here. The only thing I can add to this conversation is the danger of assuming there is a place that is free of persuasion and argument. Although safe-space considerations are well meaning and aimed at helping students feel comfortable and get in the mental space to engage learning, the idea that they would be immune or free from convincing speech is extremely dangerous. We are always vulnerable to it. And people who are not well-meaning at all will take advantage of those who feel that there’s a space that is persuasion or argument free.

When people want a safe space, what they want is a space that is free of aggressive, hostile, and bad argumentation or speech. This has been conflated with all persuasion and all oratory because in contemporary America, we are horrible at this. We have been taught, and continue to teach that facts are facts, they are easy to obtain, easy to understand, and that in their presence we should just change our mind without hesitation. This anti-human, monstrous position is responsible for people’s negative feelings about political conversation, their aversion to argument, and their desire to be away from oratory. The solution is to provide oratory as the fine art that it is. If speech teachers and public speaking courses are not going to do this, we have little hope to find it in other places.

Public speaking is oratory, and oratory is an art that connects humans and allows human beings to see themselves connected to one another in new ways. “Consubstantiality” is what Kenneth Burke called the art of rhetoric. This has been forgotten, or is just unknown to contemporary teachers. We tend to automatically think that speech and oratory are a violent interruption of our lives, separating us from what we know and believe, challenging us to accept new and different beliefs. This can be the case. But this other relation is where oratory is at its most artistic, creating moments where we see new connection and take on shared identity, seeing a place for future possibility.

I have a lot more to think about in terms of creating digital speech. The internet has become an art gallery of oratory, with preserved speech hanging there, waiting for us to stop for a bit as we walk or surf by. More on that later as I think about these wonderful orations that the students are producing this term.

The biggest hazard from teaching online I think is that you get huge waves of grading that have very firm time requirements.

If I assign students to prepare a speech 6 minutes long, I have to listen to 40 or so 6 minute speeches. There’s nothing I can do to reduce that amount of time at all.

It could be argued that if you assign papers you have a bit more control over how long it takes you to grade, and you can shorten it, but I am not sure that’s true at all. For me, reading student papers always takes longer than listening to them speak. I think even with the fixed 6 minute speech I’m still doing pretty good with classtime on grading. I’m hoping to turn everything around by Saturday so we’ll see how it goes (everything came in last night).

In my other course where I would traditionally assign a paper I have been allowing students to present their ideas either by recording themselves on a powerpoint or submitting an audio file as the assignment. I’m hoping to work a bit more on oral assessment, and giving students multiple opportunities to practice speaking their ideas to others.

The power of oratory cannot be denied now more than ever. The deluge of podcasts and the dominance of video calls, vlogging, and websites like TED Talks and The Moth show that the power of speech is not something old or less important than writing. It is not writing, but it is definitely composition. Unfortunately most people in my field teach public speaking as the transmission of facts and truths from research, which is extremely thin and limiting. Speech creates understanding in incredible ways since it is ephemeral, immersive, and helps us feel our way through ideas as we listen to the persons speech patterns, tone, and how they adjust what they are saying as they go.

My focus will be to push for more casual recordings, more one-take recordings, and more supplemental or response recordings as students interact with one another’s work. I hope that by December we’ll be in a place where submitting a voice memo from the phone is at the same level of critical engagement that a nice paper would be. Considering how little time college students spend on papers, I feel that this might be a good way to practice critical thinking.

“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.

This is a video I made for my online public speaking class addressing some of the things that after two formal presentations they still need to work on.

The biggest problem in teaching speech and debating is the problem of performing to teacher expectations which expect students to exceed teacher expectations. This is the problem identified by Buddhists as “Pointing at the Moon.” There are some good koans about this problem. I talk about it in this video a bit. Much more to say about it in an upcoming post.

What I like about this video is the way it was shot, which is something we don’t teach in public speaking even though the types of public speaking our students will be doing will be highly web mediated. I want to point this out in my instruction, which is happening all online. This seems like a good way to do it.

Teaching online means that we need to study video techniques, techniques of lighting and storyboarding, but also the process of post-production: sound editing, color grading, and so on. It’s a terrifying new world for the professor who loves the chalk and talk.

where should we start in class? With organization? Research? Developing an audience profile?

Wherever you start teaching in a speech or argumentation or debate course, that is where you are positing the start of rhetoric. 

The question of a start is the establishment of ends. What is the purpose of rhetoric? Why learn and study it?  

I was gifted this great textbook from 1900 the other day, and the authors start with style. Most public speaking instructors probably cover style, near the end of the term, along with ethics, in the sense that “audiences expect different things so speak the way they want. Now, back to the importance of a bibliography.”

This attention to style could be seen as evidence of the simplistic refutation of rhetoric as being surface-only, an affront to the deep consideration of the true that philosophy, et. al. deal with. 

It could be the understanding that style is the only way we have to understand truth. If it comes across in one way rather tha  another it wont matter how true it is.  

in starting with style, this book doesnt mince words. Theres a much better understanding of acceptability than we get today. Most public speaking courses convey an obsession with facts. Facts are the only style needed. Bring your references of various types and you’ll be believed. Qe grade a lot more on references than oration, as if we have lost faith in rhetoric as a productive, creative force for good. 

Where is the faith in oratory to make the world? probably in the same spot we left our faith in students. The last time students were praised as a group I cant remember. Instructors at my university praise an I individual student, but with the tone of surprised exception. The student is impressive because students are supposed to be terrible, and this one isn’t. It’s a sad situation. 

Where is our belief or sense that the world is more than a selection of careers? That making money means you are successful? that good grades mean you know things? All of these questions should be able to dissolve easily in the hands of the trained orator. Then be reconstituted as immutable truths. 

But no. Far more important they learn how to cite a scholarly source isn’t it? That’s our style and hence our truth. If the facts dont work, we just shrugand call others stupid. If only we had a practice that could be used to reconstitute stupidity and facts into a pliable substance for making things, attitudes, people, and thoughts.