Tag Archives: teaching

2400 Times and Counting

Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , , ,

 

Robert La Follette at an Illinois Chautauqua meeting, 1905 Wikipedia.org
      Robert La Follette at an Illinois Chautauqua                     meeting, 1905                            Wikipedia.org

Sometimes there is simply no good alternative to a lecture that inspires discussion of a complicated idea. 

These days the lecture as a form of communication doesn’t get much love.  The idea of an extended presentation to an audience who should want to know more usually engenders greater enthusiasm in the presenter than the intended recipients. The speaker is almost always in the thrall of their specialty.  But these days auditors are easily unfocused and distracted: often ill-prepared to sustain their attention and set aside their electronic umbilicals.

And then there are weak talkers. In our times if a dramatist wants to paint a picture of an old pedant practically dead on his feet, she can do no better than put him in front of a class mumbling on about some disciplinary canon.  My favorite is an ancient fossil of a teacher in the film Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) prattling on to his young charges who have more important things on their minds.

Educational styles favored in our times emphasize experiential learning which, roughly translated, means learning by doing.  That, along with our visual bias for the presentation of all forms of information (u-tube clips, PowerPoints, iPads and  Smart Boards), works against finding satisfaction in the cumulative power of a well-conceived lecture.

Temple Grandin at a TED Talk, 2010 Wikipedia.org
Temple Grandin at a TED Talk, 2010    Wikipedia.org

Perhaps its my training as a rhetorician, but I retain a lot of faith in a coherent talk as an effective means to both convey ideas, and perform the necessary enthusiasm for them. There is no better alternative to a call for change issued by a preacher or a public intellectual, or an invitation from an academic to greater understanding of a complicated but revelatory idea.  If we’ve been lucky, we can can recall at least a few times when we were hooked into the love of a subject by a passionate talker.  Ideas that may be dead on the page can come to life if they are embodied.

As a form, the lecture is also a meeting of minds in the same space that makes possible the kind of interactivity that often attributed to digital media, but often absent.  I recall a master- teacher biologist in my first year at Colorado State University.  He was a mesmerizing presence, at once amplifying complex ideas while giving them importance with real-world applications.  His lectures on DNA were built around an accumulating swirl of drawings created as he spoke.  The blackboard became a riot of color as he used various colors of chalk to fill in essential details of the Double Helix. His effort and interest were contagious. I also remember another professor at Cal State-Sacramento who could turn a single class period into an intellectual adventure. His lectures and questions seemed to owe something to the kinds of performances we were seeing at the time from gifted actors like Paul Schofield and Michael Caine. This teacher had all the theatrical tools he needed:  a resonant voice, an animated face, and the kind of conversational spontaneity that belied what I’m sure was careful preparation.

In truth, many of us still love good lectures. TED Talks, podcasts, the popularity of massed online courses–in addition to packaged lectures on disk offered by master-teachers–indicate a desire to be the willing captive of an effective presenter.  I agree with Molly Worthen, who recently noted in the New York Times that lectures teach the kind of disciplined communication practices we all need: the twin abilities to pay attention and to actively listen.1  Those who have mastered these skills know the rewards.

What makes a good presentation?  What talents brought millions of Americans out on a snowy Saturday night 100 years ago to hear a speaker at their local Chautauqua?  There’s no formula, but it seems clear that the best presentations allow us to see or understand the familiar with new and deepened sensibilities. They add a greater depth of understanding than we could discover on our own.

My guess is that I’ve lectured to students perhaps 2400 times over the course of a long career. My presentations are usually presented to groups of 25 students at a time: a better setting by any measure than a mass audience of a thousand or more.  Sometimes the presentations go badly, though I’d like to think less frequently these days. And sometimes I flatter myself to believe that I made an 80-minute period –the standard on our campus–fly by.  To be sure, that length is too long by at least 20 minutes. Indeed, a session that misfires in so sprawling a period can make it seem like the clock has simply stopped.  A single session that wastes 80 minutes can be multiplied times the 25 members of a course, totaling 33 wasted hours. Knowledge of those stakes puts a significant amount of pressure on any conscientious instructor.  I think I know how actors feel when they are about to step on stage.

Even so, a presenter on fire with their subject is a sight to behold.  Although the TED Talks format only gives most of its speakers little more than 18 minutes, you can feel the growing momentum when one of them has taken flight with a room of rapt listeners close behind.

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1Molly Worthen, Lecture Me. Really.   New York Times, October 18, 2015, Sunday Review, p. 1

Comments Woodward@tcnj.edu

Is Mentoring Out of Fashion?

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Mentor definitionTelevision’s Shark Tank is less like being in the presence of really smart people than being the new kid at a tough junior high.

I’m struck with the apparent popularity of CNBC’s hit reality show, Shark Tank.  The series features four or five investors who listen to proposals from mostly novice entrepreneurs asking for cash investments in exchange for a share of their new businesses. The product may be some odd form of ice cream, or a redesigned coffee mug that won’t leave a mark on a wood table.  In truth, the new ideas that are pitched are less important than the reactions to them from the mostly male “sharks.”  Their responses range from respectful doubt to over-the-top scorn.  And, of course, its the bullies in shows like these that we tend to remember.

What’s troubling about our fascination for the show is that some of the “sharks” pride themselves on a kind testosterone-driven frankness that borders on cruelty. A few of the investors seem to cherish a style of drill-sergeant tactlessness over more supportive mentoring. And that may not be fair to drill-sergeants.  Helping these novices seems less the point than humiliating them.

We can make too much of this as a trend.  After all, heightened conflict is the familiar and mostly toxic formula of reality television. But coming from otherwise unremarkable people who’ve made some money by having money, the argot of growing businesses suggests nothing so much as an adult variation on the kind of school-yard bluster that sometimes came from classmates who were both aggressive and scared. Shark Tank is less like being in the presence of really smart people than being the new kid at a tough junior high.  I hope it doesn’t represent a cultural trend.

This aggressive style applied to students is illustrated well in Damien Chazelle’s superb Whiplash (2014).  Actor J. K. Simmon’s Oscar-winning performance as a faux-perfectionist jazz instructor is a perfect case study of how ruthlessness can turn a mentor into a crippled tyrant.  Mentorship withers if it requires abuse of the learner. As the film suggests, the effects are likely to be more destructive than transformative.

Rhetorically, verbal taunts are often spoken to throw a listener off the scent of a phony.  This is the use of language as “mystification;” It dares the listener to respond as an equal. Instead of help there is condescension.  Instead of questions there are demands. Representative responses to individuals who want to franchise an idea often ring hollow as ostensible signs of true expertise:  We know the language:  “You’re nothing but dead meat to me,” “You’re not as smart as I thought you were.”  “Grow up; you’re playing in the big leagues now.”  One of the sharks in particular favors wearing the persona of a brilliant “money man.” He mistakes crassness for wisdom, and he prefers certainty over a true mentor’s acceptance of degrees of interpretation.  Worst yet, the information-poor responses from these supposed wise men give off an unmistakable impression of some unjustified self-regard. “I have to tell you, my friend, that this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard.  You don’t have a clue about how to set up a business or market a product.”  After an evening of statements like this, it’s a surprise the money man’s suits still fit.

Another show on the same network features to restaurateurs who likewise spout clichés that were stale 50 years ago. “You’re an old dog and I’m here to tell you that you can’t learn new tricks.”  This, after some predictable snafus in trying to build and open a  restaurant in just two days. This can’t really be how we teach business acumen.  What is lacking in all of these shows is the kind of compassion any person should expect when seeking help in reorganizing a small business.

All of this bullying is reminiscent of the stale harangues of men who have sublimated their dreams into a single soul-destroying passion to make money.  Watching these shows is like sitting through David Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross far too many times.  On first viewing there is something bracing about seeing a kind of feral Lord of the Flies survivalism transferred to a modern sales office. But there is finally something disheartening about observing supplicants ridiculed rather than mentored.  Perhaps a current trend needs to be reversed.  It might be helpful to see fewer business people who have miscast themselves as teachers.  They could be replaced by qualified teachers who could humanize the process of helping new entrepreneurs.

Comments: woodward@tcnj.edu