What has quarantine done, and what did you expect it to do?

Quickly approaching the start of month two, and I have little to show for it.

A lot more hours logged in video games, a lot less reading done. Writing promises and obligations have been furloughed, by me, so that I can stare at the television, wall, out the window, etc.

Computer screens get a lot of time with me, mostly expectant stares. My students have evaporated, but a few still complete assignments and turn them in. I look at these and they show some good thinking, good thoughts, good stuff. For me it makes me wonder though the point of higher education in general? What are we evaluating here?

I have been completely redesigning my classes to focus on one or two assignments, and steer clear of all the nonsense. It’s very hard to ask the question, “Am I assigning this for them or for me?” This question is very upsetting, if you are like me and you consider a class like a good party and you want all your textual friends to be there.

I’m pretty sure that online education is now a permanent element in higher education in a very central way, and I was hoping for this during my career at some point, I just really don’t like the way its happening. It’s going to make it more difficult to sell during difficult times, and really harm the ability of higher education to defend itself from all the upcoming challenges.

I’m wondering how the role of professor got so detached from everyday life to the point that students write me apologetic emails about late work due to the death of a family member. What can I do to hedge against this view? Does this view have any advantages? What is good about seeing your teacher (yes, we bristle at that and shouldn’t) as a cold defender of the arbitrary deadline? What good does that do for others, for us, for our world?

With the removal of the classroom and the material symbols of power the classroom most depend on, we can see that the majority of college instruction is about disciplining students and evaluating their ability to follow directions. Most have no idea what to do in the absence of parading around the front of the room for 90 minutes, carefully watching for mobile phone use.

I wonder if publication and conferences are going to change at all. I think graduate education will have to change significantly due to the incredibly low enrollments we’ll see in the fall. Publication might not change that much at all, but if it does, I hope that colleagues shift to open access journals run by communities of thinkers, rather than corporate prestige journals edited by people who love getting titles and being in charge of things.

And for speech communication, I hope we come out of this embracing our service role, and start trying to learn from the rhetoricians in composition a lot more. That is serious scholarship where it should be, on the ground, helping people create and produce better than they did. Being a rhetorical critic isn’t valuable at all unless you are also teaching and producing yourself. Criticism only goes so far as rhetorical production. I wonder if our demand for a certain type of scholarly publication is harming our ability to teach audience, the heart of rhetorical studies for the vast majority of the Western tradition.

I also hope that perhaps together we can finally begin serious interrogation of the paper as assessment, looking closely at why we’d assign a paper or an exam rather than something else. I am very interested in audio, obviously, and I wonder if there’s some nice comparative here – composition: crafting text; speech comm: crafting oration? I know they are both texts, in a way, but this seems like the perfect combination for the study of what it means to think in a liberated, critical way. One must learn how to produce texts that can mean for a lot of different kinds of people if you want to influence the motives of others.

We have no idea what waits for us at the end of August, but I know I’ll be prepared to assign a lot less and try to do a lot more with my students on the terms they can understand, and try not to feel that they should be other than they are. I should focus much more on helping them see what kind of people they can be, and that being a critical thinker means you must exercise your freedom in terms of creation, not just consumption, and it is ethically responsible to make well-crafted texts for others in order to try to get them to think about who and where they are in politics, society, life, and all of it.