It’s always usually at the 1/3 of the semester mark that I start to think about the class I’d rather be teaching, rather than the one that I am actually teaching. I keep a notebook of all these ideas for future ways to organize and orient the class, but these ideas never look very good when doing course planning.

I took this great picture today that I sent to my sister as it represents the combination of something she loves with something she despises.

For her this represents an uholy combination of much loved Harry Potter with the all-consuming horror of Legos which never fail to appear in her visual or physical presence anytime she is at home.

Assigning students to find images out there in their daily lives that represent something frustrating, impossible to accept, or other sorts of “aporia-istic” combinations might be a fun assignment. It also encourages them to look around in their daily lives in a new and different way. And this might be the purpose/function of education.

This isn’t the only thing you could do with this assignment, of course. You could assign a number of different kinds of photos and then the speech becomes “how do you account for this photo being representative of/an example of/or an instance of that concept or idea?”

This could be a number of words but it could also be quotes, aphorisms, and other things that, when placed by a photo, require some articulation. It is a good exercise in reason-giving, and a great exercise in what counts as evidence. These concepts are considered to be obvious to most students, i.e. “we’ll you know, it’s just an example of it.” or “it’s a fact.” In order to avoid these space-fillers and work on the development of reason-giving discourse assignments that are a bit off from the everyday kinds of topics might be required.

Again, public speaking is composition, which should be obvious by now. But what might be more challenging to accept is that evidence and reasons are composition. We compose evidence; we compose reasons and reason giving. This is particularly hard to accept in our current political climate.