This is an essay about incapacity in two variants sparked by having what I currently feel is the worst semester of teaching I’ve ever had. I believe the issues origins are interesting to discuss but are not relevant, as the quest for origins and starting points isn’t something that should interest a rhetorician. Instead the rhetorician should be interested in adaptation to conditions in order to create connections and agreement in and around ideas.
Student Incapacity
The students who failed public speaking or who came very close to public speaking share similar practices of the classroom. My assumption is that the students behave in these ways because they were successful practices for them in past schooling.
Most of them did not play on laptops or phones, but kept their desks clear.
They stared at me the whole class. They said nothing and contributed nothing. Perhaps one of them might have made a comment once or twice but most of them were silent all term.
When the term was nearing the end they announced in various ways they were “ready to do the work now” which I told them was too late.
The reactions were “mixed” in a way – but all indicated a common practice of begging to do and doing alternative assignments at the very last moment in the course. Many of them told me multiple times they “are a good student.” Some of them failed and weren’t sure why – they had only done about half of the work for the course.
I’m not discussing just a couple of people but a large amount of my students. I would say about 10 of them were like this in a class of 19.
This incapacity is troubling as it shows young people perceive schooling as an arbitrary ritual, completely divorced from their intellectual capabilities. School isn’t about improving ones abilities or questioning the way to approach the world or engage with it. School for these people is a task or a job to be performed for a boss. It’s purely customer/workplace in rhetoric and attitude.
The students have learned that school is a very simple game of making deals to complete work and receive a grade for that work, however begrudgingly it was accepted by the instructor. This focus of the class means that anything that doesn’t seem useful toward that endgame can be safely ignored. This includes any and all class discussion or engagement with ohters during the class time.
This fall was particularly bad in this regard as the students in my in-person course did not feel they needed to do anything except be present and perform non-distraction. This is why their desks were clean and they sat staring forward – they are good students after all. This performance means no phones, no laptops, and no disruption. Obedience and quiet is the subject of the course.
The challenge is how to get such students to start to engage the critical functions that university graduates should be able to exercise. This would include asking questions of what they are being told about reality, asking about supporting evidence and reasons, and pushing back with counter-claims about what they are being told. Although I primarily teach public speaking, this or any course could include such practices such as:
Why would I need evidence for that? Everyone knows it!
Why does a speech have to be that long?
How do you know that this will make the audience listen?
Why do we have to study this, isn’t it outdated?
Why are all speeches so boring?
The list can go on, but these to me seem like the commonplaces of a public speaking class and I would expect them to come up with regularity. These of course are more specialized topoi, what are some of the common topoi for university courses?
Why do we have to read this?
Who cares if I cite anything?
What’s the point of writing an essay?
And so on. Although most professors I know would find these questions annoying and roll their eyes, many more would find these questions “disrespectful” – that magic word that faculty use today as a catch-all term. I’m not sure what it exactly means, but the range of the meaning is something like: I wish I had students that didn’t require so much effort on my part.
Unfortunately, this dream or desire to have ready-made students is just encouraging producing the containers of future fascism. Being able to just exist quietly and go along with the authority without any questioning of the reason behind it is teaching that following authority has its own rewards. And if a student does speak up or push on some of these critical topoi, the fear of the class is that somehow this will come back to hurt them all.
I’m already there, but let’s look at the other side of this, the dialectical engagement of the problem of things.
Faculty Incapacity
Faculty incapacity primarily takes place in the leaning on “easy” or “more real” standards for enforcing student learning. The discourse of the teacher is a capitalist discourse, as teachers will always threaten students with “real world” analogues to their behavior or work ethic: “Your boss won’t tolerate this,” “How will you be able to hold down a job if you are late so often?”
Never do you hear a teacher say “How will you be able to determine which candidate to vote for?” “How will you be able to express your opinion on community issues if you write this way?” “How will you gain trust and get to know your neighbors if you can’t keep a schedule?” These things are vital to democracy, while the previous questions are vital to a capitalist-fascist order. Although it is important to be able to make ends meet, that is not necessarily best dealt with in a forced-labor system like American capital or time-work discipline, an artifact from industrialization.
Faculty are also incapacitated by not being informed of the needs of the students that are showing up in the classroom. I noticed many of my students are marked provisional admission or some sort of “step up” program of admission rather than having met the admission requirements of the university. This might not seem like a big deal to administrators, most of which don’t think about teaching as a demanding process, but more of a ritual of acquiring credits to graduate. For the classroom professor though this is a huge issue. Being made incapable by not being told or being offered assistance for the students who might not be what we assume they will be is setting up the system to fail, not just the students.
What is the university system? If it’s functioning well it creates confident doubt – that is, people who are university educated are confident that they can explore and inquire after doubt in things they are being told to think, feel, or do. This is a system of engagement with the world that isn’t very sexy, but is very essential to the practice of democracy. Alternatively, those who are scared of not knowing or aren’t sure what to do when faced with conflicting information or a story that sounds good go hardcore into denial or acceptance – a practice helpful for the fascist.
Faculty also need to get over themselves, plain and simple. What does this mean? It means that faculty must give up the fantasy that they are somehow holding a social status that requires deferment and an obsequious attitude from students. Many professors I know are very angry about student quality because they email them at the wrong time in the wrong grammar, they show up to the office unannounced to ask for a better grade, or they turn in an assignment that did not follow the complicated instructions in the syllabus. It is clear that one could be angry about all this, but the critical thinker might say instead: The practices of what I feel are normal student behavior have a near 100% failure rate. What can I do to adapt to the students I have? It’s kind of sad to me to see many professors of rhetoric not asking this question, one that is at the heart of the study of the art of rhetoric.
We must keep in mind that the students we get are not “university students” they are simply our students. Applying or assuming an attitude about them always is risky. My assumptions this past fall failed hard – they are incapable. But what are they incapable of? They are incapable of meeting the fantasy role for “University Student” I imagined when creating the course, readings, and syllabus. I must now try to figure out what they are capable of. Their behavior isn’t the behavior of idiots; on the contrary, these behaviors are practiced and refined precisely because they have been working for students in past school experiences they have had. There’s nothing I can do about that history except to learn from it, and try to create a narrative for my courses that draws on it but doesn’t keep it static. Things must change. This is the only way forward.
Is nothing being taught? It’s not so simple. I do wish nothing was being taught for what I see being taught and being prepared are easy receptors for fascism. A good student is attentive, still, and distraction-free. They obey and are willing to do whatever is necessary to pass. After all, they are good students through and through. And they will do whatever the authority says will get them a “good grade.”