This article is timed perfectly for me.

I’ve been thinking about how to re-create (recreate?) my public speaking class. Like a computer, public speaking gets slow, frustrating, and doesn’t help you produce anything good unless you reformat it and do a clean install of the operating system from time to time.

This essay is really full of great ideas to teach it. The thing I thought of after reading it was how to craft an assignment centered around kairos. “Trolling,” as discussed in the link, is a good idea, but what about campus issues? How was this taught in ancient times? I think a more homogeneous culture, like Athens, would have a lot more agreement on what constitutes opportunity wrapped in timing (timing wrapped in opportunity?) compared to our society.

If it can be engineered, how about an assignment that has them link up something happening in the news, or something controversial, to something they think is important. Crafting those links rhetorically takes a lot of skill and practice. Perhaps the public speaking class is the place to do that.