one for the books

Days like yesterday are why I love teaching.

Context: My English 283 course, Rhetorical Theory and Applications, is focused on the rhetoric of fear. We're reading Barry Glassner's The Culture of Fear, a chapter per week. On Fridays, three students are in charge of leading discussion on a chapter from Glassner. This week's chapter was "Black Men: How to perpetuate prejudice without even trying." The central argument of the book is that the media focuses on minutia or on preposterous fears like killer bees in order to distract viewers' attention from larger cultural issues like racism or gun control.

On Wednesday of this week, I asked students to take a few minutes and write down their thoughts about the course so far: what's working, what's not, etc. Enough students wrote about Friday discussions to make me want to change a few things. They said that people often got too caught up in the content of the chapter--relating it to their own lives, giving examples that relate tangentially at best--with the result that we often get too far away from Glassner's rhetoric and his claims about the media's rhetoric.

This week's discussion: I gave them a 2-minute spiel about how I wanted them to consciously work on discussing both content and rhetorical strategies rather than slipping into discussion for discussion's sake. Then we discussed "Black Men: How to perpetuate prejudice without even trying."

With fifteen minutes left, I asked students to sit back from the discussion and write about what we as a class just did rhetorically. Not what did we say, but what did we do. When they were finished writing, I asked for volunteers to make observations.

"We were searching for stasis among the arguments."
"We were analyzing the logic of Glassner's arguments."
"We kept referring to black people as 'they' and 'them.'"
"We did exactly what the media does: we focused on minor things and never got around to talking about fear of the black man. We distracted ourselves. I even wrote it on the board: 'fear of black men,' but no one took it up."

Christ, yes, that's what we did.