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School has started again. For some of us academics, this means shifting from reading professional literature to papers written by absolute beginners. Over the years this can wear on you, especially since you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll encounter the same moves over and over and over. The sheer repetitiveness of it will cause you to ask whether you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re having any effect at all on their work. If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re smart, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll vent about it to your trusted colleagues in the friendly confines of the faculty lounge. They will commiserate with you, and hopefully remind you of your obligations as a teacher. After a scotch or two and some quality time in a chesterfield chair, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll return to class refreshed, or maybe a bit buzzed, but nonetheless ready to do whatever it is you do.<\/p>\n
Should you lack good mentors or quality whisky, you may be tempted to go online with a post about how stupid the kids are. Before you do this, you need to remind yourself of three critical things.<\/p>\n
First, this is the life you have chosen. You are in the instruction business and this necessarily requires a constantly replenished supply of people who need and (hopefully) who desire instruction from you. They stay the same age over the years as you get older. You are wiser than them each year; they are the same. This might account for the feeling that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re bad at the thing you teach in exactly the same way.<\/p>\n
Second, the people you teach, especially if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re a philosopher, are brand-spanking new at the game of argument. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got views all right, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got views about everything. Some of them even have reasons for those views. But they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve very likely never subjected those views to the kind of scrutiny they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll face in a philosophy class.<\/p>\n
Third, while you may tell them that you consider them an equal partner in discussion, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not. You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re the teacher for a reason. Your obligation is to improve their argument performances–not to treat them as the failures they might be. This obligation includes improving arguments for views you may disagree with. One essential feature to improving their view is recasting their deficient argument as a less-deficient one, fortifying it, as it were (trying out \u00e2\u20ac\u0153fortify\u00e2\u20ac\u009d for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153iron man\u00e2\u20ac\u009d by the way).\u00c2\u00a0Going around their backs and griping publicly about their failures undermines the whole idea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
School has started again. For some of us academics, this means shifting from reading professional literature to papers written by absolute beginners. Over the years this can wear on you, especially since you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll encounter the same moves over and over and over. The sheer repetitiveness of it will cause you to ask whether you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re having … Continue reading This is the life we have chosen<\/span>