Running A Very Productive Rhetoric Class
by Joshua Gibbs
We use images like this to represent “rhetoric class,” even though there’s very little of this—public speaking, I mean—going on in rhetoric classes.
Most rhetoric classes are only half-credit, which means they only meet twice a week, and that’s where the problems begin. The only way to prove something is important is to lavish time and money on it, but rhetoric classes meet half as often as other classes, so they’re obviously not as important—and students understand this. Thus, students don’t take half-credit classes as seriously as their other classes. Many teachers are tempted to force respect for half-credit rhetoric courses by assigning big, semester-long writing projects, but as I argued several weeks ago, big writing projects are like big government projects in that they typically involve an egregious waste of time and resources.
So, how do you get the most out of your time with a half-credit rhetoric course?
First things first: you need a rhetoric catechism. You’ve heard my thoughts on catechisms before, but hear me out: a rhetoric catechism offers unique benefits to a rhetoric class (that other catechisms do not offer to their corresponding classes). Allow me to suggest that a rhetoric class really ought to be a public speaking class, not a writing class, and thus the students will all need words to speak that they didn’t write. The content of the rhetoric catechism will supply the texts that students practice delivering over the course of the class.
My own rhetoric catechism was largely constituted of two lengthy quotations from Aristotle’s Rhetoric.
What are the temptations of youth?
Young men have strong passions, and tend to gratify them indiscriminately. Of the bodily desires, it is the sexual by which they are most swayed and in which they show absence of self-control. They are changeable and fickle in their desires, which are violent while they last, but quickly over: their impulses are keen but not deep-rooted, and are like sick people's attacks of hunger and thirst. They are hot-tempered, and quick-tempered, and apt to give way to their anger; bad temper often gets the better of them, for owing to their love of honour they cannot bear being slighted, and are indignant if they imagine themselves unfairly treated. While they love honour, they love victory still more; for youth is eager for superiority over others, and victory is one form of this. They love both more than they love money, which indeed they love very little, not having yet learnt what it means to be without it. They look at the good side rather than the bad, not having yet witnessed many instances of wickedness. They trust others readily, because they have not yet often been cheated. They are sanguine; nature warms their blood as though with excess of wine; and besides that, they have as yet met with few disappointments. Their lives are mainly spent not in memory but in expectation; for expectation refers to the future, memory to the past, and youth has a long future before it and a short past behind it: on the first day of one's life one has nothing at all to remember, and can only look forward. They are easily cheated, owing to the sanguine disposition just mentioned. Their hot tempers and hopeful dispositions make them more courageous than older men are; the hot temper prevents fear, and the hopeful disposition creates confidence; we cannot feel fear so long as we are feeling angry, and any expectation of good makes us confident. They are shy, accepting the rules of society in which they have been trained, and not yet believing in any other standard of honour. They have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learnt its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things-and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning; and whereas reasoning leads us to choose what is useful, moral goodness leads us to choose what is noble. They are fonder of their friends, intimates, and companions than older men are, because they like spending their days in the company of others, and have not yet come to value either their friends or anything else by their usefulness to themselves. All their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They overdo everything, they love too much and hate too much, and the same thing with everything else. They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it; this, in fact, is why they overdo everything. If they do wrong to others, it is because they mean to insult them, not to do them actual harm. They are ready to pity others, because they think every one an honest man, or anyhow better than he is: they judge their neighbour by their own harmless natures, and so cannot think he deserves to be treated in that way. They are fond of fun and therefore witty, wit being well-bred insolence.
What are the temptations of old age?
The character of Elderly Men-men who are past their prime-may be said to be formed for the most part of elements that are the contrary of all these. They have lived many years; they have often been taken in, and often made mistakes; and life on the whole is a bad business. The result is that they are sure about nothing and under-do everything. They 'think', but they never 'know'; and because of their hesitation they always add a 'possibly'or a 'perhaps', putting everything this way and nothing positively. They are cynical; that is, they tend to put the worse construction on everything. Further, their experience makes them distrustful and therefore suspicious of evil. Consequently they neither love warmly nor hate bitterly, but following the hint of Bias they love as though they will some day hate and hate as though they will some day love. They are small-minded, because they have been humbled by life: their desires are set upon nothing more exalted or unusual than what will help them to keep alive. They are not generous, because money is one of the things they must have, and at the same time their experience has taught them how hard it is to get and how easy to lose. They are cowardly, and are always anticipating danger; unlike that of the young, who are warm-blooded, their temperament is chilly; old age has paved the way for cowardice; fear is, in fact, a form of chill. They love life; and all the more when their last day has come, because the object of all desire is something we have not got, and also because we desire most strongly that which we need most urgently. They are too fond of themselves; this is one form that small-mindedness takes. Because of this, they guide their lives too much by considerations of what is useful and too little by what is noble-for the useful is what is good for oneself, and the noble what is good absolutely. They are not shy, but shameless rather; caring less for what is noble than for what is useful, they feel contempt for what people may think of them. They lack confidence in the future; partly through experience-for most things go wrong, or anyhow turn out worse than one expects; and partly because of their cowardice. They live by memory rather than by hope; for what is left to them of life is but little as compared with the long past; and hope is of the future, memory of the past. This, again, is the cause of their loquacity; they are continually talking of the past, because they enjoy remembering it. Their fits of anger are sudden but feeble. Their sensual passions have either altogether gone or have lost their vigour: consequently they do not feel their passions much, and their actions are inspired less by what they do feel than by the love of gain. Hence men at this time of life are often supposed to have a self-controlled character; the fact is that their passions have slackened, and they are slaves to the love of gain. They guide their lives by reasoning more than by moral feeling; reasoning being directed to utility and moral feeling to moral goodness. If they wrong others, they mean to injure them, not to insult them. Old men may feel pity, as well as young men, but not for the same reason. Young men feel it out of kindness; old men out of weakness, imagining that anything that befalls any one else might easily happen to them, which, as we saw, is a thought that excites pity. Hence they are querulous, and not disposed to jesting or laughter-the love of laughter being the very opposite of querulousness.
As a side note, I regard these two passages as the most acute and useful psychological insights ever recorded—and I say that as someone who spent five years recording a podcast that revolved around aphorisms and proverbs. Aristotle’s brief reflections on youth and old age are peerlessly valuable when reflecting on how to persuade an audience. But they are also perfect texts for practicing oratory.
When I last taught a rhetoric class, I worked these two passages for a good deal of the school year. We recited them every day as part of the catechism, but I also had the students perform them, individually, in front of the class. We watched a video of John F. Kennedy give his famous “We choose to go to the moon” speech at Rice University (a wonderful speech that I completely disagree with in nearly every way), and I lectured students on Kennedy’s delivery. We noted how long he pauses between sentences. We observed changes in his pace. We paid attention to his hands, to his face, to his neck. We averaged out the number of words he spoke per minute—an absolutely glacial 122 words per minute. And then three or four weeks into the school year, students began delivering passages of Aristotle in the style of Kennedy.
I gave them a number of objective standards to meet. Their delivery had to be evenly paced and fall within a certain time range, which meant going slow—far slower than any of them thought reasonable. They learned to pause for effect. They learned to modulate their volume. Their volume had to rise and fall during the performance, the pace had to vary, their hands had to placed properly on the lectern, but leave the lectern to punctuate significant lines.
Before they gave their performances in class, though, they had to perform the speech several times at home for their parents, and their parents had to fill out grading sheets. We watched recordings of other well-known, effective rhetors and imitated their style, always using the catechism. Students made video recordings of themselves performing at home, then submitted written critiques of what they saw. The only original writing the students did was an imitation of Gabriel Conroy’s toast from Joyce’s “The Dead,” which each student then delivered at Christmas dinner in their respective homes. In the event you need to earn some points with parents, having their children deliver elaborately conceived toasts to elderly grandparents at Christmas dinner is about as good as it gets.
Of all the half-credit courses I’ve taught, I don’t think I ever got a better return on my time—and it came of not spending 40 hours of class time having students write speeches about the proper use of AI, the state of college athletics, or some other such dead horse.
