Today’s Plan:
- How goes it?
- 594 syllabus updates
- Syllabus Review
- Christina on Kairos
- Break
- Paper Day
- Homework
How Goes It?
In addition to your questions and responses, I want to know:
- How did the class comments go? Feedback? Reactions?
- How are we doing with the peer observations?
Syllabus Review
What’s on tap this week.
Wednesday, September 27
Last class we moved Ethos, Pathos, Logos to Monday (thanks Danielle) and agreed that we would do Kairos on Wednesday. That’s the lab day for most people, so we don’t necessarily need the kairos presentation to take up the entire time. Christina’s got a presentation ready for us.
I also want to share a link to my site, >which has notes on kairos and stasis. I might present stasis this week, or I might wait until a future date when I have some open time.
Friday, September 29th
According to our syllabus, the only order of business on Friday is to workshop. After talking about kairos (and maybe stasis), I’ll be paying particular attention to introductions in this workshop. I’ll ask: what does this introduction assume I know or feel about the subject at hand? What makes you think the author thinks you think that?
Monday, October 2nd
Whether you want to dedicate more time to kairos, introduce stasis (a good way to do this is to collect 4 articles on a problem with different perspectives, compare what levels of stasis the authors are arguing), review thesis statements, review transitions into sources–totally up to you. This is the part of the semester where I try and feel out what my class needs to work on. I know Danielle spent some time following up on logos by talking about logical fallacies–there’s all kinds of resources on the net for these. Here is a particularly slick looking site.
Bud Light commercial–how far can we “bend” kairos to our will?
If chronos is time, then kairos is “timely,” although the Greeks had a deeper sense of what that means. That is, they understood that we live within “moods,” and that our mood impacted how we received both arguments and the world.
I talk about kairos in terms of if it is established–to establish kairos is to put the speaker/writer and audience “in a moment” together.
One way to approach kairos is to subvert audience expectations (Jobs is successful at this, Kayne less so).
Look at your own posts, what have you posted–what was its “timeliness.”
On the syllabus is a day dedicated to paraphrasing. This came out of my index cards from the last time I taught the course. I identify four key parts to a quality paraphrase:
- Identifying the claim
- Identifying what the author provides as evidence
- Identifying if the author anticipates counter-arguments
- Identifying what the author hopes the reader will do with this information (or, why this claim matters)
I’ll probably use the following articles (note, I go to fivethirtyeight because I know every article will offer some measure of empirical evidence):
- “Will Alabama Republicans Defy Trump?”
- “The NFL Protests May Be Unpopular Now, But That Doesn’t Mean They’ll End That Way“
Homework
Readings for next session:
- Berlin, “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Classroom”
- Kopelson, “Rhetoric on the Edge of Cunning”
- Rickert, “Hands Up, You’re Free! Pedagogy, Affect, Transformation”
