Do you know what a rhetorical question is?
This past semester was a strange experience: I have spent two years learning pedagogical theory, three years teaching in experimental high-schools, and now I found myself once again on the other side of the classroom. Almost daily I observe both an incredible anxiety over teaching from other graduate students and a general disregard from faculty for the fact that teaching is an art. This semester, sitting in a “discussion” with 50 undergraduates, it becomes increasingly obvious that most professors have no idea how to teach.
What follows is a short treatise on the types of questions teachers ask and what can be accomplished by asking them. The people I wish would read this––namely my current professors––never will. However, this may be of value to peers as they prepare for teaching fellowships and job interviews. (Local hiring committees *claim* they care a great deal about teaching ability.) Teachers frequently ask questions of their students. Generally students do not like being asked these questions and it makes them uncomfortable. The source of this discomfort is that neither the student nor the teacher knows what purpose the question serves. There is no pedagogical theory that informs these questions––it’s simply part of our Western culture of teaching: You got asked questions when you were a student, and now you have to do it too in order to “feel like a teacher.”
In fact, there is a fairly short list of what can be accomplished by asking questions to students. I have made taxonomy of four types of questions.
Questions you don’t know the answer to:
1. Asking students for information
2. The Socratic Method.
Questions you do know the answer to:
3. Rhetorical questions to assess knowledge.
4. Rhetorical questions to force engagement.
Of these four goals, the fourth motivates the overwhelming majority of teacher’s questions. This is also the sort of question that students most hate. In fact, the goals behind 3 and 4 can be better accomplished through a variety of creative solutions instead of with rhetorical questions.
1. Asking students for information
These are simple inquiries that you might ask a peer: What is your favorite Dostoyevsky novel? Did they teach you about Vietnam in high school? Students LOVE to be asked this sort of question––partly because there is no pressure to give a “correct” answer, but also because these questions break the power dynamic of the classroom. Instead of what Paul Friere called “the banking model,” now there is a two-way exchange of knowledge and information. Now here’s what few people realize: Asking these sorts of questions is ALSO a good way to encourage engagement from the students (Item 4 in the taxonomy).
In my experience, the more students get to talk about themselves, the more they will contribute to discussion, and the more they will like the teacher. The art of teaching is funneling that energy into the course material. Finally, these sorts of questions are quite relevant to many disciplines. I study religion, so it always useful and interesting to ask questions of students with different religious and ethnic backgrounds. Students who know a foreign language are also a source of useful information. This is not “an ice-breaker,” but can actually lead a richer classroom experience.
2. The Socratic Method
One of the biggest problems in education is that teachers themselves do not appreciate the difference between the Socratic method and rhetorical questions. Although it is a gross overgeneralization, I often muse that Western education is founded on Socrates and Asian education is founded on Confucius. The Greek philosophers believed that an individual should take credit for his ideas. Furthermore, the Socratic method is founded on the idea that student and teacher can produce new knowledge by working together in a dialectic. Confucius, although he had many brilliant insights, never took credit for any of them. He attributed all the knowledge in the universe to the ancestors. A Confucian scholar, was someone who dutifully collected and memorized all of the Classics. It was impossible to make a new discovery, but you could sometimes “rediscover” something through exegesis.
Today, Chinese and Korean students consistently memorize the entire GRE. (I know people at ETS who have investigated this.) To Americans, this seems impossible. But this is only because we are descendents of Socrates and not Confucius. I am by no means a Socrates expert, but I don’t think he would have approved of the GRE. Modern Western education is simultaneously jealous of China and perpetuating a badly perverted version of the Socratic method: Bascially, we want our children to test as well as the Chinese, and we try to accomplish this with a grueling barrage of rhetorical questions. This is insane.
If you are going to use the Socratic method––or you think that you might be using the Socratic method already, there are three things you have to consider.
A. Are you using the banking model?
B. How big is the class?
C. Do the students understand what you’re trying to do?
Some professors just want to lecture and could care less what the student knows or thinks. There is nothing wrong with this. One of my favorite classes is a history lecture: he talks, I listen, and he doesn’t stop the lecture to ask questions. Teachers should ask themselves if they have anything to learn from their students––if the answer is “no,” then you are in fundamental disagreement with Socrates and have no business using his method! Emulate Socrates or emulate Confucius, but don’t aim for mediocrity.
You can only do the Socratic method properly if you have 15 students of fewer. More than 20 and it becomes impossible. There are studies proving this. I could not believe the first week of the semester when a professor told us that our class of 50 would be having “discussions” and that we would be graded on participation. Madness.
If you have 50 people and want to have a discussion, you have to break the class up into a lecture and discussion sections. That goes without saying. In lieu of a proper discussion, there are other methods to gain student input in a large class. One such technique is called “the chalk talk.” (Secondary teachers have excellent teaching methods, but they all have dumb names.) If you want fifty people to answer a question like “How is Hegel relevant to anthropology?” (Yes, I witnessed this) have lots of chalk ready at the start of class and have take 10 minutes so that everyone can write a short answer on the board. This way everyone can provide input and the professor will have plenty of fodder to chew over with the class.
The average American student has spent over a decade in an environment where the hallmark of teaching is a series of rhetorical questions. Most teachers mix both Socratic questions with rhetorical questions. The students are often confused by this and even teachers sometimes don’t know why they are asking the question. I realized how bad this was when I was teaching high school history. We were studying Socrates and I asked my students, “What is evil?” Someone said, “Like killing people and stuff.” So I asked if it was evil to kill someone in war or in self-defense. This led a girl to demand, “Why don’t you just tell us what evil is?!” I explained that the point of the exercise is that I don’t know what evil is either and we are trying to figure it out together. But these students had sat through so many hours of teachers asking rhetorical questions for no reason, that they assumed I just toying with them.
So if you are going to initiate the Socratic method, you should begin by telling students that you don’t have all the answers and that you need their insights and opinions. It also helps to remind them that Socrates’ students weren’t getting a grade and had slaves bringing them copious amounts of wine. (My high school students agreed school would be more fun if we had wine.) Furthermore, you can say things like, “This isn’t a rhetorical question, someone tell me what think about . . .”
3: Rhetorical Questions to Assess Knowledge
This is one of the most common uses of questions, and it is also a fairly useless exercise. Teachers should be constantly assessing their students knowledge, but only so that they can modify their lesson accordingly. Rhetorical questions are a poor way to assess student knowledge and there is no point in making this assessment if you are unable or unwilling to act on the knowledge you acquire.
In this anthropology class I keep harking on, I watched the professor ask a series of rhetorical questions, trying to get the students to say a particular buzzword. When several answers failed to give him the buzzword he wanted, he actually started playing hangman on the blackboard. “It starts with an ‘h’ . . . . and it is has ‘t” in it. Sheer insanity. If you use three minutes of class time on something, it ought to serve some sort of purpose. What is the purpose of getting students to say a certain buzzword? (See, now this has me asking rhetorical questions.) Asking rhetorical questions can tell you if the smartest student in the class understands something. But that really is not a very useful piece of information for a teacher to have. Frequently, the smartest students in the class understand most things. Meanwhile, you have no idea what all the silent students know or don’t know.
Once you have this assessment, you still have to do something with it. When I first started teaching US History, I was supposed to start out teaching them Reconstruction. Then I found out my class didn’t know what the Civil War was. I asked a rhetorical question: “Why was the Civil War fought?” Someone answered, “Land?” So I threw out my lesson plan for the day and told them about the Civil War. Then I reworked all my lesson plans for the entire week so that we could catch up. Now some professors have the attitude that this is not their problem and that students who cannot keep up deserve to flunk. To each their own, but professors with this attitude have no business asking rhetorical questions. If you don’t feel you ought to reassess your lesson plans, than shouldn’t waste time grilling your class.
4. Rhetorical Questions to Force Engagement
I think that this is the actual reason why teachers ask questions and why our culture has such a strong association between teaching and asking. It’s emotional: the teacher desperately wants to make some kind of connection with the students. They want to know that they are being listened to, that they are communicating to fellow beings and not being observed like Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes. Asking questions is one way to do this. It is hard to understand this need for connection if you have never taught. The first class I ever taught I called “The Village of Damned.” It was an honors class and the kids all just sat up perfectly straight and stared at me. I would ask questions and they would continue to stare in silence, not being rude but also not being quite human.
But a grueling barrage of rhetorical questions is one of the worst ways to make this connection because it places pressure on the students. In a very real way, you are transferring your own performance anxiety onto the class.
Lorand Matori at Harvard had a much better way of making this connection: he simply asked the class, “Are you with me?” Matori is a professor of Afro-Atlantic religions and he may have been drawing on black preaching cultures, in which the congregation does not sit in silence but actively encourages the preacher. Students loved being asked “Are you with me?” There was no pressure and students who said, “We’re with you!” seemed to form an emotional bond with Matori. Furthermore, this gave the students the opportunity to say, “No, I’m confused.” You don’t get that opportunity from a rhetorical question.
Rhetorical questions are also used to enforce compliance with the syllabus and to shame students into doing the reading. Students should do the reading and, since most professors assign too much of it, students are always calculating what reading they can get away with skipping. I know I do. But once again, rhetorical questions are not the best way to go about this. Often students cannot answer these sorts of questions even if they have done the reading, because the questions are highly subjective or overly specific. I’ve seen questions like, “What is argument of this book?”
Kimberly Patton, who has published articles on pedagogy, had a better method of inferring compliance. At the start of class, she would simply ask each student to give an insight into the assigned reading. She would usually move in circle starting to her right. This created a sense of pressure in that you had to say something and didn’t want to appear foolish, but unlike the rhetorical question you didn’t have to be a mind-reader: any insight would do.
Alright that’s it. If you’ve read this far, you now know more about teaching then the average university professor or at the very least have some pretty banter to waggle at your next job interview. Remember: What is teaching? Hmmm. OK, but that’s not really what I’m looking for. Well it starts with an ‘A’ . . . No, not awesome, but thank you . . . It rhymes with “fart” . . . .
