Teacher Spotlight | Debbe Carson

Words from Debbe:

School starts tomorrow.

I find myself smiling as I load up my notebook and check to make sure all my markers work before heading out to begin my 23rd year of teaching Rhetoric.  And this – year 2 – is definitely not my favorite year to teach, especially to a class of very young students.

In a homeschool co-op with more than two dozen  families, Rhetoric is nobody’s first choice for teaching assignments; so much so that they pay me to teach it. My own six children grew up going through my rhetoric class, and when the youngest one graduated I retired.  Fast forward five years, and I have come back to teach it for the same homeschool co-op we attended.  I found in my retirement that I hadn’t been teaching rhetoric for the paycheck after all.  I taught rhetoric because I love it.  But why? What’s so great about rhetoric?

The most important reason that comes to mind concerns the questions we are able to ask.  In the Grammar level, the questions are What happened, when, and to whom?  In the Logic Level, the questions primarily concern why and how events occur. The most important reason that comes to mind concerns the questions we are able to ask.  In the Grammar level, the questions are What happened, when, and to whom?  In the Logic Level, the questions primarily concern why and how events occur.  All the questions we deal with in Grammar and Logic are open to selective inclusion: if we decide to focus our study solely on Western Civilization, leaving out what was occurring in other areas, we are free to craft our scope and sequence accordingly. If we pose answers to the question of why in a way that will not overload students with inappropriate knowledge, that is our prerogative. This is what detractors mean when they say that our students are “sheltered.”

But the Grand Rhetoric Level Question is “So What??”  In rhetoric we give much thought and deliberation into what is really important, and this process has application far beyond the school room. Rhetoric is where the knowledge students have been building up over their entire school career intersects – sometimes cataclysmically – with the real world. In rhetoric, students can safely practice evaluating the current cultural landscape with a full-orbed grasp of history, and an ability to compare and contrast perspectives that differ from their own.  When students explore “What did this author believe, and why did he or she believe that?” the discussion can then progress to “Is that a valid belief given the context; is that important to more modern philosophies,” and this helps them begin to evaluate what they, themselves, believe. They use their logical and knowledgeable tools to look into why they hold a certain belief, whether it is valid given the evidence at hand, and whether it is an important subject to grapple with.

Rhetoric students who come to terms with their own beliefs about any topic, understand why they believe as they do, and have already evaluated the importance of that belief is better able to engage in reasoned dialog (if they can find it) and to not be deflected by unimportant side topics.

As our children prepare to try their wings in the world of competing ideas, the questions we ask in Rhetoric can be even more important than the answers.