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A thing I find hard when teaching in the US is to break this argumentative façade students are taught to cultivate as a public speaking skill. Getting all their talking points from TV news debates, adopting a TED-talk rhetorical style is how many participate in class discussions. https://twitter.com/muslimrumsprnga/status/1250283151290535939
This was common among some of the better students I had in a private college in India too, because of Americanized media literacy--they constantly confused skilful articulation with complex arguments. And you see it entirely fall apart when they have to write essays...
...where rhetorical sophistry doesn't help them grapple with higher-level concepts, accommodate contradictions or even just dialogue with other writers & thinkers. Some who have had good composition classes do better but others really struggle with my feedback for improvement.
This kid Ziad for all his media opportunism is a great illustration of what can get valorized in elite colleges in US & sadly India too. But as an international instructor, those white kids really dont like being told by me that they need to be smarter than they think they are.
And if I had a Ziad in class, god help me, I wouldn't know how to get through to him at all because no teacher can ever compete with the validation of social media influencer success.
