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">https://twitter.com/muslimrum...

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& #39;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.https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🙄" title="Face with rolling eyes" aria-label="Emoji: Face with rolling eyes">

And if I had a Ziad in class, god help me, I wouldn& #39;t know how to get through to him at all because no teacher can ever compete with the validation of social media influencer success.