Rhetoric and Civil Life Blog
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What makes a good professor?
I often think about this as I sit through my new classes, figuring out
which professors I like and which ones I don’t like. I know, and I think everyone knows, rhetoric
has a strong role in making a good professor.
There’s always that professor who is able to work a 300-person class as
if there were only 20, that professor who engages the students in different
activities each class. But, sometimes I
find it hard to compare professors of different departments. Maybe it’s always going to be more fun to
learn sociology than it is to learn math – it’s like comparing apples to
oranges. However, the other day I found
a setting in which I could compare two apples.
In my anthropology class, my professor had one of his colleagues come teach the class because she specialized in a part of anthropology that he was unfamiliar with. As I sat through this class, I found that she kept the class interested more than he ever could. Why? It wasn’t even the most interesting part of anthropology. In fact, it is probably the most boring part – genealogy. What kept the class interested was her use of rhetoric. While both my professor and the guest speaker used logos, or logic, the guest speaker seemed to have more ethos and pathos.
The guest speaker’s ethos, or character, was stronger. Her voice was naturally engaging, her pitch having variation throughout her speech. She also has a sense of power in her voice, despite her small size. My professor tends to just talk in a monotonous fashion, is soft spoken, and often goes off on tangents – the type of speech that puts a student right to sleep.
When it comes to pathos, or using the emotions of the audience, she had an overload of it. She had jokes all throughout her slide. It was as if she knew how boring the subject was. This kept the audience glued to her presentation, waiting for the next moment to laugh. She also used examples that would be relevant to us, and that she knew we would find interesting. In contrast, my professor always uses examples of trips he personally took, or other things that we can’t really relate to. This causes me to zone out and to miss the point he was trying to make.
By using ethos, pathos, and logos, the guest speaker was successfully able to teach the biological subset of anthropology to a class predominantly filled with liberal arts students. I can now definitely say that no matter the subject, if the professor has better rhetoric, it will not only be more interesting, but also easier to learn.
In my anthropology class, my professor had one of his colleagues come teach the class because she specialized in a part of anthropology that he was unfamiliar with. As I sat through this class, I found that she kept the class interested more than he ever could. Why? It wasn’t even the most interesting part of anthropology. In fact, it is probably the most boring part – genealogy. What kept the class interested was her use of rhetoric. While both my professor and the guest speaker used logos, or logic, the guest speaker seemed to have more ethos and pathos.
The guest speaker’s ethos, or character, was stronger. Her voice was naturally engaging, her pitch having variation throughout her speech. She also has a sense of power in her voice, despite her small size. My professor tends to just talk in a monotonous fashion, is soft spoken, and often goes off on tangents – the type of speech that puts a student right to sleep.
When it comes to pathos, or using the emotions of the audience, she had an overload of it. She had jokes all throughout her slide. It was as if she knew how boring the subject was. This kept the audience glued to her presentation, waiting for the next moment to laugh. She also used examples that would be relevant to us, and that she knew we would find interesting. In contrast, my professor always uses examples of trips he personally took, or other things that we can’t really relate to. This causes me to zone out and to miss the point he was trying to make.
By using ethos, pathos, and logos, the guest speaker was successfully able to teach the biological subset of anthropology to a class predominantly filled with liberal arts students. I can now definitely say that no matter the subject, if the professor has better rhetoric, it will not only be more interesting, but also easier to learn.