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Love to Argue:
Why classroom argument
it's like martial arts practice.
The English verb "to argue"
has two main meanings.
When you argue WITH someone ABOUT something, you're having a fight.
But, when you argue something,
not "ABOUT something," but "something"
you are making
a case
or you're giving reasons
for an idea or opinion
that you have.
You're supporting
a position.
Now, while academic argument is not angry, it is aggressive.
You are, in fact,
presenting your opinion and actually pushing back or trying to, sort of
overcome someone else's opinion.
So it can be seen as aggressive and many students don't want
to be aggressive their friends
they don't want to point out flaws
in the presentation of their
classmates, or in the
speaking and ideas of their teacher. They feel that that would be unkind.
Now while I agree
that
cooperation is really important in certain situations, it's not appropriate
everywhere.
I mean, imagine you want to play tennis and you want to get good at it, and you and your friend practice
tennis
and you hit the ball to your friend and your friend hits it to you
as easy as you can - very nice and simple - to your strong side so you never have
to run around...
and the game is easy.
Then what will happen is the first time you face a real opponent
you'll get completely "creamed" as we say. You'll lose.
You haven't helped your friends
by playing "easy" with them. You have hurt them.
I hope that if you play tennis with your friends, you place as hard as you can, and if you
beat your friend or your friend beats you, I hope you can be friends afterward.
Well it's a similar thing
in school
with ideas. You're playing tennis,
sending ideas back-and-forth
like a match.
Now, even with your teacher,
you have to challenge them whenever it occurs to you to challenge them,
to question
and to play with your ideas.
It's not
something you have to worry about, that you're going to hurt your teacher
by challenging them.
I remember when I was studying fencing,
and I remember when my fencing teacher, the first time he would spar with me.
He stood up and I had my
fencing foil and he had his, and
he wasn't wearing a face mask. And he would have
kicked out any student
who tried fencing without a mask on because you can lose an eye.
And I was worried about it because I didn't want to poke his eye out.
When he realized
that I was worried, he laughed.
He said, "Do you think I'm so weak that I couldn't
stop you?"
He wasn't worried.
And after I fenced with him as hard as I could for a few minutes, I realized
there was no way
that I could ever get close to even poking his eye out.
He was so much better than I was.
But he didn't play me with the
most of his skill.
He played me just
a little bit higher than my skill level so that I could learn. He didn't
fight me with all of his skill. He was my teacher. He was helping me grow.
I also remember the first day he put
his face mask on. It meant that I had gotten good enough at fencing that
there was a small chance that I could
get to his face, near his face.
And he was
happy that I got that skill.
He wasn't sad that now I was good enough that possibly I could, you know,
by accident, hurt him.
It's the same thing in the classroom.
It's a kind of competition. It's like a fencing match
and your teacher wants you to do your best, to say your strongest argument, to
make your case.
They have skills and abilities that have been practiced for many years and when you
get good about that possibly you can score a point, they're gonna applaud you
as much as your friends will because that's what
college is all about:
learning
to make a good argument,
learning to pierce the arguments of others.
So, you gotta love to do it. I't like
a sport. It's like martial arts, where you play
with a friendly desire
to score a point.
Touche.