A number of years ago, a colleague of mine from KIPP came to visit one of my classes (senior English) and was amazed that we spent an entire class period on one paragraph (I think it was a Borges story from Labyrinths that was incredibly rich in allusions).
I couldn’t help but think of him today in senior English when we spent nearly the entire class on a few pages from a Socratic dialog (the Meno for anyone interested) because a number of students had questions/comments from the 1.19.16 class that also arise in that dialog:
- “I am still a little confused with the Socratic method”
- “Is it possible to learn to ask the right questions without truly knowing a subject well?”
- “How do I know how and what to question?”
- “Explain more about Socratic questioning.”
A significant portion of the class was spent on rhetorical analysis: how does Socrates lead Meno to espouse the positions that he [Socrates] wants him to? In one case, we drilled down to a sentence in which there was an apparently parallel structure in each clause of the compound sentence, but in one clause the verb was “think” and in the other one it was “know.” Close reading, indeed.
We also talked about false dichotomies, pointing out the unstated implications of your opponent’s point, as well as the dangers in the use of rhetorical questions.