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A Look Inside 12th Grade Advanced Rhetoric: A Microcosm of Democratic Learning
This past week, Mr. Simoneaux’s 12th Grade Rhetoric class gathered for their X block class at 3:05 p.m. Students assembled desks into a circle to form a Socratic seminar before taking their seats to discuss their first topic: how to discuss. One student took notes on the classroom whiteboard as the group established norms for class discussions. Questions and comments posed by the group included...
- Do we think we benefit more from hearing thoughts from more different people or more different thoughts from the same people?
- How far will the conversation go without everyone’s perspective?
- If one of the skills we need to practice is rising to the occasion and figuring out how to succintly make our point, should there be any hard limits on how much one can talk?
- My goal in the discussion is to learn something new that I haven’t thought about.
- We can choose to make this an environment where it doesn’t feel like an affront to say “I notice you have been talking alot, let’s give someone else a chance to speak.”
- Let’s make this a comfortable space because it’s okay to ask questions.
- I ask for precision and modern vernacular.
After coming to a common understanding that hearing from everyone was a value the students wanted upheld, one student collected and wrote the established norms for the group before the class moved onto the text, Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
For the discussion, students discussed the difference between an ultra minimal and a minimal state. Within the deep dive of this reading, students also compared Nozick’s theories against a previously read text, John Rawls’s Theory of Justice. In addition to the students’ comparisons was the discussion of how both Rawls and Nozick have a commonality in rejecting utilitarianism. While both men believed that human beings are uniquely individual and their individuality should be protected, their ideas of how to protect that individuality were profoundly different. It was also noted by Mr. Simoneaux, that despite their disagreements ands their strong dislike for each other’s philosophies, the two men had a very close friendship. As students packed up at the end of class, many stayed a few extra minutes to ask questions of Mr. Simoneaux or to connect with fellow classmates furthering the discussion beyond the time for dismissal.
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