Rhetoric, to me, is the way culturally that humanity discusses their ideas, thoughts and answers to problems throughout history. When you look at the way humans discuss things in the most academic ways possible we see it go through large sweeping changes whenever we see new cultures come into the forefront of what we study as rhetoric.
In the beginning there are the Greeks, particularly Aristotle, where we see a focus on invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery. For the Greeks, it was not only important to come up with an idea but being able to remember and recite it to anyone who will listen. Oration was important but not nearly as important as the rhetoricians in the eighteenth century. In this period, we see just about every form of the Greek model disappear except delivery. For those oratorios whether or not you were speaking about something sound did not matter, the important thing was that you were a good speaker and they way you spoken sounded incredible. We do not see much change in the model until the early twentieth century with the creation of the National Council of Teachers of English in 1911. The focus on ways to
encourage and establish composition work helps to pave the way to the changes
seen in rhetoric study later in the century. With the 1960s and the increase of more people in society being able to and going to college a drastic shift in the way rhetoric is taught and studied. We see a greater shift on social rhetoric with discussions on both gender and race. This increases the discussion of what counts as rhetoric and how much should we mold things to what we already consider rhetoric or if rhetoric should change to match what is now considered the proper spoken language of today. As we move into the next century we must also look at the use of rhetoric in social aspects over the internet and the way we see it implemented in everything from social media, to media outlets, to online-only scholarly journals.
I hope that with everything I learn I will have a more detailed understanding of what is expected of me as a future professor/teacher. Knowing exactly how to produce the work outside of class will be extremely beneficial to my ability to effectively teach class that will be informative, engaging and educational. The different class work will also help me figure out a good base for starting out with my teaching, everything from creating a syllabus and class schedule to working with students of different ages, races and ethnicity. The art of teaching is not as simple as people think and we are still continuing to work on teaching how to effectively work on students so that they will learn what is needed of them. Classes like these will help me to efficiently practice for my future works without hindering my studies. I think that curriculum project in particular will be useful as it will likely become the backbone for my fist independent class away from a first year curriculum based learning model.
