I was excited last week to hear that Loudoun County Superintendent Eric Williams will be leaving soon for a new job in Texas. Not because I’m a glutton for LCPS drama, and not that I have anything against Mr. Williams. But I sensed a potential mini-unit in the surprising news, which would provide a fantastic resource of texts to use in my AP Language and Composition classes: press releases, newspaper editorials, statements from parents, and all of it centered around an issue that was relevant to my students. Most importantly, I deemed it a fine opportunity to examine the carefully wrought language of a public figure who has chosen a moment of extremely trying circumstances to make a job switch. It seemed like a genuine gold-plated Teachable Moment.

These expectations were somewhat modified when I brought up the matter with my students and learned how truly uninterested they were in the Superintendent’s departure. I gave an informal poll to both my Lang classes,  where they could choose three different stances on his departure: shame on you, good for you, and who cares? The latter two options were the overwhelming favorites. Many students in the who cares? camp claimed to not even know who Eric Williams was. In both my classes, a number of students voiced a similar desire to defect to a distant and potentially less-stressful county.  

Tiptoeing past that emotional abyss, I pressed forward with the mini-lesson. I asked students to read the statement from Eric Williams to the Clear Creek Independent School District and then analyze its rhetoric, taking into account the rhetorical situation (speaker, purpose, audience, context, exigence) and the strategies used to accomplish this purpose (choices, appeals, tone).   

While students may not have cared about Williams’s decision to leave, I was pleased at the great pains they took in completing the assignment, carefully picking apart the choices Williams made to make a good impression with his new district deep in the heart of Texas. That actually was the biggest comment I found myself making on the assignment: many students failed to see that this statement was actively trying to cultivate a positive relationship between a new Superintendent and the residents of the community. It is indeed rhetorical, as this student from my fourth block class made perfectly clear…

After discussing the analysis homework, we used the whole situation to continue our investigation of complex situations, the type of issues that are often examined on the Q1 synthesis prompt on the AP Lang test. Students are asked thorny questions such as what should be the role of public libraries moving forward? or to what extent is imminent domain beneficial?

We’ve been discussing qualified vs binary stances, how most big issues often cannot be reduced to a simple binary. Even though my students were overwhelming on Eric Williams’s side, it did not take them long to acknowledge the validity of other perspectives from certain people (teachers and parents especially) who might not feel the same good will at his abrupt departure.

And for the final assignment in this mini-unit, I have attempted to game-ify rhetorical choices… 

 

I put students in breakout rooms at the end of class and let them work together for ten minutes, the idea being that they could complete their bingo cards much faster if they brain-stormed different rhetorical choices as a group. I’ve been stressing a rhetorical-verb-driven method of analysis (as opposed to device-driven), and this gives us a meaningful application of this concept, predicting different ways Williams could accomplish his goal of mollifying LCPS as he leaves.  

I’ve been pleased with the results so far…

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