More childish fun

In order to not seem like an awful person, I have to start with context: this post is about jokes we made while mocking someone's singing. Let me say at the outset ...

• It was not a student.
• It was not that the singer was off-key; more that the singer didn't seem to get that the song was over.
• It is grossly exaggerated for humorous effect. The singing wasn't really that bad. Pretty bad, though.

With that established, we're passing around jokes about someone's bad singing, and the jokes are good enough that I want to keep some of them for posterity. For anonymity's sake, we'll call the bad singer Bob.

• Bob sang our alma mater, and the earth opened up and swallowed the whole college.
• At a ball game, Bob sang the Star Spangled Banner, and everyone renounced their citizenship.
• Bob went scuba diving and sang to the whales, and they beached themselves.
• Years ago, Bob sang “Rock a Bye Baby,” and it was the first recorded case of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
• Bob sang “I’ll Fly Away,” and NASA put him on a rocket to Pluto.
• Bob sang “Do you really want to hurt me?” and Boy George said “More with every note.”
• Bob sang “We are the world,” and the world said “What do you mean, ‘We?’”
• Bob sang “Happy Birthday” and the birthday boy climbed back into his mother’s uterus.
• Bob sang “Help me Rhonda,” and Rhonda suddenly appeared and duct-taped his mouth shut.
• Bob sang “Santa Claus is coming to town,” and Santa carpet-bombed the whole town with reindeer poop.
• Bob sang “Jesus Loves Me,” and Jesus said “I think we should see other people.”

Escuchando

So I'm in the earliest stages of brewing up two research projects in the area of listening. I'm describing them here in case former students of mine are interested, and especially in case you have insights or realizations to share.

Project #1

This one occurred to me in August, and I did a little scut work toward submitting to IRB, but I got sidetracked with this little thing called fall semester. This study would unfold in two parts.

First, I would create a survey that would ask participants to think about a very powerful, eloquent, persuasive speaker, and then think about a very sharp, incisive, powerful listener. Once they had the image of each clear in their minds, they would be asked which person would be better equipped to achieve each outcome from a list. The list would include things like win an election, graciously accept an award, give a best friend's toast at a wedding, form a close relationship, help someone overcome an emotional problem, etc. Scattered through the outcomes would be ones tied very precisely to persuasion and winning arguments. One item might well be, "Win an argument." Others might be things like "Change someone's mind on a politically controversial topic," or "Persuade a jury to find in favor of a client," or "Sell a used car." I would find a way to disseminate that survey to a large, very representative sample, with lots of demographics represented. My working hypothesis is that people from every background will disproportionately expect that the speaker is better equipped to persuade, and to win arguments, than the listener is.

Second, I would prepare a shorter survey for debate judges to complete immediately after a debate. It would have just four items: 

1. How close was the debate you just judged?

• Very close
• Somewhat close
• Not close

2. Was one or both of the winning debaters a more effective speaker than both of the losing debaters?

• Much more effective
• More effective
• Neutral
• Both winning debaters were less effective speakers
• Both winning debaters were much less effective speakers

3. Was one or both of the winning debaters a more effective listener than both of the losing debaters?

• Much more effective
• More effective
• Neutral
• Both winning debaters were less effective listeners
• Both winning debaters were much less effective listeners
• Don’t know.

4. Pick the most accurate statement from below:

• Effective listening had more to do with the outcome of this debate than effective speaking did.
• Effective speaking had more to do with the outcome of this debate than effective listening did.
• Effective listening and effective speaking had identical or very similar effects on the outcome of this debate.
• Don’t know.

And here are my hypotheses.

H1: After debates that a judge describes as close, the judge will more often describe the winning team as better listeners than as better speakers.
H2: After debates that a judge describes as close, the judge will report that listening skill had more to do with the outcome than speaking skill did.

If my hypotheses are supported, the study will establish that in practice, apparent listening skill makes more of a difference in persuasive and argumentative settings than speaking does. Now, some might object that I'm basing the conclusion on the judge's perception of each participant's listening skill, not anything measurable. But my answer would be that in a debate setting, the judge creates the winner by awarding the win, so if it's the judge's perception that listening made more of a difference, then that is a fact, because the judge's perceptions were the substance from which the win was constructed. I'd also argue that debate judges draw extensively from training and experience to make very detailed judgments of why each team either won or lost the debate, so I think this is actually one of the best in situ research designs for this question. A third shadow working hypothesis is that just about no judges will choose the "Don't know" options for the last two items, because I expect that when prompted, they'll actually have very strong opinions about both sides' listening effectiveness, but that might prove not to be the case.

On a logistical note, a common practice at college debate tournaments nowadays is for all the judge feedback to happen online, through a central web-based app. I have enough good friends left in the college debate world that I think I could get them to put a link to this survey right above where judges had to go to fill in their decision. And I'm thinking of rummaging around foundations that deal with civic engagement and seeing if I can't get a small grant for this. I'm a lot more likely to get lots of judges to take part if I can do a weekly drawing for a gift something-or-other to someplace. I'm also thinking of offering this to students in Listening Behavior as an honors contract: they can collaborate with me on the study, and if they make a sufficient contribution, I'll list them as co-authors when I submit it.

So, that's one project. Here's the other.

Project #2

Four or five years ago, I got an idea one morning while I was brushing my teeth, and a few months later I had a theory piece in International Journal of Listening about Performative Listening. In particular, I remember running the idea past Peter and Fromm on the way home from a tournament, and they gave me some helpful suggestions, which is why they're both listed in the acknowledgments. Now, I have another idea.

This morning, for no particular reason, it struck me that critical listening has a complement: persuasive speech. Comprehensive listening has a complement, too: a spoken lesson. Appreciative listening's complement is any sort of audible performance, empathetic listening is any sort of self-disclosure, and discriminative listening's complement is any sort of meaningful sound. In most of those cases, what I'm identifying is what would hit the bullseye as the paradigm case of speech suited to that listening function: people sometimes listen comprehensively to something that's only loosely a lesson, or they listen appreciatively to something not really designed to be aesthetically pleasing. But the exercise of thinking about their complement does pin down something about the listening functions, and something potentially very important.

The problem is, there are a lot more modes of speaking, or communicating audibly, that are not covered by the above list of communicative modes. Argument is not the same as persuasion, so what can we say about listening for argument? Corporate worship is not the same as performance, so what can we say about listening for worship or devotional activity? It's not critical, appreciative or comprehensive, precisely; it's participatory in a way the other listening functions don't quite capture.

My initial impression, which I'm not entirely confident is correct, is that it's a problem with breaking listening into discrete constructs. It feels to me as though there ought to be a spectrum. Crude instruction strategies in effective speaking very often turn back to the topos-based strategy in Aristotle's rhetoric: a list of kinds of things to say in specific circumstances. But that approach is shot through with serious limitations. Far better is an approach that treats the best speaking as that which is finely tuned to audience and circumstance. I think what I want to propose is that listening isn't divisible into discrete functions, but its purpose can be aligned along certain dimensions, and that listener and speaker experience the encounter differently, in effectiveness and satisfaction, based on the effectiveness of their tuning to one another. 

Now, naturally, people speak for more than one purpose at once, and listen under more than one function at once, and a speaker teaching a lesson might encounter a listener more prepared to be critical. But that could also be part of the theory: where the speaking and listening functions weren't tuned, then that would be a different type of communicative encounter with different outcomes.

Anyway, preliminary thoughts. Might wind up as another theory piece.

Cannonball

About two years ago, give or take a month, I left Fairfield Baptist Church. Today, I'm probably three or four visits away from re-joining it. I'm writing down what happened between then and now, so that any curious parties can read it here, and that way I don't have to tell it a bunch of times.

I moved here from Texas in 2007. Back in Texas, I was a member at Calvary Baptist Church of Nacogdoches. I helped out with the youth group, taught high school Sunday school, and headed up the AV workings for Sunday morning worship services. I spent a ton of time in church-related activities, and felt very rooted there. I knew what was happening, and they knew about twists and turns in my life.

When I moved here, I visited six Baptist churches, and out of those, I joined Fairfield. For a month or two, I taught first and second grade Sunday school. Then, I started teaching the college Sunday school class. I also pitched in with VBS, with Faith team, and with occasional events like the Fall festival and the block party. But somehow, it wasn't quite the same. I lived all the way on the other side of town, and it seemed as though quite often big things were happening at Fairfield that I never heard about. I never thought anyone was deliberately trying to exclude me, but I did feel badly out of the loop. Example: when Mick went home to be with the Lord, I didn't know about it until two weeks after the memorial service. I had this nagging feeling that somehow my roots hadn't taken. Once or twice, I set out to visit other churches, but never felt a peace about changing, so I put it on the back burner as a vague spot of discontent.

In the summer of 2013, I had a persistent ringing in my left ear. It turned out to be this. One of the symptoms of Ménière's Disease is sudden unexpected dizzy spells that can make it unsafe to drive. Since I'd been walking to and from work for six years, and since Enterprise Car Share had just come to town, I realized that the only reason I still needed my own automobile was to get to church. It occurred to me that if I joined a church in my own neighborhood, several things might change, all of them in a reasonably healthy direction:

• I might feel more rooted. My theory was that I would cross paths with people from my church family at the grocery store, at Alton Baker, etc., and have more of a sense of community.
• I could stop upkeep on a car I didn't use, including dropping car insurance. This seemed to me like wise stewardship.
• I could get out in front of the dizzy spells problem by giving up my car before I had to. Major life changes like that are never quite as traumatic when we choose them as when they're forced on us.
• I would also, to be honest, get a break from the jobs I was doing at Fairfield. I was terribly burned out on teaching Sunday school, and helping out with AV for the early hymn service was the biggest reason I couldn't give up my car, since I couldn't arrive early enough if I took the bus. The wise thing to do would've been just to speak up and ask for time off, but I didn't have that much wisdom handy.

So I started visiting Garden Way Church in October 2013, and I joined in January 2014.

I met some wonderful people at Garden Way, and I'm glad I had the experience. That said, it didn't take. The reasons it didn't doubtless have as much or more to do with my failings as with their traits, but it's now abundantly clear to me that it wasn't a good fit.

I don't regard it as a mistake, because I think I needed to learn a few things. The biggest among them is that I feel less rooted in my church because in Texas I had a job that wasn't very labor intensive, and here I work about a sixty to seventy hour week. Don't get me wrong; I love my job. But it does crowd out almost everything else in my life. When I went to Garden Way, I took the unrooted problem with me, and it didn't get appreciably better. The idea about a neighborhood church and a sense of community was just dead wrong.

And I also will say that whatever Garden Way's merits, and they are considerable, I've found Fairfield to be a church that's very warm, up front and basic. What first attracted me to Fairfield over the other churches I visited back in 2007 was that people weren't frantic to cover up imperfections. There was an honesty, and a wisdom about making fundamentals the main thing, that I didn't find in other churches. And I'm not saying it's absent from Garden Way, but I do think it's a particular strength, a particular provision from God to Fairfield.

So as of today I'm still visiting, and I plan to visit through September and keep praying about this. But it does increasingly feel as though I'm back where I belong, and that about October it'll be time to move my letter.

Gifts

I have a thing I do on Facebook every year, on my birthday, and this is why I do it. What I do is change the settings so people can't post to my wall, and then I put up a post that asks them to reply and share one memory of me. Doesn't have to be earth-shattering, funny, or a good story; it can be just a sentence long.

My reason for doing it has a lot to do with phatic messages. A phatic message is just a display of politeness; it doesn't convey, or request, any meaningful information. When you see someone you know and you say, "How're you doing?" and they say "Fine," you've exchanged phatics. If you ask "How're you doing?" and the person responds with details about different aspects of her life, then she commits a social mistake, because the proper response is "Fine." "Fine" is even the proper response if she's having a rotten day, because the question is simply a polite, empty ritual, meant to simulate interest and liking even when the asker doesn't really feel either one.

What I worry about is something I'll call "phatic creep," the slow desertification of language where empty politeness shoulders aside meaningful talk. One worrisome example of this is "I'm sorry for your loss." I'm not sure who coined it as the all-purpose condolence, but as you can see, it's enjoyed runaway growth over the past thirty-ish years. And the problem is, condolences shouldn't be empty. Sure, it's difficult and uncomfortable to think up something heartfelt to say to a person who's grieving, but some hard things need to be done well, with no shortcuts, and I count that near the top of the list.

I think this is a symptom of alienation and declining social capital. People who become unaccustomed to interacting in powerful and sincere ways with intimate friends tend to fall back into safe, scripted utterances. Bureaucrats use bureaucrat-ese with their clients, and too often, Christians lapse into church-safe language over taking the risk of speaking directly and dangerously to the situation in front of them. In a healthy culture, with more opportunities for direct interpersonal engagement, people would feel more confident talking through those sorts of issues, but that's not the culture we navigate today, sadly.

There is no steering wheel for culture; instead, there are little habits and little changes that can nudge in one direction or another. I see that birthday wishes on Facebook tend to be just the two words, and sometimes something as whittled down as HBD. Even when the wish has a little more elaboration to it, it's warm and thoughtful, but it doesn't really convey any content or foster real engagement. It's still phatic. So instead, I ask people to offer up a memory just so we both can have a moment of appreciating what we've done, and who we've been to one another. I try to make a point of responding to each reply, either with my reaction to the memory, or with a related memory. Sometimes it's a little extra effort to pull that out of the past, but it's worthwhile.

I started doing this about four years ago, and every year I've really enjoyed reading what people come up with. Some repeat the same stories from previous years, but they're fresh again and ready for retelling after that big a gap. And sometimes it makes for a pretty interesting relational Rorschach test; I think of the relationship we have in one way, but the top-level memory the friend comes up with shows me just how wrong I am. It's not always entirely comfortable, but it's a useful and welcome learning experience.

I'll add, I opted out of present-buying years ago. I decided that for small children, presents are about excitement and magic and a quick remission from discipline, but for adults, presents are about greed. I'm also very difficult to shop for, because I overthink just about every purchase half to death, and when I want something, I go right out and buy it for myself. This memory-sharing has turned out to be a lot more satisfying than possession-swapping. And there's a pretty solid research-based explanation for why that's the case.

I'm not against phatic communication; it certainly has its place and its important function. But phatic communication as a response to meaningful events like painful loss, or milestone events like birthdays, just seems like a squandered opportunity to enjoy and strengthen relationships. And those opportunities are finite, so it's important to make the most of them.

More fun

This is a sequel to this post. I've done a bunch more jumprope rhymes since then, so here they are:

Connie Wilmarth
Tried to kill Darth
Vader with her cotton twill scarf
Whistling Liszt
Torqued her wrist
Tragically, he died unkissed

‎Jedediah
Can supply a
Word about the one Messiah
Jesus' reign
He'll explain
If there's caffeine in his vein

Lanta Davis
Won't enslave us
Neither will she microwave us
Through her gracious
Perspicacious
Lessons, we'll wind up sagacious!

Peekaboo! It’s
Stacey Lewis
Unlike Mary, she’s no Jewess
Synagoguing
Nor out logging
Every day she’s here, Lew-dawging!

Samuel Robi-
son's not snobby
Meeting people is his hobby
Ball? He'll bounce it.
Race? He'll trounce it.
It's your birthday? He'll announce it.

Catherine Miller
Dance floor filler
Moved to Michael Jackson's Thriller
As she stepped
Jesus wept
Off His feet entirely swept

Aaron Dilla
Holy killa
In the field he's God's guerrilla
Bible blaster
Study faster
Cram it in, you budding pastor!

Britni Steiling
Schemes compiling
Like Paul said, she's reconciling
Homeless people
Once asleep'll
Find a welcome 'neath the steeple

Joseph Womack
Quite the throwback
Make us green like mountain snowpack
In a wink
Debt goes shrink
Beacons all are tickled pink

Peter Norland
Went to war. Gunned
Down at once, he left an orphaned
Bunny, Foo-foo
Crying "Yoo-hoo!
What's the ASL for 'boo hoo?'"

I also did one for Preston, but I'm afraid it's lost to history.
Edit, November 16, 2016: found it!

Preston Carmack
Superstar
Accelerates the van like Star Trek
Tallyho!
Make it so!
Warp nineteen to our next show!

Edit 2, November 21, 2016: just found another one I did for Dr. Steve Caloudas, who was briefly a psychology professor here a few years back.

Is he Judas
Or a Buddhist?
No! He's Doctor Steve Caloudas.
Like epoxy
His faith rocks! He
Lives that Eastern Orthodoxy.  

Testifying

Jenna paid me a visit yesterday. Jenna graduated in 2012, and is about to finish up at U of O law. When she was here, she was cheerful, hard working, and a joy to teach. She told me from the start that she wanted to go to law school, and I told her she should join the debate team, but she never did. Over the years she's told me that difficult tests and rigorous standards for writing assignments did a good deal to prepare her for law classes. And yes, yesterday she told me she should've tried debate. Jenna is well positioned to go out and make a very satisfying, meaningful life, and I'm proud of her. And I got to teach her.

I have a student in public speaking this term who is very different from his classmates in a number of ways. For one, he's a veteran. For another, he's unbelievably eloquent. His word choice is so unique and evocative and powerful, I've told him several times he reminds me of a slam poet. For a third, he has something going on that from time to time causes him to freeze, dead silent, in the middle of a speech; not just for five or ten seconds, but for two or three minutes. On some occasions it's meant he was unable to continue and had to sit down, while on others he's shaken it off and finished. There are five assigned speeches in my class, and on top of those we do a class exercise in impromptu speaking that supplies a little more practice. On his third assigned speech, he made it through for the first time ever without freezing, but he came in under the minimum time limit, and was quite vexed with himself. But then, this week, he gave the fourth assigned speech, which is the most difficult of all of them, and he nailed it: beautiful construction and language, no freezes, well within the time limit. The next day I got to my office and found a drawing had been slipped under the door. On the back, it said, "I knew I was an artist, but I didn't know until now that I was a poet." Yesterday, he stayed after class and said "Not bad for my fifth speech ever, eh?" I told him I was very, very proud of him.

Sierra is the backbone of the forensics team this year. She is talented, upright, industrious, and genuinely the sweetest and most loving person it's ever been my privilege to coach in speech and debate, which is not a community of people known for their sweetness and love. A few weeks ago, she asked me if I would write a recommendation letter for a scholarship she sought. I wrote the simple truth, expanding what I said in the second sentence of this paragraph into a full page letter. All of it was direct and honest, and none of it puffed up, exaggerated or misleading. Yesterday she emailed me that she got the scholarship. It reminded me of years and years ago when I performed Jordan and Tessa's wedding: I got to say "I now pronounce you husband and wife," and the world was different. Here, I got to describe what I saw, and then affix my title to the letter, and that helped move a foundation to give Sierra money that helped make school affordable.

When I arrived here in 2007, they told me that one goal was to prepare more NCC students to go on for graduate degrees. They also told me that historically, very few communication majors had done so. Since then, two of my advisees have done master's degrees in counseling (Krista and Britni), one in TESOL (Ambria), and Jenna did law school, but no one had ever pursued a graduate degree in communication, which left me just a tiny bit irrationally sad. But then, last week, I found out from Kelsay that she was going to be the first. Several months ago, she told me she had her eye on a master's program out in the midwest, and asked if I would write her a recommendation. Kelsay, like Jenna and Sierra, had been a career-lengthener and a burnout antidote, so of course I was willing. One fun twist to the task was that I knew a faculty member at the college who happened to be the associate director of the graduate program, so I decided to try to push all his buttons toward getting Kelsay a graduate assistantship. As with Sierra, I just told the simple truth about what I'd seen, but I chose the details that would make her a good candidate for scarce assistantship dollars. So when she stopped by with the good news last week, it included the wonderful detail that she was funded. She's going to teach public speaking, and every time I imagine her in a public speaking classroom, I get excited for the students who are going to learn from her. She'll be superb at it.

This year has been one of the most exciting in the past several years for newly declared communication majors. I won't name names and go into detail here, because I'd leave someone out and inflict hurt feelings, but I look over the list, and I can't contain my happy little office chair wiggle. (I do make sure my office door is closed, first.) I know there are  going to be days they drive me crazy, and I'll probably have to chew each one of them out once or twice, but it's an incredible, talented, joyful, lovable, wonderful group of people, and I have the privilege of a front row seat while they grow into themselves.

God is good.