Date: November 4, 2006
Special to The Well at MHC

Three Ways of Looking at a Blackboard: A “Trivial” Approach to Writing and Speaking..
Growing out of the classical conception of seven “liberal arts,” the book presents the first three of these “arts,” grammar, logic, and rhetoric (collectively called the trivium, Latin for “three ways”)...
Like practically every freshman composition instructor I know, I have spent the better part of my academic career searching for the “perfect” freshman rhetoric. Perfection being a hard thing to come by, in academics as in other areas of human endeavor, I have accepted the likelihood that such a text simply doesn’t exist, but I have not abandoned my search, hoping that it might at least turn up a “better-than-average” candidate. Alas, seventeen years have passed since I began my career (and my search) and I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. Call me hard to please if you will (although I prefer to think of myself as “principled,” or idealistic), but virtually every examination copy I eagerly thumb through disappoints me in one of two ways. Sort of like the beds in “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” all the texts that come across my desk are either too soft or too hard. That is, they are either pragmatic and “user-friendly,” but (dare I say it?) shallow, or genuinely substantive, but overly theoretical and, hence, tedious to a class of first-semester freshmen. What I am after is a text that is “just right”—accessible to freshmen, and maybe, just maybe, even enjoyable in spots, while at the same time comprehensive and thorough in its coverage of fundamental rhetorical principles. Rather than wait any longer for such a text to appear over the examination-copy horizon, I decided to take matters into my own hands and write one myself. That book is Three Ways of Looking at a Blackboard: A ‘Trivial’ Approach to Writing and Speaking.

While grounded in three thousand years’ worth of rhetorical theory and practice, Three Ways… is a totally new approach to teaching freshman composition. The title of the book refers both to its subject matter, and to the learning/teaching model through which the subject matter is presented. In classical and medieval education, the seven “liberal arts” were divided into two courses of study: the trivium--made up of grammar, logic, and rhetoric—and the quadrivium—comprising mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and music. The trivium (Latin for “three ways”) was viewed as a prerequisite to the quadrivium, and provided a foundation for mastering those four content areas. Given the traditional role of freshman composition as a foundational course in communication and critical thinking, preparing students for the next three and a half years of higher education, the course plays an analogous role in modern times to that played by the trivium in classical and medieval times. It thus seems entirely appropriate that the subject matter of a freshman composition course be the three “subjects” of the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric. And that is, indeed, the content covered in Three Ways of Looking at a Blackboard.

Of course, the prospect of “covering” grammar, logic, and rhetoric in a mere fifteen weeks’ time is daunting, to say the least, but not impossible, provided one uses an extraordinarily efficient learning model to present the material. The most efficient learning model currently available is none other than…the trivium. Since the middle of the 20th century, many American educators have come to view the trivium, not only as a sequence of three language-oriented courses of study, but also as a three-stage learning model applicable to any and every subject one might undertake, from biology, to banking, to baseball. Every subject has a grammar--the set of fundamental principles that define it and distinguish it from other subjects—a logic—a system of operational relationships connecting these principles—and a rhetoric—the application of these principles to new tasks within the subject--and the most efficient way of learning a new subject is to tackle, sequentially, its grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Three Ways of Looking at a Blackboard is, thus, a “trivial” approach to the trivium, covering, first, the grammar of grammar, the grammar of logic, and the grammar of rhetoric; next, the logic of grammar, the logic of logic, and the logic of rhetoric; and finally, the rhetoric of grammar, the rhetoric of logic, and the rhetoric of rhetoric. The “trivial” learning model is incremental, and yet cyclical at the same time, so students encounter the fundamental concepts of the trivium three separate times, becoming progressively intentional and independent with each successive stage.

In the true spirit of classical and medieval rhetoric (e.g. Quintilian and Erasmus), Three Ways… takes a concretely pragmatic view of language. From the very first page, students are encouraged to think of language as a game--like golf, or baseball, or chess—played by specific rules to achieve specific objectives.  They spend the “grammar” phase of the course learning the rules by which the game is played, the “logic” phase of the course practicing these rules in a variety of isolated game situations, and the “rhetoric” phase applying their knowledge and experience to “real-life” language situations. Think of a novice golfer, who has just purchased a new set of clubs and an introductory book about the game of golf. He or she reads about the game of golf—the objectives of the game, what each club is for, and so on—and then takes the clubs to the driving range and putting green to practice each club, over and over, in isolation, giving the hands a feel for what the mind already knows. Finally, he or she heads to a nearby municipal golf course, forks over thirty or forty dollars, and spends a few hours applying all that knowledge and experience to a hundred or more real-life golf situations, no two of which are exactly alike. Our hypothetical duffer has progressed from the grammar of golf, to the logic of golf, and then to the rhetoric of golf. In a very similar way, Three Ways… takes students from the grammar of English language usage, to the logic of English, to the rhetoric of English. By the completion of the course, they have not only mastered the inevitable “five paragraph expository essay” (a genre, by the way, that exists virtually nowhere on Earth except freshman composition courses), but far more importantly, have developed a genuine sense of the power of language to do things to the world around them, and some practical experience in making it do the things they want it to. They thus emerge from the class prepared to tackle virtually any writing or speech situation they encounter, whether it be in the classroom, in the dorm room, or in that big and scary place many people refer to as “the real world.”