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[the grocery store]
was out of, and she
wanted, what did she call it //rain checks//
86
Unidentified male student:
//rain check//
87
Gwen:
//sure, you can get a
rain check //--
(85) Anna:
--for all these twenty-five, and she
got rain checks.
88
Prof.:
That’s why I waited. Now what is- is this a
complaint, or a question, or what now? [[89 class
laughter]].
Ten different identified students participated in this exchange, along with several
unidentified students (and the entire class, at times).
30
As the class moves further
into this discussion, we see a breakdown of the strict pair-part structure that gen-
erally dominates in these classrooms (including this one); the professor-student
pairing of question-answer is interrupted when students respond directly to one
another. In turns 67–68, for example, Alicia and Dirk coproduce an account of a
story from the newspaper; note the cohesion produced across multiple speakers
through parallelism as both students and the professor in three successive turns
repeat “never had a problem.” After the professor reads the exact wording of the
ad, one student begins to express disgust with the story (“that’s bull- ”) and is in-
terrupted by another student who disagrees, “It says ‘to win.’ It says ‘to win.’ Not
‘you will get.’” Two students again chime in to help Anna produce her narrative
when she has trouble remembering the word for “rain check.” In turns 61–63, we
see an exchange more typical of informal conversation: the professor pauses in the
middle of her comment to respond to an expression on one student’s face: “You’re-
Gwen’s looking at me and she’s saying, ‘Well,
I
would have.’” This rendition of a
perceived response in the form of (fictional) reported speech brings the professor
into a less formal discursive space with the student; the student, somewhat startled,
responds, “Well, I don’t know- ”, perhaps a signal that she is reacting to the blur-
ring of genre boundaries. The professor induces laughter from the class a number
of times, and the overall informality of the class produces a speech setting that
permits the following exchange (toward the end of the class) to seem less harsh
than it otherwise might have:
Transcript 7.12 [6/20/18]
Prof.:
[ . . . omit beginning of .27 turn . . . ]
Now I really will dismiss you if you can
answer this question. What’s the difference between an offer and a
promise?
John:
Well, I think (). Your offer gives the offeree the power to accept. You don’t
have the promise until the offeree has accepted the offer.
Prof.:
Wrong.
John:
Oh.
Prof.:
Close, close.
John:
I spent all night working on that one. [[class laughter]]
Professorial Style in Context
163
Prof.:
Close. He said that you don’t have a promise until the offer’s accepted.
You’re wrong by one word. (.05 pause) You see, a promise isn’t necessarily
a contract. A promise isn’t legally enforceable.
John:
Right.
Prof.:
Right. What an offer is
[ . . . omit rest of 1.49 turn explaining definition of
“offer” . . . ]
Thus, the overall discursive setting can set the tone for professorial responses, and
the student’s joking reply carries on the overall tenor of the professor-student re-
sponses throughout the class. This was the classroom with the most egalitarian
distribution of student speakers in the entire study; it was the class in which 100%
of the students spoke during the semester.
31
At one point in the semester, in a move
unlike any found in the other classes, the professor put one of the students in the
role of judge and two others in the role of attorneys, and had the two students ar-
gue to the judge, who took over the professor’s role of questioning and moderat-
ing the discussion. This was a marked exception to the rule in these classrooms,
where student comments are almost never unmediated by professors’ turns.
32
At the same time, we can also note continuities between the methods used to
attain continuity and coherence in longer traditional Socratic dialogues and in these
more polyphonic exchanges. In the lengthy exchange above (Transcript 7.11), if
one ignores the switching of students and imagines only one student respondent
instead, there is not all that large a distinction between the earlier portions of this
excerpt and many of the Socratic dialogues; the most striking difference is that the
professor keeps selecting different students to respond to her ongoing questions.
Just as in the extended dialogues, we find many professor turns beginning with
positive affirmations such as “right” and “yeah”; we also see repetition of student
responses for emphasis and cohesion (turns 42–43, “expression of intent”; turns
50–53, “solicitation for offers”). As did the professors in the more Socratic class-
rooms, these professors provide significant structuring to the ongoing discussion
through mini-lectures and doctrinal exegesis, as well as through the form of their
questions. When an answer is not quite on point, we also see instances where the
professor recasts that student answer in an encouraging light: “All right, you’ve got
the street-level understanding of why the ad is not an offer. Let’s put it in terms of
offer under contract law.” And where a student is clearly offtrack, the professor
also employs interruption and redirection: “Well, no, you’ve got to be very care-
ful. Don’t say ‘I received this offer in the mail.’” However, when the student does
not come up with a correct answer after one more turn, the professor moves on to
another interlocutor, rather than pressing a single speaker to continue. On the one
hand, this means that there is less need for coaching and cuing than in the more
extended dialogues. One could also say that students are not learning to reason on
their feet to the same extent, and that the quick search through the room for a re-
sponse that will move the conversation along leaves individual contributors little
room to recover and develop their arguments. On the other hand, it also relieves
individual students of the stress of ongoing dialogue when they are not coming up
with the desired responses. In her interview with me, the professor in Class #6 also
pointed to the attentional benefits of this approach:
164
Difference
I’ll call on a student who I think will give the answer, because it saves a lot of time and
I don’t think it’s any fun to sit there with somebody not knowing the answer and
waiting for them to struggle through something.
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