Does it matter that colleges teach communication classes using textbooks?

When teaching, I usually use about 10 slides in 50 minutes and start out with a slide that has S.I.R. in which I ask the audience what was significant, interesting, and relevant about the lesson plan for the previous week.

From experience, I discard the fillers and address what I consider crucial issues for today.

Too much presented these days is what the speaker is interested in and puts the audience into suspended animation >>>One sided , non fat dry milk , typical topical sermon/lectures.

But… when concise points are given which influence decisions and an appropriate ‘context’ is not provided, it is like firing at a target without knowing which one you were supposed to hit.

One of the challenges again of the inability of some of these modes of communication to take place without feedback.

For some of the other modes, perhaps we need to get better at asking our questions; ie knowing what we want. Ex. When the boss asks a vague question, her employee is apt to adopt the ‘more is better’ philosophy in the general case to ‘cover her bases’.

Medical doctors must sometimes order and weigh a greater number of medical tests than just those few tests that finally identify a condition – the excess information really is needed to rule out non-relevant conditions.

Psychological counselors intake more information from subjects than what turns out to be relevant later on: because “real” needs are often buried under a cascade of irrelevant initial information.

Lawyers going to court have an ethical duty to do broad and wide “discovery” of facts: not just to find relevant facts, but instead, to find facts that will lead to relevant facts. Only at trial are the relevant facts reduced back down to a simple few – a few relevant facts threshed out from hundreds or thousands of irrelevant ones.

Science proceeds by nearly uncountable “failed” experiments recorded as – failures.

Random samples in the sociology of religion aren’t really random if designed to prove the cute and simple bias of the researcher.

Spiritual journeys in faith may (if we are honest) involve walking experimentally down a dozen dead-end streets in order to find the way of the Way.

It’s easy and cliche to say – get to the point.

As if Jesus was as a terse, proverb-vending machine.

To know what’s relevant in my faith – my daily faith in real life – not in some cliche-spitting proverb realm where points are fast and cheap, I often need to know and research through tons of “waste.”

To sweep the whole floor to find the penny.

Getting to the simple “it” (God’s specific will for today) isn’t always simple.

Oh, for a few good friends willing to wade through it all.

That is at least one reason that the founder of our family business (Jesus) may have spent his first 30 years doing nothing (in terms of public ministry