The New York Sophist

A depiction of the world’s oldest continually operating university, the University of Bologna, Italy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We are engaging in a pretty interesting experiment in my debate program.

This arose out of a meeting I held for students who wanted to take on more leadership in the team. Out of this meeting, the students decided to hold a number of training sessions for the new members of our program.

I attended most of them, and have filmed them all. You can watch the series here.

I am very pleased with these videos for a number of reasons. First, I think the quality of the instruction is uniquely strong. Not quite strong, not very good – uniquely strong. I say that because I believe this teaching to come from experience and reflection – praxis, as identified by Paulo Friere, bell hooks, and others as an important element to critical thinking and critical being in the world. I think I might be able to give a more thorough lecture or more detailed presentation, but I don’t believe it would be as good as these due to that extra ingredient of experience.

Secondly. these are proof of concept of something we have known for a long time – that peer education simply works. Teaching is the best way to learn something, and to learn something you need a thoughtful and engaged instructor. Most of these videos are peer education videos, with the exception of the one I did and the ones that the graduate students did. But overall, those videos seem to have the same energy as well. Maybe not mine, but most!

Finally, I think these videos represent the future of the power of digital video and blogs to serve the University. The idea of good teaching, engaged learning, and learner-centered education all come through in these videos. I think I am starting to figure out how to use digital video, blogging, and the internet to teach. I think segmenting instruction and putting it in video collections like this is a huge step in the direction of making online teaching effective.

Here’s a better debate from Binghamton. The debaters still need to work on clear linkages of their arguments to the issues at hand or the issues that are supposed to be in the debate, but compared to the other one I posted yesterday, this one is of a better quality. Some of the teams are the same in this round, so that’s a positive thing – they can debate in a more interesting way than the way they did in the quarterfinal.

One interesting moment in this video is the clash between Closing Government and Closing Opposition. Closing Opp went through to the final, as did the Opening Opp. Examining the differences between what Closing Gov did and Closing Opp did could be an interesting class exercise. Having students re-do those speeches might also be very productive.

Debate: Pay North Korea war reparations. Binghamton debate tournament 2012 from Steve Llano on Vimeo.

Here’s a better debate from Binghamton. The debaters still need to work on clear linkages of their arguments to the issues at hand or the issues that are supposed to be in the debate, but compared to the other one I posted yesterday, this one is of a better quality. Some of the teams are the same in this round, so that’s a positive thing – they can debate in a more interesting way than the way they did in the quarterfinal.

One interesting moment in this video is the clash between Closing Government and Closing Opposition. Closing Opp went through to the final, as did the Opening Opp. Examining the differences between what Closing Gov did and Closing Opp did could be an interesting class exercise. Having students re-do those speeches might also be very productive.

Debate: Pay North Korea war reparations. Binghamton debate tournament 2012 from Steve Llano on Vimeo.

It’s been a couple of days since Binghamton, which I thought ran quite well. There were of course, some issues that I think American debating could do without, but they are for a couple of separate posts that I am working on. I don’t think I will ever understand judge allocation that puts five judges in some rooms, and two in some others. This makes little sense to me, as it seems to say low rooms, which we all know are very messy and generally have newer debaters in them, require less attention, less ears, and less eyes. Top rooms, which usually have more experienced debaters who understand how judgements within the game are made (“debate shorthand,” I call it) and usually provide a very clean and deep debate, need more ears, and eyes and minds. I think people who are doing well require less judges, and people who are doing poorly require more. After the round, during lunch, or between elims, those students now have 3-5 people to ask for tips on how to improve. Perhaps someone will explain to me the judge allocation thing one day, but so far nobody has successfully done so.

As far as debate quality in the Northeast region, this is clearly a rebuilding year. The debates I saw in elimination rounds reminded me of 2008 vintage. Here’s a good example, from quarterfinals.

Debate: Media Time Spent on Gun Violence – Binghamton 2012 from Steve Llano on Vimeo.

In this debate, you will see how everything becomes very muddled and very unclear very quickly because all of the speakers are showing off how “American” they can be in debate style. Not one speaker takes a step back and analyzes the question of principle – “why we do what we do.” They are all talking about consequences, impacts, and causation. If anything signals to a judge that you are from an American debate tradition, it is that style of argument.

I do think that there are a couple of debaters in this round who are novices, and I think they are closing opposition (who had the hottest argument in this debate, in the extension speech, but sort of miss developing it fully) and I don’t want you to think I am saying they are responsible for not being good. The question is regionally, community wise, how do we ensure that the tide does not go out so far from year to year?

The other criticism, and it’s a fair one, of what I am saying here is that this is a pretty good debate by debate’s standards, and I am way out of the normal way of evaluating debates. It’s true – I have very little interest in debate. I am interested in rhetoric and argument. On that metric, this debate is really bad. As a debate, I think there are enough tiny causal weird “turn your argument around” strategies to make any debate junky smile. We seek to avoid an inward looking game and seek to offer this game as an examination, a laboratory, an event that causes us to reflect on our discursive practice in our other roles in life.

I want us to live up to our ostensible standard – that we are debating for reasonable, general people – and try to hit that mark. It is the only legitimate, ethical mark to hit if we are going to keep spending this amount of money and professional, scholarly time watching and evaluating these contests. If we are not working to hit the Universal Audience with our discourse, what exactly are we aiming at?

Growing up in the south I was taught never to point a gun, loaded or unloaded, toy or real, at something you didn’t intend to shoot. Where is that standard in our argumentation practice?

Or perhaps all of these people are new. But they aren’t, not all of them. And even if they were, someone is teaching them what to do. I hope that someone reads this.

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It’s been a couple of days since Binghamton, which I thought ran quite well. There were of course, some issues that I think American debating could do without, but they are for a couple of separate posts that I am working on. I don’t think I will ever understand judge allocation that puts five judges in some rooms, and two in some others. This makes little sense to me, as it seems to say low rooms, which we all know are very messy and generally have newer debaters in them, require less attention, less ears, and less eyes. Top rooms, which usually have more experienced debaters who understand how judgements within the game are made (“debate shorthand,” I call it) and usually provide a very clean and deep debate, need more ears, and eyes and minds. I think people who are doing well require less judges, and people who are doing poorly require more. After the round, during lunch, or between elims, those students now have 3-5 people to ask for tips on how to improve. Perhaps someone will explain to me the judge allocation thing one day, but so far nobody has successfully done so.

As far as debate quality in the Northeast region, this is clearly a rebuilding year. The debates I saw in elimination rounds reminded me of 2008 vintage. Here’s a good example, from quarterfinals.

Debate: Media Time Spent on Gun Violence – Binghamton 2012 from Steve Llano on Vimeo.

In this debate, you will see how everything becomes very muddled and very unclear very quickly because all of the speakers are showing off how “American” they can be in debate style. Not one speaker takes a step back and analyzes the question of principle – “why we do what we do.” They are all talking about consequences, impacts, and causation. If anything signals to a judge that you are from an American debate tradition, it is that style of argument.

I do think that there are a couple of debaters in this round who are novices, and I think they are closing opposition (who had the hottest argument in this debate, in the extension speech, but sort of miss developing it fully) and I don’t want you to think I am saying they are responsible for not being good. The question is regionally, community wise, how do we ensure that the tide does not go out so far from year to year?

The other criticism, and it’s a fair one, of what I am saying here is that this is a pretty good debate by debate’s standards, and I am way out of the normal way of evaluating debates. It’s true – I have very little interest in debate. I am interested in rhetoric and argument. On that metric, this debate is really bad. As a debate, I think there are enough tiny causal weird “turn your argument around” strategies to make any debate junky smile. We seek to avoid an inward looking game and seek to offer this game as an examination, a laboratory, an event that causes us to reflect on our discursive practice in our other roles in life.

I want us to live up to our ostensible standard – that we are debating for reasonable, general people – and try to hit that mark. It is the only legitimate, ethical mark to hit if we are going to keep spending this amount of money and professional, scholarly time watching and evaluating these contests. If we are not working to hit the Universal Audience with our discourse, what exactly are we aiming at?

Growing up in the south I was taught never to point a gun, loaded or unloaded, toy or real, at something you didn’t intend to shoot. Where is that standard in our argumentation practice?

Or perhaps all of these people are new. But they aren’t, not all of them. And even if they were, someone is teaching them what to do. I hope that someone reads this.

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