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All day I will be trying my best to upload live videos from the Brown & Gold Debates at Adelphi University in Garden City, NY!
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This week I am teaching my Worlds debate class, and the group I have is pretty impressive. All quite sharp, all very interested, and all excited to learn the art of debate. I started as I usually do by showing the WUDC Koc Worlds Final round – a round that many still praise as one of the best, if not the best WUDC final of all time. After we watched about half of it, the students were ready to ask questions or make comments.
“Why do they bounce around so weird when they talk?”
“Why do they go so fast? I can’t remember anything they said.”
“Why don’t they just choose the most important point and stick with it?”
“Why do they speak so artificially?”
I was struck with a nice moment of dissonance – here’s the best we have to offer from the culture of competitive debate, and an intelligent, if green, audience is having trouble understanding why it is valuable. There number one concern was if they were going to have to speak like that.
“No,” I said, “But you will be expected to speak persuasively. So if you are in front of different audiences, you must be prepared to adapt your words to fit the occasion, otherwise it’s like you haven’t said anything at all.” They were pretty quiet. “Like how you feel about this video,” I added. They started to resonate.
I was reminded of the continuing insular practices of monastic orders. Their idea of good worship, or best worship is really just a performance of a believed rhetorical “purity” – when unordained see it, they correctly identify it as irrelevant, weird, and confusing. If you are in the order though, if you have faith, then you start to see it as not only proper, but “the best.”
Debate as seen from non-Western monastic practices is just
upaya
–
that help one realize how to reach others with the truth. I think this is a good spice to add to our discussions of WUDC rounds that are “the best” or “really good.” We must always keep in mind that we are not reaching the audiences we imagine we are, and the more we speak to one another and appeal to one another, the less of a remainder there is. Without something left that doesn’t cleanly divide out in the discourse, there’s little for outsiders to grasp on to.
Having to teach debate to the non-initiated is also an important element of practice. It’s required in martial arts to teach at some point in your studies. We should require it too. At the very least, it will keep you honest about what you are accomplishing, doing, permitting, and promoting in the world. And although cold, it’s good to get hit with a bath from time to time.
Related articles
-
Policy Debate: A Critique of the Appeal to Authority (shinecycle.wordpress.com)
-
He’ll Track Down Anyone if Upaya the Right Price (puns.icanhascheezburger.com)
Image via
This week I am teaching my Worlds debate class, and the group I have is pretty impressive. All quite sharp, all very interested, and all excited to learn the art of debate. I started as I usually do by showing the WUDC Koc Worlds Final round – a round that many still praise as one of the best, if not the best WUDC final of all time. After we watched about half of it, the students were ready to ask questions or make comments.
“Why do they bounce around so weird when they talk?”
“Why do they go so fast? I can’t remember anything they said.”
“Why don’t they just choose the most important point and stick with it?”
“Why do they speak so artificially?”
I was struck with a nice moment of dissonance – here’s the best we have to offer from the culture of competitive debate, and an intelligent, if green, audience is having trouble understanding why it is valuable. There number one concern was if they were going to have to speak like that.
“No,” I said, “But you will be expected to speak persuasively. So if you are in front of different audiences, you must be prepared to adapt your words to fit the occasion, otherwise it’s like you haven’t said anything at all.” They were pretty quiet. “Like how you feel about this video,” I added. They started to resonate.
I was reminded of the continuing insular practices of monastic orders. Their idea of good worship, or best worship is really just a performance of a believed rhetorical “purity” – when unordained see it, they correctly identify it as irrelevant, weird, and confusing. If you are in the order though, if you have faith, then you start to see it as not only proper, but “the best.”
Debate as seen from non-Western monastic practices is just
upaya
–
that help one realize how to reach others with the truth. I think this is a good spice to add to our discussions of WUDC rounds that are “the best” or “really good.” We must always keep in mind that we are not reaching the audiences we imagine we are, and the more we speak to one another and appeal to one another, the less of a remainder there is. Without something left that doesn’t cleanly divide out in the discourse, there’s little for outsiders to grasp on to.
Having to teach debate to the non-initiated is also an important element of practice. It’s required in martial arts to teach at some point in your studies. We should require it too. At the very least, it will keep you honest about what you are accomplishing, doing, permitting, and promoting in the world. And although cold, it’s good to get hit with a bath from time to time.
Related articles
-
Policy Debate: A Critique of the Appeal to Authority (shinecycle.wordpress.com)
-
He’ll Track Down Anyone if Upaya the Right Price (puns.icanhascheezburger.com)
Always looking for or at ways to stretch the rather 2 dimensional debate club model of practicing, going to tournaments, and practicing some more. One of my goals is to push the envelope of the “skills and drills” defense of having a debate club. There has to be more to it than improving your chances of winning tournaments.
Without any suggestion from me, tonight we had our first lecture/teaching session at our general meeting conducted by students for other students. I think it went pretty well.
The only question I have on my mind at the moment is the same one I ask in the video: How does this connect to tournament debating? Is the connection apparent, does it matter, and if not, why and how could such a connection be made?
I hope we have a regular series of such talks as a regular part of our debate practice. The term “practice” is always on my mind in its many variations of meaning. I like to think that I teach debate practice, instead of just watching debate practice. Alternatively, I also like to think that this club is my debate practice, in a similar manner to dental practice or legal practice. But all of this is for another essay.
Here is the video of tonight’s first student lecture, enjoy! The lecture is titled: “Ethics and Persuasion: Gorgias in the age of Science.” This is something that this student came up with and just made it happen. I had nothing to do with it, except to film it and ask too many questions at the end of it.
Always looking for or at ways to stretch the rather 2 dimensional debate club model of practicing, going to tournaments, and practicing some more. One of my goals is to push the envelope of the “skills and drills” defense of having a debate club. There has to be more to it than improving your chances of winning tournaments.
Without any suggestion from me, tonight we had our first lecture/teaching session at our general meeting conducted by students for other students. I think it went pretty well.
The only question I have on my mind at the moment is the same one I ask in the video: How does this connect to tournament debating? Is the connection apparent, does it matter, and if not, why and how could such a connection be made?
I hope we have a regular series of such talks as a regular part of our debate practice. The term “practice” is always on my mind in its many variations of meaning. I like to think that I teach debate practice, instead of just watching debate practice. Alternatively, I also like to think that this club is my debate practice, in a similar manner to dental practice or legal practice. But all of this is for another essay.
Here is the video of tonight’s first student lecture, enjoy! The lecture is titled: “Ethics and Persuasion: Gorgias in the age of Science.” This is something that this student came up with and just made it happen. I had nothing to do with it, except to film it and ask too many questions at the end of it.