The New York Sophist

I’ve been thinking about how to re-create (recreate?) my public speaking class. Like a computer, public speaking gets slow, frustrating, and doesn’t help you produce anything good unless you reformat it and do a clean install of the operating system from time to time.

This essay is really full of great ideas to teach it. The thing I thought of after reading it was how to craft an assignment centered around kairos. “Trolling,” as discussed in the link, is a good idea, but what about campus issues? How was this taught in ancient times? I think a more homogeneous culture, like Athens, would have a lot more agreement on what constitutes opportunity wrapped in timing (timing wrapped in opportunity?) compared to our society.

If it can be engineered, how about an assignment that has them link up something happening in the news, or something controversial, to something they think is important. Crafting those links rhetorically takes a lot of skill and practice. Perhaps the public speaking class is the place to do that.

Lama Tsony on Crazy Wisdom

Crazy Wisdom is a new film about the life of Chogyam Trunga. I like this piece from Tricycle because of the metaphor – “he embodied a quality of fearlessness that was like licking honey off a razor blade.”


Getting the best out of a precarious and harmful situation – what a great image for it. My question now is, can this be taught? What would the Rinpoches say about teaching this? Is it an effect of Enlightenment, or a cause? Perhaps neither – perhaps it’s a rhetorical dimension necessary to recognize one as Enlightened.


Buddhists don’t like to talk about rhetoric, per se, they do like to talk about “right speech,” one of the precepts given by the Buddha. Right speech can and should include rhetoric. I’m certain it happens in Buddhist pedagogy, and has always happened. I think it’s a lot more overt than we might suspect. I think there’s some fertile ground for research here.


For practice, how does one teach the debate student to perform argumentation this way? How do you lick the honey from the razor’s edge? Sounds like a question of style to me. And a question of many hours of difficult practice.

Lama Tsony on Crazy Wisdom

Crazy Wisdom is a new film about the life of Chogyam Trunga. I like this piece from Tricycle because of the metaphor – “he embodied a quality of fearlessness that was like licking honey off a razor blade.”


Getting the best out of a precarious and harmful situation – what a great image for it. My question now is, can this be taught? What would the Rinpoches say about teaching this? Is it an effect of Enlightenment, or a cause? Perhaps neither – perhaps it’s a rhetorical dimension necessary to recognize one as Enlightened.


Buddhists don’t like to talk about rhetoric, per se, they do like to talk about “right speech,” one of the precepts given by the Buddha. Right speech can and should include rhetoric. I’m certain it happens in Buddhist pedagogy, and has always happened. I think it’s a lot more overt than we might suspect. I think there’s some fertile ground for research here.


For practice, how does one teach the debate student to perform argumentation this way? How do you lick the honey from the razor’s edge? Sounds like a question of style to me. And a question of many hours of difficult practice.