The New York Sophist

This September is finally starting to feel like fall and I’m experiencing quite a bit of nostalgia for my old debating life. The smell in the air and the quality of the light on campus make me anxious that have not booked a bus or hotel yet; that I made plans on a Saturday to do something in the city, and so on.

Habits are strange things that we often think of as bad, of breaking them before they break us. But there are habits of thought and feeling that are triggered by conditions that have little to do with our cognitive state or our intellect.

For example, I thought today how strange it would be to work on this campus and never interact with a student. How odd would it be to work at a college or university and not interact with students. Not out of choice, but because your job does not require any student interaction or meeting at all. Perhaps your job is one where you are not supposed to interact with students?

I have thought about leaving my university job more than many times. To do what, I am not sure. I really think the barrier is the incapacity I have to imagine doing anything in September other than standing before nervous students talking about the importance of speech. I would feel so lost and so confused by a September that lacked those things.

My immediate reaction to this thought is self-accusation: Why do you lack the capacity of imagination here? But perhaps that’s not the end point of where that question leads. Perhaps the self-accusation is realization that being in this position in discourse with students about, well, discourse, is not a lack of capacity but the root of capacity in imagination. Perhaps the classroom is my commonplace book.

“Several years ago you had my sister,” said the new student – but in a college classroom not a high school one. This is a commonplace for most secondary teachers: the announcement of legacy status. But in university this is unheard of. Perhaps I’m wrong about this, but it took me (a)back. “How is your sister doing?” A full report was filed and I wondered and resented the lack of change in my position in this dusty classroom hearing about all the change in the years that have passed between her and me and now.

I assign textbooks in September; I regret textbooks in September. Maybe the ultimate capacity of the self-accusation of lack is to embrace it fully and just go. There is plenty to talk about; what’s on your mind? What’s on their minds? If rhetoric is a thing as powerful as you write about, think about, and imagine it to be, then what are you scared of? What holds you back from just going in? Why all the accoutrement? Why the bumpers, why the railings, why the handholds?

The real trouble is thinking of an incapacity as the root of all capacity. That’s a tough order. Imagining an incapacity as inventive is really a stretch. But it isn’t really – what else is the point of a commonplace book in rhetoric other than to recognize – and admire – your incapacity to “say it just like that.” Collecting bits of information, quotes, and statements – images from others – is a good habit that seems as if it is there to remind us of what we cannot do. But the contemporary mode of the commonplace book – the “vision board” of the younger generation – is an inventional device that is created to help you imagine and work toward creating something that is within your capacity. The old commonplace book should be seen this way as well I think.

But habits are hard to break. I am grateful for that, particularly in September when the light has this certain motivating quality even though I really don’t have anything to prepare for it. The feeling of anxiety, then relief is good but nostalgic.

Attitude and Engagement at the start of the term

The start of the term means figuring out the archaeology of the class. This requires some digging, brushing and poking around to determine what substrate the students are in. Where did they come from?

The values of the students, their tools, their approach to learning is a collection of practices that developed over time in relation to an environment or environments. We would be remiss as teachers not to investigate that sediment for the things that worked for students in previous classrooms.

The metaphor opens up the idea that when students are acting in ways that frustrate you, or make you launch into a narrative of “how terrible students are today,” you can change that attitude and ask after what previous classroom experiences they had that made them act in these ways. It takes the blame off of your students and puts it on what we know to be an underfunded and misguided system of state requirements for moving between somewhat arbitrary grade levels.

Also shame on you if you blame your students as individuals for their classroom behavior and don’t consider what experiences they had in classrooms that might have led them to this behavior.

Approaching student behavior or questions or engagement with the “nuts and bolts” of the class (as a favorite history professor of mine used to call it) should be done with care. They are showing you valuable information as to what “survival strategies” and “technologies” of learning worked for them in the past. The blame is not with them, unless you want to blame them for making it this far.

The first few days of teaching are always very insightful as you can see the students trying to figure you out using the paradigms they have on file for every previous teacher. You can use this to your advantage to raise some incredible positions, questions, possibilities with the class as to what it means to sit in mostly forward-facing, plastic seats and face a wall for 90 minutes and listen to someone talk.

Today is day 2 of my classes for the most part, except for my terrible hybrid section (I despise hybrid courses but they keep giving them to me) which because of University scheduling will not meet in person till the 12th. I’m interested to see what bubbles up in the conversation today. What fragments of pedagogical engagement will come to the surface?

A great chat I had impromptu this morning with my friend and colleague Matt about one of my rhetoric lectures that I have given over the years at Cornell University. The version we are discussing is this one from about five years ago:

Even though I have several iterations of this talk available on YouTube, this one has the most views by a wide margin. Not sure why. Initially I thought it was the shirt. This doesn’t seem to be supported by any reliable data.

In the video above this one Matt and I talk about his recent viewing of the video and how he thought about it from the “meta” perspective: What is it a student can do with this lecture and what impact does it have (or should have) in the context of teaching. It’s a good conversation between us about the aim and purpose of a class lecture and what might actually occur. I am glad I recorded it because we have a very nice candid and rhetorically-oriented conversation about purpose, audience, attitude, and things of that nature. I’m very happy we had the chat and it was a nice stimulation to get refocused on teaching as the summer enters its final month.

Also spoiler warning: At the end we talk about He-Man: Revalations on Netflix so if you don’t want to learn about some of the more interesting elements of that show, stop the video when Matt mentions it.

This summer has been one of great travel and great ideas. I haven’t really been meeting my goals of doing regular videos or even regular writing, but June was a very concentrated moment for me in working through some nascent thoughts.

Here’s a talk I gave with Korey Stegared-Pace from Stockholm’s Microsoft Reactor. They focus on offering a lot of different helpful content for developers of all kinds. Korey covers the technical aspect while I consider some of the other reasons why we might want to do this and what it might mean.

The biggest question of course is the unanswerable one – what’s a debate? How do you know? There are endless definitions of a debate and most of them are good. I have very particular pedagogical preferences when it comes to what a debate is. I’m willing to change it based on the situation at hand. But when you say “I’m going to teach an AI how to debate,” the bigger question for me is “What’s a debate,” not “how are you doing to teach it?” If you don’t have some specifics there, you might not be teaching what you think you are.

Another question is the relationship between argument and debate. This is rarely thought about outside of the rather obvious “arguments appear in debates” or the somewhat naïve “debate is a kind of argument.” This also has to be grappled with a bit I think and we have to consider what this relationship would be. Again, no objectively right answer here, but you need a working definition in order to teach this. I’d say the way to think about it is history – you have to have a definition of history to teach it, and that definition has to be serviceable, not universally right – historiography is fascinating because of this continuously appearing feature of history. Same with debate and argument.

Something that didn’t make it into the talk but I’ve thought about since then is the necessity of having a temporary certainty to teach about something that circulates around uncertainty. Science pedagogy is quite comfortable with this – the good way is through the scientific method, a navigation process to teach for the swirling madness. The bad science pedagogy is the one of truth-discovering or “we are right” discourse that even good scientists (as apart from good science teachers) will sometimes say. To teach proof of concept of AI we need some clear understanding of a debate, what it is and how to look at it, a notion of what arguments are in that context, and then we can move forward and say an AI can debate or can’t debate – and what that might mean.

The first debate event occurred over a weekend at a university. The directors of multiple debate programs met in person and online to discuss the year ahead.

The first day was about “equity,” a policy of discipline necessary at competitions where fairness matters more than anything. Since the debate event is organized around the idea of a zero-sum game, where there are winners and losers, and people advance to “quarterfinals” and such, people who use terms or attitudes that offend others must be dealt with in the terms of the competition. It’s not possible to determine a winner if someone cannot argue because they are under duress from being offended.

Of course, this is only an issue if you want to have zero-sum competitions in a tournament modality. But the first day was tiring, and there was no energy or time for the debate directors to discuss creativity, imagination, or different approaches. In fact, it was assumed that “tournament” is a synonym with “debate.”

A second debate event occurred that was attended by 5 people in a public space in midtown Manhattan. The call was put out by the host for anyone who wanted to debate to appear. They did. After some general chat, there was discussion about debating the topic of self-determination movements in Hawaii. Although little was known about it between the attendees, they agreed to debate it. But first they had to settle a prior question: Was this venue too cold? The weather was nice; maybe we should debate outside? The group discussed it and relocated to a table in Rockefeller center.

The second day at the first event was about scheduling and some suggestions of variations of tournaments that could be had. There was discussion of what book would be required reading for the tournaments and when the events would happen. The scheduling conversation was very important and was mentioned many times as a way to move beyond discussion of tournament variation (which was minimal). There was no time for discussion of questions like: What is a debate? What should debate look like? What is evidence? What do we want debate to be? What would we like debate to create/produce/result in? Some people who attended do not teach debate or argumentation at all and others have no interest in teaching it. They want experiences. Some attendees didn’t care about the topic or the book that would be the required “source” for the events but did express how special it would be to be with students in historically important sites on nationally marked days. Whether the debates are discussed as they take in the sites of Atlanta or Paris, was, unfortunately not discussed. After all, there’s a schedule of events to plan.

At the second event, the debate was over in less than an hour and led to a conversation about what arguments are and what evidence is. Of course, such a conversation cannot be solved and requires continuous conversation within a context. This appears frustrating at first, however any conversation about these things – including what a debate might look like or should look like, and what rules there should be and why – is vitally pedagogically important. Such discussions bring to mind questions about concepts that masquerade as set quantities. A debate is a rather obvious thing if you don’t ask after it too much – or have a set of tournament rules and procedures that you teach instead of creative thinking.

One of these debate events is mired in the dead thinking of higher education, an industry that will not be with us much longer with its bloated fees, wasteful requirements, and egoists posing as teachers. The other, imbedded where it can be found, in public and for the public, reaches out with the structure of debate and the process of debate as the minimalistic way in for a deeper conversation about what counts and what should count in terms of debate. One is preparation for the future, the other is an under-attended celebration of the past.

Public involved, facing, and community-oriented events are an obvious better use of the time, salaries, and resources given to debate programs now. Instead of curating events for people interested in debate, events should be created by the university toward communities to get them interested – and more importantly thinking – about what debate is and what their relationship is to it.

These two events for me represent a gap in thinking, one that is quite dangerous when we think of what’s needed for the future. The university has the capability and the resources to dig deep and reach far. However attention will not come from above. It has to come from those who strongly believe that the role debate and argument have in our lives and the lives to come is much more significant than a weekend away spent striving to participate in the quarterfinals.