The New York Sophist

Day two is over and a lot of people are getting ready to go to the party at a local nightclub. I’m going to take the night off to do some relaxing.

Now halfway through the tournament – things are moving smoothly and from my point of view, very fast! As you can see, this is quite a beautiful place, but most of my time is spent inside the hotel thinking abou debates, arguments, and of course, teaching, styles of teaching, and how much teaching is involved in judging competitive debates.

The motions at the tournament are all very interesting, and I think they require careful attention to every term in order to win from the opening proposition. But then I wonder when that’s not the case.

The best thing about today was how many styles of giving decisions and leading discussions in adjudication that I took part in. My thoughts now are that good chairs must balance two distinct tasks that are on a continuum:
1. evaluating competitively vs. teaching (for debaters)
2. normalizing vs. training (for wings)

So depending on what a chair thinks is important, they will lean toward one of these poles on each metric.

It’s a rough idea, but something worth working out later. For now I am going to relax a bit and try to get some sleep!

Getting ready for day two of competition here in Antalya, Turkey at the Koc Worlds. Day one was great – I felt the rounds I saw were much better quality than the rounds in Cork last year – compared laterally of course.

I have a few good ideas for posts coming out of the great conversations and encounters I’ve been having over the past couple of days. One of the most interesting moments was finally getting my hands on a copy of the Monash Debate Review, a publication I have been interested in for a few months now. It looks good, and the editorial staff seems to really be interested in pursuing academic study of debate.

The motions so far have been pretty interesting. I think if anything, they are good for teaching how to approach motions on the first half of the debate. That’s what I’ll be using them for anyway.

Round 1: This House would ban labor unions.
Round 2: This House believes that developing nations should pay the full tuition of female university students.
Round 3: This House would financially incentivize both inter-faith and inter-ethnic marriages.

Now the tab is out for round four, so it’s time to start the day! More to come.

I had some pretty good video already, even though we just arrived in Turkey. The wireless here though is limited to the hotel lobby, and everyone seems to want to use it at the same time – so video uploading is pretty much out of the question. Instead, I guess I will have to rely on my puny words to describe what is happening. I have a few good photos, and should be able to upload one or two of those as time goes by.

Today is mostly orientation and meeting up with old friends as well as making some new ones. I’m just relaxing for most of the day. There is a mandatory briefing this afternoon.

The highlight of the trip so far was our flight from JFK to Instanbul, which three hours into it had to return to JFK to repair the lavatories. I guess flying for 8 hours without a functioning bathroom is beyond acceptablity. Anyway, we left at 5pm, returned at 8:30 and then were off into the air again at midnight. 25 hours later here I am in Antalya, Turkey!

Taking a short break from preparing for Christmas and a trip to Turkey for the World University Debating Championships next week. I have been doing a bit of shopping and meandering around New York waiting to go to the museum with my Aunt in about half an hour.

The biggest and best news is that I finally finished my doctorate which gives me a lot more time to work on projects that I’ve been waiting to work on a long time. The first is re-designing my public speaking course to attend more to response and consideration of the ideas of others, rather than the standard model of consideration of the ideas of the speaker in a vacuum. I need to design a list of texts for response for each speech, and only keep a couple of speeches in the curriculum that are purely for the speaker to share his or her own thoughts without a context.

Secondly I am trying to design a course that will be the door to placing competitive debate at my University in the curriculum. I feel that full curricular integration is the way to go for both the department and the debate club to flourish. It will allow for the servicing of more diverse majors and students and also give a more honest introduction of the field to the students who happen to stumble into a debate course. I look forward to designing it.

Finally I am considering putting a debate podcast together that will consider the teaching and practice of debate for a wide international audience. I wonder if it should be audio or video. I think it will start audio, and grow from there. At WUDC I hope to kick it off with some video blogging that I will post here. Keep an eye out for it.

WUDC promises to be great – catching up with old friends, making new ones, and as always those impromptu conversations about teaching and learning debate that really help me improve my practice in the new year. I hope it’s going to be a fun one!

Now off to the Guggenheim!

No big enlightening post for today – mostly just a day of catching up on miniscule (yet important) things around the office and in my academic life.