Final Exams Abound But Still A Busy Time for Debate

What to do in the summer – this is a popular question right now for my students. What can we do to prevent our skills from atrophying?

1) Do your daily workout! This means reading up on global events from global perspectives. Do you see a name or an institution that you aren’t familiar with? Keep it in a notebook. This should be a daily habit for at least half an hour every morning.

2) Research! Take that notebook and for a couple of hours a week go into the details of those governments or organizations you don’t know much about. Research and write it down in summary form. This helps you remember it but also creates a reference notebook for you to look at during prep time.

3)Find Outlets – here in New York City we are lucky to have the NYC Debate club which meets every Sunday in Manhattan. If you don’t have something like this, get together with friends and discuss the issues, or even set up some electronic meetings with teammates via Skype or possibly Second Life.

4)Drill Yourself – Watch debating videos on the internet and assign yourself a speech, then give it and record it. Watch the speech the person in the video gives and compare. What did you miss, what did they miss?

5) Take on the Big Issues – Pick a few books to read on those big philosophical or economic frames that you hear people arguing all season. Seriously read them, making notes or better yet outline the book as if it were an argument (because it probably is one). Then use this outline to help yourself prep for framework debates or framing the debate if you are opening government. Not sure what to read? Check out a dictionary or encyclopedia of philosophy, and consult the references in the entry for the philosophy you would like to know more about.

This is extremely important for American teams that are faculty driven. The summer is seen as a vacation, but in other countries there are still tournaments and debate keeps going. In order to compete with these teams one must not take the summer off from debate, but must take the summer on in a different manner.

Oh, and don’t forget to study for finals!

Why not Oral Finals?

Had a very productive meeting with an independent study student this afternoon that really made me think that oral examinations are the way to go.
We had such a nice productive session of question and answer, argument and response and investigation of ideas one to one. It was low stress and very productive, and ended with agreement as to what was to be written and how it would be assessed.  Why can’t I do this with every student? And what stands in the way? I think the opponent is tradition.
Finals is a week of stress, consumption of bad food and drink, and tree slaughter. How many huge, unreflective and bad thoughts will be sadly tattooed in inkjet across the corpses of trees? How many will really care about the words they are reading? Or the person behind those words?
I struggle every semester to think about alternative assessment and the final exam. While I back up my school laptop to my flashdrive before heading home for the weekend, I thought I would share a few observations from the one course where I always give an oral final: Public speaking.
See in that class it’s semmetrical and just makes sense. It’s a class about speaking publicly so the oral final is a no-brainer. But what about other courses?
In my public speaking class some students have reflected on this since the assignment is to argue for or against a final exam and what that final exam should look like.
here is a short list of suggestions from them: Listening exams, sharing and re-doing drafts, a group speech, engaging a topic previously spoken about from the other side, and others. 
It’s a great way to see how the students think but also some of these things are really good ideas for a course anyway.
In the rhetoric field I think we are lucky to have courses that so easily fit into the idea of an oral examination, but the trick is how to do other courses this way.
Earlier I was speaking with the director of our honors program who showed me a video of some music recitals from the internet to discuss with me a point about poetic language.
It made me think: With the internet as an archive of performance and evaluation, why not include things like that in the final examination?  Why not have students evaluate other performances as a part of their own evaluation? This is a way of getting oral examinations into most any course.
And a nice way of avoiding all that stress and waste!

Debate's Missing Manual

I’ve been doing some side-research this morning, which means I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing and instead poking around in an early stage of a research project that interests me quite a bit.

I found this terrible article in the Wall Street Journal which unfortunately is a pretty good representation of the “reading public’s” view of debate. Allow me to summarize what I think the assumptions are:

1. Debate is not essential, it is trivial.

2. Debate occurs last in the educational process, never first.

3. Debate obfuscates the truth.

4. Debate is only good if the truth is revealed as an effect of it.

5. Debate is emotional, semantic and sportified – it is the opposite of reason, rationality and cooperation.

I think that’s a pretty good, narrow list. It seems people, very much like Oppenheimer, believe debate and argumentation do not require any scholarly training or research to understand, that the effects and functions of it are obvious to anyone, and that there is a pure form of debate we have abandoned.

I think Alisdair McIntyre has a good scenario he establishes for morality, but I think the analogy to rhetoric and debate is clear as well. He asks us to imagine a world where a catastrophe leaves science in disarray, and a fascist political party imprisons and kills many scientists. Later, an enlightenment movement rises and tries to recover science:

 “But all they possess are fragments: a knowledge of experiments detached from any knowledge of the theoretical context which gave them significance; parts of theories unrelated either to the other bits and pieces of theory which they possess or to experiement; intruments whose use has been forgotten; half-chapters from books, single pages from articles, not always fully legible because torn and charred. Nontheless all these fragments are reembodied in a set of practices which go under the revived names of physics, chemistry and biology.” (from After Virtue).

People talk about debate and argumentation in the present day without much (or any) critical, scholarly or intellectual appreciation for it at all – they talk about it with a minimal amount of support. At the same time they have to talk about it because they recognize we depend on it for so much. Just like science in McIntyre’s scenario, it is necessary to have it, but people don’t quite understand what they have.

Even worse: Arguing and debating seem so natural that most attempts to intellectuallize them look trival or silly. They are audience oriented events so shouldn’t they be atheoretical? Most people wouldn’t think twice about an article in a major magazine about debating that didn’t cite one argumentation or debate or even rhetoric scholar.

So with this situation at hand I am thinking of trying to write the missing manual for debating. My first steps have been historical in nature and I am having trouble locating resources for scholastic debate practices. Today (more evidence for my point) the term “scholastic” debate is attached to any debate contest that is sanctioned by a school or university. This is not the prior meaning, and I think a recovery of that (from medevil university examination practices) would be a good first step. My suspicion is that philosophy, combined with the rise of manuscript and then print culture made debate appear anachronistic and that these technologies could accomplish what debate could in a more efficient and superior manner. Of course this is not the case, and with the transition to “secondary orality” (Ong; Havelock) debate thinking is required again in a serious way. But people cannot remember how it was done. They have charred papers and equipment without instructions (fallacies would be one example).

In the end I think that some sort of geneology or perhaps tracing of debate practices along side the history of rhetoric and philosophy would shine a bit of light on our communicative anxieties of today – flame wars, trolls, and email scams among them.

The Classroom as a Public Space


A blurry photo of one of the classrooms I teach in

I engage in a fantasy that the classroom functions as a public space. That is, the classroom in micro can be seen as the way people would interact in macro.

But the classroom is a very protected and isolated space. There are very clear roles for everyone to play and very clear structures of control and obedience.

The furniture and surroundings indicate that you are in a special place, a place marked for being what it is – like a doctor’s office, hospital, or institutional building like a court.

If the function of the public speaking course is to prepare students to attend to the demands of a distracted, sharp, busy public of transient bodies, how does the classroom promote this?

I am starting to think that perhaps it doesn’t, and it might be up to faculty to try to alter this environment to make it provide a bit more for the students so they can learn the most important lessons from a public speaking course.

What are the most important lessons? Here is the beginnings of a list I am working on:
1. That facts do not speak for themselves.
2. That the truth is not obvious nor immediately convincing, and needs a huge amount of help.
3. That what works for one audience will not work for all audiences.
4. That knowing more than others gives you more responsibility toward them, not less.

I know there could be many more and should be many more applied to this list, but in the traditionally arranged public speaking in a classroom these four are violated quite a bit. The students speak to a very limited and very familiar audience. They speak using a lot of tropes and shortcuts of reasoning that work very effectively for their very specialized peer composed audience. And the audience and the speaker often conclude together that “those others” out there in the world are just too stupid to be concerned about, unless they can get you a job or are at another university or college somewhere.

The answer to this problem for me is to “publicize” the classroom – with a dose of some more complicated audience theory (I’m considering a bit of James Crosswhite and some of Benedict Arnold as well for starters). How do we publicize the classroom? The easiest way might be broadcasting speeches through networks like Skype or stickcam. There are probably other alternatives that are asynchronous, such as youtube or blip.tv. The focus and the point here is to give students’ speeches a wide audience of people in and outside the university so they can have a bit more engagement and practice with that “public” audience that the traditional classroom marks as out of bounds.

The End of the University

Not in a teleological sense, but otherwise.

This guy thinks that the University will be irrelevant in a few years. The only question I have after reading this article is where or what would the motivation be to create all of that great digital content if the University folded?

Clearly what he means is the buildings, campus, physical presence model will no longer be relevant, but then again perhaps I’m being too charitable?