The New York Sophist

Everything I am working on posting right now is half baked, so I can’t really post but I sort of want to.

I had a fantastic time at USU Nationals in Vermont, but my video camera was being disobedient, so I have no video to show for it. However, Tuna recorded some excellent rounds and there were a few professional videos during the tournament, so I encourage you to check them out at the Debate Video Blog.

Here are the things I’m working on posting about: What a defense of a national organziation for US BP/Worlds coaches looks like, Why the CA/DCA system might not be for the United States (thinking about adding a :A Geneology but that makes me sound a bit snooty), and perhaps something about the recent Ward Churchill stuff which has me thinking about the limits of academic freedom.

So in other news, Loke Wing Fatt was here for the past couple of days and he gave me great advice about how to advance my program. He has very keen perspectives on debate, debate pedagogy, and structure – three things that I love but might not be the best in the world at doing.

Monday we have a workshop, and it’s pretty much all arranged. I’m exctied to see how that goes as it will be the first function that all three of our allied schools in the area might attend.

This weekend was the Cape Cod Community College Warm-up tournament, and I’m really sad that we couldn’t participate. I’ve been thinking about it all weekend. It’s disappointing not to be able to go to every tournament. It’s a sad reality, but a good one at the same time as in the Northeastern US, there are more and more BP tournaments on the rise. With that and the West Coast, as well as the Pacific Northwest, there should be more and more tournaments that must be turned down. Can’t do them all. One day perhaps, but not now.

Well with that sadness out of the way (and a bit of happiness looking toward the future of BP) I am getting ready for USU Nationals, which kicks off Friday Morning in Vermont. I’m flying to Burlington Thursday afternoon to make sure that I am fully ready to engage in this beast of a tournament.

My students are amping up as well. Today they had their first practice session without me. This is very good. The function of the master is self-effacing.

Teaching is weird – done at its best, it eliminates the doer. One would not want the mind to rest upon the one who brought forth the concepts, but the concepts. In Zen, there is the famous moon koan – “When I point at the moon, do your eyes rest on the finger?” this is a classic teaching koan as well. How do you instruct without trace? Don’t the eyes follow the finger to the moon? The finger is still present. Or in more punny words, how do you “moon” someone without giving them the finger?

So I am getting a variety of reports on the quality of the practice. But for the most part it is good. Some looked at the moon, some didn’t. And I think a couple saw the reflection of the moon and smiled. And I hope they all get to be that way one day.

I used to say “By the time you are a senior, the most important and deepest question we will share will be ‘Where is the tape?'” That was a very policy debate oriented statement, I don’t know what the BP equivalent will be.

But it is always the week before a big tournament like this that one sees how far one has come and how far the teaching has left to go.

I am going to try my best to Vlog the US BP Nationals right here on this blog, time depending. Keep tuned in – I might have a pre-nats special or two lined up.

There is a situation that I have trouble dealing with in teaching debate to beginning students. It is the situation when a student demands absolute rules for how to debate the “right” way.

This comes from high rationality and the enlightenment mostly, and is also found in a highly scientific and absoutist worldview. This si the result of a system of teaching and learning that instists on the removal of pobability in favor of certainty as the end of education.

So it becomes hard to teach such students who are very comfortable and insistent upon such standards to do well (or to act at all) to embrace probability as not only an inevitable condition, but a positive good.

I didnt have much luck today engaging with a student like this on this issue and it made me realize the necessity of having a good strategy for proving this to students who want certainty and a list of rules for how to debate well.

The one thing that I was reliant on in the past was how archery is taught in Japan, or how it is done along the lines of traditional zen thinking at least – how the target isnt given to the student at all until after the student has shot wihtout one often times for many years. Students express the same frustrations about this sort of thing in those situations.

The target must be removed so that argumentation can improve or a t least be taught well. But can this be done? The modernist sentiment and deep track of argumentation theory would say no. So this leads us to the possibility of abandoning argumentation theory from the modernist tradition. But without that, argumentation theory loses great gains (burden of proof, presumption, evidence standards, etc). In fact you could argue that it wouldnt be recognizable as argumentation theory at all.

We could turn to Burke and go for identification/division, but again this is a target. How does one shoot without a target in argumentation?

I suppose the idea of the universal audience is where we are left, but again one has a target. Maybe distnquishing the idea of Target and target might be productive? Perhaps this is the distinction that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca make between demonstration and argumentation is exactly the distinction I want between targeted and non-targeted argumentation.