I know I should be at a bar, but wow.

I mean wow. What a strange tie in promotion.

Sitting here making some notes for tomorrow, coming up with simple motions, and shopping for new trance music on my favorite digital download site, armada.

I did forget my PSP charger, but thankfully the PSP has no trouble recharging from a USB cable.

Soon to the bar, soon. . . I swear I’m not that big a loser, honestly!

Notes from DC

All settled in and just doing some last minute work before the workshop starts in the morning. I hope I can make a good impression on all the faculty and administrators who will be there. It appears that while I will be teaching new debaters some things about BP, I will also be making an implicit pitch for the start up of the debate program here.

I may video some of the practice sessions, lectures or debates and post them. We’ll see tomorow morning how the scene looks.

For now though I’m listening to music and reviewing my notes. I don’t do a lot of preparation, but I do like to make sure that I haven’t left a key issue or component out of the session. In a few minutes one of my former HS debate students will be swinging by for a drink and possibly dinner. After that I will probably jot a few more ideas down for exercises and activities.

I’ll give an update at around lunchtime as to how I think it’s going tomorrow.

Slowly Posting the Videos from Cornell

Here’s the first one, quarterfinals from Cornell judged by me, Chris from Cornell and Irene from Cornell.


Quarterfinal BP round @ Cornell Invitational Debate 2009 from Steve Llano on Vimeo.

Interesting round, might be worth writing something about since there was some serious disagreement about the rankings during the adjudication process.

This is from Vimeo, which seems to be better quality in my opinion than Google Video, and since they are shutting down their uploading program, might as well start using vimeo. Tuna in his blog already uses it quite a bit and I think it looks very nice. I hope to get some fancier video software and actually start uploading in Hi-Def soon. For now though, these videos don’t look so bad at all.

To Brighten Your Day

I hope this article cheers you up as it did me.  What a way to start the day.

This morning my public speaking class wasn’t their usual talkative cheery selves and nothing seemed to be going well until I brought up the stimulus package, and they were into it. They are a most unusual class. The other class was more typical – we are starting an experiment this week and we’ll see how it goes.

So now grading and last minute work for the trip to D.C. this weekend, and hopefully some good debate teaching!

Introducing Debate to New Students

Today I’ve reserved for working on assignments, excercises and activities for brand new debaters.  I define these students as people who have done nothing in the way of public speaking all the way up to those who might have forensics or mock trial experience.  Debate is something different from all other forms of forensics, and so I think it deserves a different pedagogical approach.

Here are the questions I’ve been thinking about:

1. Is it better to list for the students some principles of debate, or to let them experiment and then form the principles they follow inductively?

2. Who or What should be conceptualized as “audience” for beginning debaters? At first, the teacher seems appropriate, but as time passes, this becomes very inappropriate.  The Zen koan of the “finger pointing at the moon” comes into play – the student can’t just see the moon.

3. How does one bridge the knowledge gap among beginning debaters without making them feel ignorant, stupid or worse? The “worse” here, in my thinking, is that they are unable to debate – that they could never know all the things that the older students on the team know, and are naturally “not smart.”

Most of the ideas I’ve come up with so far today involve the fallacies, and also involve constructing and refuting arguments with Aristotle’s topics and concepts of proof. I think that three-part system is a good one for starting people off with some tools that work in most any occassion.  There’s plenty of time to deconstruct the fallacies of reasoning later in their debate life.