The New York Sophist

We’re done with the USU Nationals in Denver and I have a few questions:

What sort of competition is this? What is it that we are competing to be good at doing? Or saying? Or being? Is this more like baseball or art? Dance or track? Competitive cooking shows or American Idol? What’s the best metaphor?

How can you keep alive the distance between act and habit in debate competitions? Said another way, how can you reward the good by naming it “good” without the belief that the label stays no matter what you say next? 

anti-intellectualism is a central part of the average reasonable voter’s world in this moment. We can’t help but replicate some of that. Is this ok? Should we work to exclude it? 

What is the understanding of evidence and proof for the debate participant, and is it stable?

The public is missing. Do we care? 

My last post was about the difference between an administrator and a teacher, and how easily those things elide into one another. After reading some comments on it, I was returned in my mind to my days as a high school teacher in Texas. Thinking about those days reminded me of an older idea, an idea that the goal of administrative rhetoric is to crowd out, freeze, and shut down an alternative rhetoric based on teaching as the governing discourse of the institution. This is done through substituting the tone of institutional rhetoric for the tone of communitarian discourse.

There are deeper connections here, as I suspected there would be somewhere in the recesses of my thinking. I once was a high school teacher, and there is a very compelling communitarian rhetoric that high school administrators use to get you to feel guilty about not joining them in the paperwork empire they are trying to construct. For most school administrators must secure their position by creating some perceived value to their position. I would say most school administrators are using their current position to be promoted to some other position, or they are satisfied (and surprised) that they were able to nail down the job they have, so they try to justify their position’s vital role through the creation of a lot of extra work for the teachers.

They co-opt communitarian rhetoric by establishing the work they are doing as benefiting the entire school and all students. They honestly believe most of what they are saying since they conceptualize the school and the students as the same thing on a plane of statistics about graduation and state test marks broken down on every metric you can possibly imagine. You can see exactly how any identity intersection is doing on a test or with graduation or what have you. The forms, the work that is created for teachers to do as administrators, is conceptualized as more important than teaching since it is broad, easily visualized, and applicable to every possible identity that the students could have.

Contrast this view with the act of teaching, which is generally out of view, difficult to enumerate or craft into statistics, very personal, very contextual – it has a very quick expiration date (most of what worked one day with one class will fail with another class on that same day or later). It’s often a product of time, attitude, and moment – and the teacher’s practice in the art of catching the situation and responding with a “teaching attitude.”

This is tough to do and requires a lot of energy and attention. Such things are eroded by dividing teacher attention and reducing teacher energy by refusing to give them the time in their teaching situation (class period, classroom, course, etc) to practice this art. Teaching, under the dominant discourse of the administration, is the opposite of “teaching” since what is productive and valuable for the school is determined by the co-opted communitarian rhetoric based on visibility, intersectional statistics, and ease of categorization into numerical values.

This is how the teacher is made to feel bad doing the work of teaching instead of doing the work of the school. Effective teachings difficulty in being pinned down or measured, its personal nature, its hard-to-replicate effervescence in the moment with the particular student and class makes it hard for others who were not present in the classroom to appreciate it or even name the value of it. Often presence in the classroom doesn’t capture it either.

The obsession to measure teaching through communitarian arguments based on things that are easy to count covers up the elided claim that what is good for the school is good for the student. There can never be a “good for the student” without teachers who are encouraged to disappear into the eddies and pools of the current and address what is swirling around them now. We would do good to encourage those who have an affinity for the art of grappling with uncertainty and making something good out of it for those joining us downstream.

It’s a hard rhetoric to fight. Where I work, professors regularly assign large papers and constant journaling and quizzing as if the production of texts was direct evidence that a class was worthy or challenging to the students. We are so panicked about how good teaching is determined that we latch on to the administrative rhetoric of the institution as a metaphor for our students. We replicate the paperwork nightmare that is placed on us under the language that this is for the benefit of all of us. We tell our students this is beneficial – a dodge from the harder question of determining what, in an hour long class meeting, would actually be beneficial to do.

There is no comfortable rhetoric of what good teaching looks like outside of being a strict adherent to the administrative, productive, institutional model. This is comfortable because we have tons of papers to grade and tons of work to chide the students for doing poorly. It makes sense to the rest of the world what teaching is when it looks like this.
What about a rhetoric of uncertainty and indeterminism? What about the teaching rhetoric where what is focused on is potential and creativity rather than progress and mastery? What if the total sum of the elements of the course was not a boundary, not a soccer field one must run around in until exhausted, but a diving platform, a place where one can prepare oneself to leap off, twist however they want, and safely enter the water, emerge, and contemplate doing it again? Questions of metaphor, how to represent in rhetoric a situation of uncertainty and instability, are difficult yet productive for a teaching discourse that exists on its own terms. 

On the train headed to the Lafayette debates, sponsored by the French Embassy and GW in lovely Washington, D.C. A different sort of debate competition that I have enjoyed helping the students prepare for.

During the run-up to all of this, as I have all semester, I have been interrogating why I am so frustrated and short these days with the subject of debating. I’ve nearly lost all interest in it as it seems like an event very loosely connected to the university. There’s little thinking, a lot of copying of speeches, and zero scholarship either going into or coming out of BP debate these days. But the root of my frustration is with something else. I think that I am frustrated because I have confused administering a program with teaching.

When running a large-ish BP program, one mostly takes on the role of a program administrator. You book hotels, tickets, you pay fees, you order checks cut, you know some of the accounting people better than faculty who study similar things to you who are in departments you never go to. You constantly check up on students and ensure they are going to show up, that they brought what they needed, all of that sort of thing. BP with its emphasis on quick preparation and familiarity with how to approach motions within BP (as opposed to how to approach motions in many argumentative forums) discourages teaching in terms of no prep, no laptops, and no advance limitations to the motions.

Where’s the teacher? BP discourages the teacher and pumps up the coach-administrator, who is a figure that makes sure the teams are lined up, the judge obligation is filled, and that his or her teams have a procedure down to construct winning arguments based on the structure of a speech or a motion regardless of the subject matter or content of the debate. The teacher becomes a “chief strategist” someone who maybe has walked that road before (won a lot of important debates) or has some insight into what wins and losses. This is the equivalent of teaching a literature course based on word frequency or number of adjectives used in the book, things like that.

I enjoyed debate because I enjoy teaching, and current practices have worked to eliminate the possibility of teaching from BP. Instead you want someone to offer processes that can be easily mastered and frequently deployed to find the right thing to say on a motion (rather than the best, which is often the goal of university courses, determined by the standards of a field).

What would teaching look like for debate?

I think praxis is what is needed here. The right amount of theory on argument, audience, persuasion and the like that then is critiqued and modified based on practices with audiences who evaluate those arguments. This is very broad, however, compare it to what most people think is happening at BP competitions: The purification of argument in a larger project of being right about issues. There’s little praxis here; the right way to argue has been determined and is reinforced via the hegemonic practices of the CA system and the lack of accessible motion writing norms (as well as the absence of any political will to develop such a thing). 

I think this competition will be a good test for me as I really enjoyed walking through some theory and other readings with my students, spending hours talking to them about different arguments and approaches rather than booking a bunch of hotels or going over some YouTube video to extract the structural norms of victory. Instead, I had an opportunity to read some new texts with my students and re-discover some favorites. Teaching is what attracted me to debating at the start of this journey, and my confusion of debate with program administration, or being a coach of some kind, I somehow confused with this art.

Administration is important, but not if it’s the majority of your interaction with debating. Administration also includes the formulaic approach of figuring out strategies of winning, as opposed to strategies of how to explain a difficult text. Audience is key too: Without it, there can be no debate or argument pedagogy that intersects debate with contemporary or 20th century argumentation scholarship.

For many years I have been trying to hammer out this book on metaphors for debate as an educational practice. Competitive debate is, of course, tied up in there even though I know you refuse to believe you are participating in something educational (my own students call non-tournament debate events ‘learning trips’ – nicely diminutive with just the right dash of halcyon school-system rhetoric). The metaphors are not in short supply, but what is are the connections making the metaphors really sing.

Recently finishing up reading Esther Schor’s book Bridge of Words about the history and development of Esperanto. I was using Esperanto as a possible metaphor, making the argument that there are a group of folks out there looking at debate as a pure form of argument, something that is absent the missteps or errors of daily lived argumentation. A quick glance at the Malaysia Debate Guide confirms both that the desire for purity is alive and well in the debate world, and secondly that a quick glance is all that is needed to get the total value from that document.

Turns out I haven’t been thinking of Esperanto in the proper historical context to make it an adequate metaphor for debating practices. Instead of Esperanto being a corrective to the imperfect and irregular natural languages of the earth, Esperanto was meant to be an equalizer between speakers of different languages. Instead of one person having all the advantages by being a native speaker, or by having studied and mastered the language with other native speakers, both speakers must work to interpret what is being said and what they want to say. It disadvantages both speakers so nobody has the upper hand in the communicative moment.

Since there are no native Esperanto speakers, this works pretty well. Nobody in the exchange has an unfair advantage. There’s no secret place to go to master the accent, the grammar, the idiomatic parts of the language. There’s only both people practicing within a language that is not theirs, but the world’s. A language that belongs to nobody.

Debate should be more like esperanto, but many practitioners think that debate is a quest for getting an advantage around idioms, irregular constructions and the like. Most debaters and most debate coaches think that debate is about mastering the grammar and realizing it to a level of perfection. They think the way to do well in debate is to find mastery of the language of debate to leave their opponents at a disadvantage in the language of the form.

What is the grammar of debate? Fairly useless idiomatic things that only make sense to the users of that language. Things like roadmaps, distinguishing rebuttal from constructive, and announcing the number of arguments you will say. There are also argument specific ones such as examples that are frequently given, and grand statements on the nature of rights and freedoms in democratic systems.

This is much closer to Latin, in particular those Latinists who are obsessed with Ciceronian Latin, a form of the language that is perfectly useless. What I mean is that it’s use is an attempt to achieve a perfect form of the grammar and agreement of the terms of Latin in a very ornate, formal, and pure way – meaning that nobody would use such Latin in their daily lives. The daily Latin is full of slang, errors, and constructions that do not serve perfect structural meaning, but serve getting meaning across situationally.

What we need isn’t a perfected argumentative structure or form of public deliberation. What we need is an equal playing field between speakers in order to test the value and strength of our arguments. Treating debate like a language to perfect only serves a monastic vision of debate, something that is useless but admirable as the perfect elimination of all the slip-ups of everyday argument. Instead of this Ciceronian ideal, let’s make our formats Esperanto – a place where one’s advantages and disadvantages in speaking and arguing are rendered moot in the face of a structure that is easy to learn but difficult to master. This is how you get fairness in debate is a system where all participants have no access to an automatic frame in which to deposit what they are going to say. What should improve are the depth and subtlety of student arguments, not their perfection in time management or getting that rebuttal speech down just right. A perfect debate form serves nobody, excluding those who come well prepared to discuss important ideas but are left behind by a community obsessed more with the argumentative equivalent of an ablative of means (like counterprops) rather than examining a variety of information about a controversial issue brought foward intentionally by the format in a way that a wide number of people could access and understand.

It’s raining, but four years ago it was sunny when I watched my mom breathe for the last time. Now I’m sitting here looking at reciepts  for pizza and taxis and filling out forms that prove that, yes, these were university expenses. And I think my job is so important and valuable.

She wasn’t gone long before I hopped on a plane to attend a debate tournament, because they matter so much. I remember nothing of that event. Every tournament since that one has been less and less meaningful. Now they simply sit in my mind and rot.

These 9 dollar an hour cubicle functionary tasks are the wounds we of course bear for the task of doing “oh so much” for education. This is a narrative I have constructed as universal, but it’s shared by only one person – me. I share it with my ideal self. He’s a disgusting figure, someone who thinks he’s so amazing for spending so much time working with students outside of the official confines of the classroom. He’s proud of the sacrifices he makes; he feels entitled to things. He’s full of shit. This husk is what I’ve made in order to justify where I sit in the world, a place far away from the much more enjoyable life I used to have where I would do things that needed no justification to myself as valuable. 

I used to read and write for my own enjoyment. Now those tasks are pushed to the secondary, and tertiary lines due to serving the university. I’ve convinced myself that the uttered phrase, “thank you for all you do for the university” is some sort of currency, moral or otherwise. What a joke. If anyone is profiting off of what I’ve been doing, I’ll never know. I try to meet with students, the noise from the cleaning staff is too loud for us to have a conversation. At least someone is having fun in the world. 

My mother’s hospital room was an endless parade of visitors. Young and old, they praised her as a teacher. She had done it for thirty years. We were never alone, not until those last few minutes. They could have been hours. I was not attentive to the time. Not one of them said, “thank you for all you did for the school.” Because they knew it was insulting. Insulting comments are best kept from dire and emotional moments. Better to deliver them in insulting circumstances – such as when you have done a lot of unpaid work and consider yourself lucky to sit in a dirty, tiny cubicle next to the garbage.

I remember spending whole days reading in the library. Now I spend whole days doing paperwork. Now I prepare the wrong readings for class. Now I fantasize about how I’m improving things at my university.

It’s a sick joke. I wrote it. I delivered it. Nobody laughs.

What a fool I’ve been.

“Thank you for all you do for the University” will be no comfort when my last sunrise moves to meet me. It’s coming. The beams are reaching toward me. I’ve done nothing. I have nothing to show for all of my supposedly noble hard work. I’ve improved nothing around me. Everything is smudged with my fingerprints. Things are in different places than they were. there’s some mud on the carpet. My legacy.

When that sun comes up what will I say? I didn’t go over budget? Everyone safely got on the plane? So and So had a great time speaking really fast to three other people in an empty classroom somewhere on the planet?

All I will be able to say is – what have I done with my life?

It’s all I can say today as I keep going back from my rainy apartment to that sunny Houston hospital.

I’m wasting my life. I’ve wasted my life. 

It repeats as I reconcile the hotel taxes from the last trip with the online records. What noble work I do in the service of higher education.