The New York Sophist

Here it is. I probably shouldn’t post it, because I make a lot of mistakes, but I was distracted pretty heavily by the technology I was using. Not the best idea to use some new tech when you are trying to teach, but I wanted to give it a try. Also, I had the audience a bit wrong, so I had to adapt on the fly to address the things I thought they might like to know about. In the future I think that the comparisons to policy debate’s attempt to “mind the gap” might be something best left for the end. Or a paper. Yea, probably a paper (this is indeed how my inventional process works – talk about something, become unsatisfied, write down a lot of stuff about it, make it into an essay).

I used a small mixer and a professional microphone to record this on my end, on the other end I am not sure what they had but it looks like it was just a very nice Mac microphone built into the laptop. The sound quality is quite good and it makes me excited to try making some short podcasts about debate!

Things to consider:

1. Delay in reaction – there’s a bit of a delay from the crowd reaction to what I’m saying and it’s hard to attend to it.

2. Moving around things on the computer screen is distracting to my narrative flow – it’s pretty obvious – but I think that will work itself out over time and with some familiarity. More tests are needed.

3. Interactivity. So many simple-minded folks critique this sort of teaching by saying it’s not face to face so you lose something. What is lost? I think the Q&A is possibly the best part. I think unfamiliarity and a lack of experience with the technology is what prompts this criticism.

I fully expect that most Universities will demand 10% of their courses University wide be taught exclusively online over the next 5 years. I hope to get a bit more practice in before this happens.

Last week I shot some asynchronous teaching videos for our University’s “Storm Talk” series – which is where they ask professors to talk about things that interest them for a few minutes here and there and post them to social media sites for student reaction. This might have a bit better application for pedagogy than the “live lecture” – Lecturing might return to its popularly considered form of being ineffective, but this form might be super-effective online, where students can treat the lecture like a “text” – flipping back and forth through it to concentrate on the parts that they consider most difficult or most valuable.

Giving a talk today via Skype to a policy debate team about Worlds style debating. The question that I am using to orient my comments is one that might be a bit Lacanian: What’s left out? Or, since it’s a format that was created in Britain perhaps the better lecture title might be “Mind the Gap.”

Using this as the principle of constructing how this format works and why it might be valuable to practice seems a better approach than a lot of the head-on, scorched Earth style discussions that many people expect/lament/enjoy/instigate. My feeling is that exposure to one format when one is from another only increases the chances that one might understand the grammar of one’s home format a bit better, becoming a better debater in both formats (over time of course).

What I think happens is the same as in learning a foreign language – you become better able to understand how your own language works when learning a foreign tongue via the weird structural approach that we use in language teaching. This is why many schools report better test results on grammar and reading comprehension when they require Latin in the curriculum.

But it goes a bit deeper. Gadamer in Truth and Method relied on the classics department as his model of a humanities program that doesn’t always go begging to the social sciences for justification on the level of method. The reason why is that these grammars are invented, and one can always interrogate and question the order of the order. Translations in context or out of context or within addendums and modifications to the grammar rules are always in play. This type of fluid understanding is one of the few means to keep truth alive and useful – by keeping it in play, keeping it fluid, keeping it breathing. Dare I say: Keeping it alive.

Debate formats should be like this. Even if you disagree, time is against you. Culture is against you. Show me a policy debate round and I will use the same example to prove that it is not policy debate. Worlds is also changing/changed. These flows and pulses will happen. Do we want to be swept up by the waves or do we want to ride them? Better still, let’s learn how to surf. Enjoy your symptom, as Zizek would say.

Mind the gap when exiting or entering the format.

Giving a talk today via Skype to a policy debate team about Worlds style debating. The question that I am using to orient my comments is one that might be a bit Lacanian: What’s left out? Or, since it’s a format that was created in Britain perhaps the better lecture title might be “Mind the Gap.”

Using this as the principle of constructing how this format works and why it might be valuable to practice seems a better approach than a lot of the head-on, scorched Earth style discussions that many people expect/lament/enjoy/instigate. My feeling is that exposure to one format when one is from another only increases the chances that one might understand the grammar of one’s home format a bit better, becoming a better debater in both formats (over time of course).

What I think happens is the same as in learning a foreign language – you become better able to understand how your own language works when learning a foreign tongue via the weird structural approach that we use in language teaching. This is why many schools report better test results on grammar and reading comprehension when they require Latin in the curriculum.

But it goes a bit deeper. Gadamer in Truth and Method relied on the classics department as his model of a humanities program that doesn’t always go begging to the social sciences for justification on the level of method. The reason why is that these grammars are invented, and one can always interrogate and question the order of the order. Translations in context or out of context or within addendums and modifications to the grammar rules are always in play. This type of fluid understanding is one of the few means to keep truth alive and useful – by keeping it in play, keeping it fluid, keeping it breathing. Dare I say: Keeping it alive.

Debate formats should be like this. Even if you disagree, time is against you. Culture is against you. Show me a policy debate round and I will use the same example to prove that it is not policy debate. Worlds is also changing/changed. These flows and pulses will happen. Do we want to be swept up by the waves or do we want to ride them? Better still, let’s learn how to surf. Enjoy your symptom, as Zizek would say.

Mind the gap when exiting or entering the format.

Image via Wikipedia

Before the debate round starts, the student asks, “Are you going to judge on the flow, or are you more into persuasion?” What in the world could the difference be? What does it mean to be persuasive, and what does it mean to not be into it? What are we doing if not teaching persuasion?

This was my welcome back to the high school debate scene.

Another room, another debate – they stare at each other not knowing what to say. One of them finally picks up some crumpled paper and begins to read what’s on it out loud.

In a third room, a discussion of how best to address gender bias – via policies that call attention to the division around biological difference, or completely deconstruct the relationship through discussion?

It’s been a while since I’ve been to a high school tournament and judged high school policy debate. It was really great, and really took me back to the days when I coached it. A lot hasn’t changed.

Students are still engaging literature and information that is on a level that most people would consider too difficult for them. But gone are the rubber filing bins. I didn’t see one. All of this information is accessed by laptops, flash drives, and small folders of paper here and there. This was the most notable change, the paperless revolution – which seems pretty much over at this tournament.

The students are speaking about and evaluating claims based on paragraphs from scholarly material that is on a reading level they should not be able to access, according to most high school or middle school teachers.

They are speaking clearly and quickly on their feet, and they are attempting to apply this complicated literature to their own lives, and to their own experiences they have during the round, the tournament, the school day, what have you.

All of this is great, but present also were many issues of concern that are not unique to this area, but nearly timeless in high school debating. I dealt with these issues when I was a high school coach as well.

When students are beginning it’s almost as if they are thrown in and reading someone else’s words. They depressingly and confusingly read a bunch of papers and sit down. They don’t understand what they are supposed to do and don’t understand how to participate properly in the debate. One of my friends who attended with me articulated this as the loss of imagination in the debate – students are not asked to rely on their own imagination when they first start out in policy debate, they are given blocks and arguments written at far away places by people who have nearly forgotten what it was like to be a beginner. Wouldn’t it be better to rely on the student imagination?

I think there’s some good criticism here, but the way that policy debate works – and it’s a way that I definitely admire – is to encourage the development of imagination within the boundaries of a rule system that could be a simulated courtroom or simulated academic environment. I like to think about these debates as a hyper-charged creation of a thesis or other academic argument, with the procedural being most closely related to arbitrary scholarly or publication rules. When I say arbitrary I don’t mean useless, but that they could be nearly anything. I think the format calls upon students to use imagination, but they need to be more familiar with a lot of the technical matters first – as well as catch up in reading level as their daily classroom experience is not going to help them read the material they will need for these debates.

A second criticism is how much the students might run the show. The teachers might provide the basics of the rules and the basic moves in the game, but what one does with that stuff is really up to the students in rounds. A lot of the literature being used is beyond the scope of the teachers’ ability to understand. This can be a bit dangerous at worst, or at best sounds sort of ridiculous. As my friend put it, It’s like they are teaching knives without teaching cutting, teaching guns without teaching weaponry, teaching kicking without teaching karate (or as I just thought, teaching words without teaching rhetoric).

I think the solution to a lot of the problems in the schools would be to turn more over to the students to be responsible for. Under the rubric of competition, students strive to perform high quality work and choose not to just “skirt by” because a teacher isn’t around to use disciplinary power to correct them. What’s correcting the quality of their work is the fact that there’s another team out there working hard to beat them, to win that next round. And this means the students will work quite hard to ensure that they don’t lose.

The other thing it does is help the students learn to trust their own ability to assess the quality of their own work. They have to read it, think about it, speak it and practice it and realize themselves what the quality may be. One student said to me during some after-round conversation, “I knew I should have swapped out those cards, you are right.” The function of the judge is really to be a critic – not a teacher, not a disciplinarian, but a critic of the academic-oriented text that the debaters co-create through their speeches.

Teachers and judges serve as a nice balance to the students who are developing these self-assessment skills. That’s the best thing that those participants can provide during the tournament. I don’t think the hands-off matters that much, as long as teachers and other members of the community are turning student attention back to these issues often.

As far as the opening question goes – I’m not sure what I’m in to or what it is I teach. Sometimes I teach persuasion, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I tell people to avoid it, sometimes I avoid it myself. Somtimes, most of the time, I’m teaching situation based thinking. Some call it advocacy, others call it trickery. What I call it depends on who I’m talking to. And I think that student’s question reveals the beginning of the development of an understanding that being persuasive is not enough. Sometimes one’s persuasion must not be known as such.

Image via Wikipedia

Before the debate round starts, the student asks, “Are you going to judge on the flow, or are you more into persuasion?” What in the world could the difference be? What does it mean to be persuasive, and what does it mean to not be into it? What are we doing if not teaching persuasion?

This was my welcome back to the high school debate scene.

Another room, another debate – they stare at each other not knowing what to say. One of them finally picks up some crumpled paper and begins to read what’s on it out loud.

In a third room, a discussion of how best to address gender bias – via policies that call attention to the division around biological difference, or completely deconstruct the relationship through discussion?

It’s been a while since I’ve been to a high school tournament and judged high school policy debate. It was really great, and really took me back to the days when I coached it. A lot hasn’t changed.

Students are still engaging literature and information that is on a level that most people would consider too difficult for them. But gone are the rubber filing bins. I didn’t see one. All of this information is accessed by laptops, flash drives, and small folders of paper here and there. This was the most notable change, the paperless revolution – which seems pretty much over at this tournament.

The students are speaking about and evaluating claims based on paragraphs from scholarly material that is on a reading level they should not be able to access, according to most high school or middle school teachers.

They are speaking clearly and quickly on their feet, and they are attempting to apply this complicated literature to their own lives, and to their own experiences they have during the round, the tournament, the school day, what have you.

All of this is great, but present also were many issues of concern that are not unique to this area, but nearly timeless in high school debating. I dealt with these issues when I was a high school coach as well.

When students are beginning it’s almost as if they are thrown in and reading someone else’s words. They depressingly and confusingly read a bunch of papers and sit down. They don’t understand what they are supposed to do and don’t understand how to participate properly in the debate. One of my friends who attended with me articulated this as the loss of imagination in the debate – students are not asked to rely on their own imagination when they first start out in policy debate, they are given blocks and arguments written at far away places by people who have nearly forgotten what it was like to be a beginner. Wouldn’t it be better to rely on the student imagination?

I think there’s some good criticism here, but the way that policy debate works – and it’s a way that I definitely admire – is to encourage the development of imagination within the boundaries of a rule system that could be a simulated courtroom or simulated academic environment. I like to think about these debates as a hyper-charged creation of a thesis or other academic argument, with the procedural being most closely related to arbitrary scholarly or publication rules. When I say arbitrary I don’t mean useless, but that they could be nearly anything. I think the format calls upon students to use imagination, but they need to be more familiar with a lot of the technical matters first – as well as catch up in reading level as their daily classroom experience is not going to help them read the material they will need for these debates.

A second criticism is how much the students might run the show. The teachers might provide the basics of the rules and the basic moves in the game, but what one does with that stuff is really up to the students in rounds. A lot of the literature being used is beyond the scope of the teachers’ ability to understand. This can be a bit dangerous at worst, or at best sounds sort of ridiculous. As my friend put it, It’s like they are teaching knives without teaching cutting, teaching guns without teaching weaponry, teaching kicking without teaching karate (or as I just thought, teaching words without teaching rhetoric).

I think the solution to a lot of the problems in the schools would be to turn more over to the students to be responsible for. Under the rubric of competition, students strive to perform high quality work and choose not to just “skirt by” because a teacher isn’t around to use disciplinary power to correct them. What’s correcting the quality of their work is the fact that there’s another team out there working hard to beat them, to win that next round. And this means the students will work quite hard to ensure that they don’t lose.

The other thing it does is help the students learn to trust their own ability to assess the quality of their own work. They have to read it, think about it, speak it and practice it and realize themselves what the quality may be. One student said to me during some after-round conversation, “I knew I should have swapped out those cards, you are right.” The function of the judge is really to be a critic – not a teacher, not a disciplinarian, but a critic of the academic-oriented text that the debaters co-create through their speeches.

Teachers and judges serve as a nice balance to the students who are developing these self-assessment skills. That’s the best thing that those participants can provide during the tournament. I don’t think the hands-off matters that much, as long as teachers and other members of the community are turning student attention back to these issues often.

As far as the opening question goes – I’m not sure what I’m in to or what it is I teach. Sometimes I teach persuasion, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I tell people to avoid it, sometimes I avoid it myself. Somtimes, most of the time, I’m teaching situation based thinking. Some call it advocacy, others call it trickery. What I call it depends on who I’m talking to. And I think that student’s question reveals the beginning of the development of an understanding that being persuasive is not enough. Sometimes one’s persuasion must not be known as such.