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.

Day after Cornell

Relaxing at home today since the Uni is closed and thinking about doing some work but probably won’t get around to it. Today’s Kelly’s birthday so that’s the focus of the day.
I liked the tournament at Cornell – really well run and I feel like it was the most competitive tournament we’ve had in the east in BP format (so far). I think it’s going to get tougher as we go on. 
The tournament didn’t give me my usual great feelings mostly because I was doing some stuff with the tournament that I haven’t done before like helping to pick the topics, set up judging panels and stuff like that. It just reconfirmed by dislike for the running of a tournament, and how appreciative I am that there are people who like to do that sort of thing. I reconfirmed my belief that I am not one of them.  I’m happy to help out the running of a tournament, but I think where I’m best at that is in the low rooms judging, helping people get a bit better at argumenting. Yes, new word, jot it down.
I spent some of the bus ride home re-connecting wtih my students who I didn’t really have much of a chance to talk to during the weekend, which is, as everyone knows, the best part of a tournament.
Here’s a list format of the things about the Cornell tournament that were great. Marked with positives for your ease-of reading:
+ I came up with some new teaching ideas though after talking to a few friends about BP teaching methods. 
+Saw some freinds from California who came out for the tournament. I hope this means that more Cali BP teams will travel east more frequently. There’s a lot to learn from eachother.
+ Connecting with old friends and catching up as well as sharing some great stories.
+ Watching some really amazing students make arguments that I would never think of in years, much less 20 minutes.
+ Ate 3 blueberry bagels. So rare.  To get anything other than onion or Pumpernickle is super rare for me, so to get three over 2 days is out of this world.
Negatives:
– Having real responsibilities connected to the running of a tournament.
– Feeling disconnected from my students for most of the weekend.
– Having to vote against three of my most favorite teams, sometimes more than once
– Being away on Valentine’s weekend
– My new video camera doesn’t have the stamina of my older video camera.
I think the positives outweigh, kind of. They are of a different quality.
I’ll post what videos of the tournament I have later on.  Some of them crapped out I think. It’s too bad.

Technological Reflection

Just downloaded about half a gig of texts. I transfered them to my stick drive, something that one of my friends has labeled, “The briefcase of the 21st century.” 
I plan to read some of these on the bus trip this weekend to Ithaca on my microtop, a computer that is about 8 inches in size.
These texts are mostly Buddhist commentaries, and I always think of Jack Kerouac when I’m reading this stuff.  When he got into it, he wrote Allen Ginsberg many letters about it, including one that was a bibliography.  At the end of this nice bibliography (he annotated it as well) he remarks to Ginsberg – hey, dont’ go looking for these books in the New York Public Library because I stole them from there.  
Ironic, but close to what I’m doing, except the theft is a bit more ephemeral. I wonder what he would have thought about BitTorrent and all the freely accessible texts on the internet? I do know he probably would have loved the word processor – no more taping together typing pages to write novels.