The New York Sophist

I never just turn on a TV unless I’m in a hotel by myself. It’s a strange thing to experience cable when you don’t regularly have it. After this quick trip I realize that if I had cable TV I would never accomplish anything because bad cuts of ancient films that I like are always playing.

The Gods were really smiling on my San Francisco hotel cable. The night I arrived The Principal was on, followed the next afternoon with Predator, and then Predator 2. Arguably Predator 2 is the most enjoyable of the Predator movies, but that’s a post for later. The Principal is probably the best ever “rough school” film ever made, in the tradition of films like Blackboard Jungle, Lean on Me, and the disappointing Freedom Writers. I have no idea why I like this genre so much. It kept me staring long after I should have been reading, working through my notes, or doing something else more valuable than that. Still, what a great movie. 

So how was Twitch? I bet you are dying to know. Judge for yourself!

Watch Twitch Talk | Stephen Llano and the Art of Debate from TwitchOffice on www.twitch.tv

The HQ is amazing – and what is more amazing is that I was told during my tour that in 6 months they are moving to a better one. I can’t imagine a better office space than what I saw. The university is really, really out of touch with crafting spaces that encourage people to work, to engage in collegiality, and to work together in unpredictable ways. The University is far too certain about what office space should look like. Let’s take a page from the tech industry and create a variety of spaces that one can move through instead.

I saw the library, several gaming rooms, several private conference rooms, all arranged to be reserved as needed. Add to it a lot of laptops (Mac seems to be the weapon of choice around there, surprised me, but perhaps my sample size is biased toward mostly design-team folks?) and a lot of space for meeting and chatting and you have the office. Oh, I found out where all the La Croix water is stored. They also have every good kind of cereal, coffee, and stronger stuff. It’s great. I stand in awe mixed with jealousy.

As for the talk, I think it went well. I have some things that I would like to tweak about it, and after I do that I’ll post the full version for the eye on Academia.edu. I think that’s a good spot for writing that’s not quite bloggy and not quite academic. It’s a middle ground for sure. The audience was a tough one as they gave nothing away: Attentive looks mixed with furious typing. I feel that having my primary space for public speaking be a classroom really makes you dependent on certain “tells” or moments in the structure of the talk that aren’t present in other environments. I found myself looking for those bits of confirmation which were not there. The danger of speaking in one environment, or style, or delivery mode too long is one easily conflates it with what style is, or what presence is, or what “good speech” is. This is exceedingly dangerous. But the risks of trying something really new are worse: Total loss of the audience. Each change has to be measured carefully. 

Unlike a university classroom however, there were signs that they were chatting with one another through something, which I think is great. I try to encourage that in my classroom, but I don’t think the students know one another well enough to engage in a side-chat during lecture. I wonder if they were using Slack or perhaps just the Twitch chat? Regardless, it really makes the lecture/talk environment much, much more productive, engaging, thoughtful – you name it. Peer conversations that layer on top of the talk – that’s a beautiful thing.

I wish I had the equivalent of Twitch chat in my classroom. It would really open up peer-teaching opportunities. Most of my students are on Facebook or some equivalent during class, but talking to those far away. Next time I teach online I might just open up a Twitch channel for class for certain lessons just to get access to that wonderful chat interface.

As for the rest of the talk, I tried to hit a good energy level, but it was hard to judge. Sometimes if you go into an unfamiliar audience with a very high energy level, it becomes a laughable presentation just because it’s out of place. Too low, you risk confirming the stereotype of the professor. The goal is to give the audience reasons to avoid the script – “oh, this is a college lecture, I know what to do.” We all have pre-made scripts of how to interact with various kinds of presentations and the trick is to avoid ticking the boxes that legitimize that reaction.

The other thing I did wrong was assume the audience would be all in on video games – the Twitch employees come from a number of backgrounds and perhaps I should have been a bit more imaginative with examples or sample topics. I think that the people in that audience are creative types who like challenges in terms of design and making a product for other creatives – for people who like to make content. That could have opened up a lot of different topics to engage. Also I could have made it a bit more interactive. I think that some sort of visual aid, regardless of how weak my slideware skills are, would have gone a long way as well.

Otherwise it was pretty fun to string together a lot of my ideas into a talk aimed at those who live far outside the borders of my normal discourse community. Encountering them and sharing these ideas helped me reframe them as well. Afterwards I had a couple of very good discussions with audience members who wanted to learn more about it. Sadly, I didn’t have a lot of good advice for them but maybe they are more long-term conversations.

A final thought is how I consistently underplay the value of public speaking. Even in an environment with obviously intelligent, motivated, thoughtful people, there is a pervasive fear of public speaking. I always say: Everyone fears it, everyone wants speakers to do well, everyone wants to get something out of a speech. So there’s no reason to worry – we all want it to go well and not be boring or horrible. But that’s different than workshopping a speech – something I hope that I can come up with a better method for in a week or so when I teach this first masterclass for The Motion. I have some good ideas, based on thinking and working out “what works” when sharing these ideas. A couple of people reached out to ask about public speaking tips – that should really be the foundation of every lecture we give, right? Or perhaps we could make it our practice and signature move when we present anything to do it as if it appeared effortless. “Effortless Effort” would be a good Zen-style principle of speech here.

I do feel like I won the lottery. I got to see the headquarters of one of my favorite things on the internet, got to speak about ideas I love to really smart, really engaged people, and got to eat some great seafood. What could be better? Sophistry pays in dividends what it doesn’t pay in cash, and frankly, we have the ability to name the value of anything and have it stick, don’t we?

The first full, free weekend in a while is bound to come with some snags. I let the day pretty much run away with me, my starship, a few quests, and a whole lot of farming in No Man’s Sky. Time just blows by me without any measure when I’m playing that. But I did manage to pull myself out of my video game haze and tackle some pleasure reading in the afternoon/evening. Now I’m about ready to hit the sack, even though it’s not that late.

The thing on my mind right now is preparation for an invited speech on debating that I’m giving this week to Twitch in California. It happens to coincide with the realization that I’ve been directing debate for 10 years here at St. John’s, and now might be the perfect time to step away from it. So the biggest question facing me is: How do you articulate yourself as a debate teacher, or debate scholar, without that obvious debate connection?

I still feel that debating is valuable to the students and I’m also very happy with what the program has done for them. What I’m not happy about is ten years of missing weekends (still always a trick how to manage one when I get them) missing reading, missing working out writing, missing recharging for the classroom on Monday, missing quite a bit of vital time to get my head and heart back where they need to be to teach. I’m still endlessly fascinated by the teaching and learning of debating as a subset of rhetoric. The importance of oral communication and oral questioning, argumentation, and advocacy imbedded within every class in the university seems hard to overstate. But this sort of working in debate is so far removed from what debate is now, that it doesn’t feel right to call it debating. Debating is much more like sportsball than education, highlighted best by the incredibly passionate way those in the international debating community indicate that they are happily not interested in learning or teaching anything at all. Education is a detriment to what they would like to do, which, at least to me, remains pretty unclear.

The point though is not to bash on intercollegiate debating, but to point out how my recent thinking has just dovetailed into this moment where I’m about to speak about debate to people who, I assume, have no idea what it is or can be. Perhaps a few in the audience have had a brush with it. Regardless, it’s a chance to take an approach to it as something other than a game, but a life approach. Or an epistemology. Or a practice like jogging. Or various other things I’m tossing around in my head. I hope to finish writing it tomorrow so I can see if it makes as much sense to my ear as my eye. The end result will be much more important to me than to the audience. I’m trying on a new understanding or relationship with debate as I start a transition away from it in a formal capacity, but only I know that. Some readers might balk at this and indicate this transition has been going on for quite a while. To them I say they might be right – they have the power and perception of distance that I do not have. I have to live inside this mind and there’s not a good way to get a clear lay of the land. I have been pulling away for a while, but I have thought of that pull as the force of innovation. I’ve thought of my ideas as critiques meant for change or alteration, not the articulation of a whole new approach. But it’s Saturday night and here we are, listening to Spotify, wondering about disciplinary identity, something that is really quite irrelevant unless you are ordering business cards through the university.

Tomorrow also involves a lot of listening: I had my students record their debate speeches from a contest that was held a week or two ago (I forget). I hope that hearing some recordings will help me teach them how to improve the arguments. I’m certain the arguments are good in a laboratory sense. The improvement is that of the sophist, the rhetor, the cook. You can cook a potato perfectly; this does not mean anyone wants to eat it. It has to be seasoned the right way, and that’s the study of rhetoric. Rhetoric too often is about doing it right and not about doing it tasty. We’ll see if I’m right.

All of this is in preparation for a competition in Atlanta that, as time goes on, is revealing itself to be another sportsball-style event. The history of American debate is a history of lateral hand-offs that are meant to say because the jersey is different, the game is different. I think it’s exceptionally hard to change an old system into something new, even if the critiques of the old system are good. I think it’s next to impossible if you toss in ideology and identity as the things at stake in the change. People want debate to look and feel a certain way because ideology has conveyed that value to them for a long time. When you set something up new, the nerves are going to pull the thing back into the orbit of the ideology. Gravitation, like ideology, is everywhere – it’s the weakest force in the universe until you realize that it’s always got a hold on you, always pulling you somewhere toward a larger mass. Pretty sure we’ll go to this competition, but not sure it’s going to be anything revolutionary, educational, or whatnot. I do think the students will benefit from it in some way, so I’ll trust that. I think I can perhaps convert it into something valuable if it tanks. There’s always Waffle House for the post-debate debrief.

In the past 10 years I have gone from celebrating debate across the world to now starting to celebrate debate across the curriculum. It’s taken the development of an international program that faced opposition at every step to get me to see the value of debate in this different way. But as of this moment I’m still a bit trepidatious about what I am. Can I just keep saying I’m a debate teacher? That title always struck me as nice, even though it references the cringe-worthy title “debate coach.” Debate director is a bit too snooty and also unironically hilarious. How about sophist? That’s a good one too. But nobody gets it right away. It’s just an invitation for you to explain. And by the time they understand what you are, you’ve already done it to them. Rhetorician is a good title too. But I don’t want to be associated with the faux political scientists and the slew of endless criticism. I want to teach production, not direct an athletic team, nor hold a course in French theory without one text in French. What do you call this person?

I hope I figure it out by Thursday for my sake. My audience will not be interested. They will want to improve their understanding of misunderstanding; their ability to argue and express their thoughts. And I’ll help them. I will do my best, whatever I am.

Recent events at my university have tanked my faith in the institution. It’s at a very, very low point. It’s not just my institution; it’s all universities. It seems that at every university, decisions are being made about fantasy students who are in fantasy positions. It’s like fantasy football without any actual football to ground it. I think the entire schema is silly at best, harmful at worst.

Student voices and perspectives are crushed on the regular. It’s almost trained as an impossibility for faculty to be able to listen to students when they offer criticism, observation, or thoughts about our incapacities in the classroom. When students offer arguments we immediately turn to discount them because, well, they come from students.

It’s strangely ironic: We have worked hard as faculty to create a discourse where the students are so idiotic they are beyond help. At the same time, our primary mission is to help make them better via teaching, courses, degree plans, etc. And we also assume that they are capable of deciding exactly what they want to do for the next thirty years on day one of university. I wonder if you could engineer a system better poised to catastrophically fail.

As I write this over 37% of the United States government’s assets are student loans. It’s only going to go up. And people will be paying on them in jobs they dislike, hate, or have no feeling about. They will believe university is the sham that got them in this position. And they will communicate that to others. There will be no warning for us in the university; we will just start to experience abandonment. And it will happen very fast. We will be scrambling to figure out what’s happening as the reality of closure faces the university. Not sure which ones will survive, but it won’t be many.

In preparation for this, the university should relax its attitude and control on students. It should provide more actual control to students over what and how they learn. The university should become a place for slow reflection, broad reading, and writing with and for one’s peers to hone a sense of self. Or to ask the question, “What do I want to be?” Strict credit requirements packed into endless semesters to force the question “What do you want to do?” – that’s not going to save the university.

Time for students to reflect, think, and decide what sort of person they would like to be is in opposition to the rest of the world. Nobody wants to be anything.  They just work and accept their work as essential. Time for students to read casually, to explore the library, to sit and think about what sort of person they would like to be and what they should explore in order to become that person allows space and agency to raise questions about what one wants to do with one’s short time here. These were some of the best moments of university for me, and they were permitted simply because there was time built into the week for me to think. Or should I say: I built it in by skipping endless classes and taking very few credits every term.

I feel like that has been eliminated by a lot of bad decisions, in teaching, in administration, and in how we conceptualize of the nature of students and our ethical role as professors in the university. It makes me want to assign a lot less work and ponder a lot more alongside the students.

To that end, debate programs should take a page from the past and inject a lot more of the literary society flavor into their operation. The precursor to the weekend-warrior model of the debate team was the literary society. I named my club the debate society as a gesture back to the days when a 2 day competition wasn’t the defining factor of a debate program. Students read, discussed, conversed, debated, and did many other things together. Why? Because they were eager and excited to practice their intellectual capacity by writing and speaking their minds.

The literary society was eclipsed at the university by the rise of the fraternity system and the arrival of intercollegiate competition as the touchstone of university PR. Before that, intramural competition was student-centered and for student value, not a way to advertise the value of the university to the broader community. It’s return might signal a turn toward the actual interests of students, helping them control a bit of their day and life in selecting what to read and discuss with one another, and practice advocating their ideas before thoughtful others.

The literary society is missing the central rhetorical ingredient of audience. Competitive debating misses this too because they structure it out, replacing it with those who are meant to pretend to be a thoughtful audience. Perhaps there’s little value in a real audience; the other members of the literary society are those who the debater should be working to persuade. But this is more literary than debate, and much more philosophical than rhetorical. I do think a debate program should commit to rhetoric, which means commit to adaptation. Competitive debate and philosophical speculation do neither. They might accidentally accomplish this, but they are very interested in the collapse between the ontic and the epistemic (these courses are often taught together as well!).

I feel like the debate program must add the best of the 19th century to its activity list in order to help produce space to imagine preserving a university of some sort after the imminent financial collapse. Corporations are already acting as if the university has died, providing huge training departments and internal curricula for their employees. What the university must offer is not more job training and not more “do” questions, but more space for students to imagine what their lives could be like, what the “be” ahead of them could and should feel like. When they wake up, who do they want to wake up as? Perhaps the university can fuel this question to keep it going in their lives for the next 20 years.

Wishing I had saved my first draft which Squarespace deleted for me when I clicked “post,” but I would also like to have a nice hot glass of that Moroccan tea – green, with a lot of mint, and tons of sugar, too hot to hold, served in tiny glasses. It’s the way I started every day this past week, just arriving home yesterday. A bit jet lagged, but ready to teach and work this week back in New York.

This past week in Rabat, Morocco I led my mostly-annual workshop with the students of ILCS Rabat on public speaking, argumentation, debating, and the art of getting your opinion and ideas out to an audience of others. I really like thinking about it and have been slowly making it better over time. This week was particularly good and I think I know some reasons why. This post is a reflection on peer learning – something that gets a lot of flak. Never really seems to go well, and it seems like amateur hour when you do it in a classroom. These tips might help incorporate it better in other teaching situations.

What we did this time was I had my students who were teaching prepare lessons with partners in order to teach 90 minute(ish) lessons on different things that we set as the subjects that need to be taught. We shared all these documents and then talked about them a bit. The students mostly worked together on it and there was very little intervention on my part with the lessons.

This post is going to get confusing because I have my students from my Debate program teaching, and there are students from ILCS in Rabat who are learning. I prefer the Friere nomenclature of “student/teacher, teacher/student” but don’t want to sacrifice clarity on what it was that we were doing and why I think it worked well. I’ll try to be as clear as I can about who I am discussing without doing any disservice to the idea that everyone is in a position to teach and learn, simultaneously, in the classroom, until some authoritarian professor comes in and screws it all up.

Here are the reasons in no particular order why I think this time worked well:

Lots of Time to Plan

We set up what we would teach and who would be responsible for planning it out pretty early. I’d like to do it even earlier next time, and maybe set up a loop with the Debate Society here to test out our material. There should be little difference in what we teach as good argumentation, debate, and speaking between our society and others who could benefit from such teaching. The focus on competitive success makes a big cleave between what one would teach to real debaters and what one would do for outreach. I thought the students who would be teaching needed time to put together what they might want to teach, and that was essential. There needs to be time for reflection and planning in any teaching, and consideration by those who would be in the role of teacher as to what they would like to do. I think most debate workshops skip over this, and feel their role is mere description of the steps to success as opposed to setting up a site of inquiry and practice.

Teaching in Partners, Not Alone or in Groups

A lot of peer education puts the student who is teaching as a solo figure before a classroom. This invites the class to use their well-worn comfortable techniques of judgement as to whether the knowledge is valuable. It invites thinking that knowledge comes from a sujet suppose savoir, some person who is also knowledgeable, and transmits it. This usually winds up making peer teaching ineffective since the signs of value from the students’ cobbled together rubric doesn’t work – here’s someone rhetorically performing as a peer, not as someone who is a professor. The rubric will score them low. Partnering them up with another peer though throws this ideology a curve ball: The traditional site of knowledge is no longer easy to determine. Knowledge exists somewhere in between these peer educators, and perhaps it is a bit harder to evaluate. The thinking that the class does about what is worth knowing and what is not also helps the content achieve a new level of interaction. I think that teaching in groups is not going to catch this benefit either, as more than two is read as a presentation, which is not as interactive as teaching. People can participate or not in the presentation, which is a very stable and stagnant form of address. But two peers trying to communicate the ideas of debate or argument to a class used to either group presentations or professors lecturing will be more engaged precisely because there is no comfortable place from which to draw a straight line from the knowledge to the subject of that knowledge (or vice versa).

Active learning is not Extra but Central

Debate is always active learning, but we never really talk about it. Pretty weird. It’s a shining example of what active learning can and should look like. I think we don’t talk about it because debate remains colonized by the sportifiers, who see the only role for learning in debate is to learn how to be better at winning tournament debates in a very particular format of debating. Although students who regularly participate (or have regularly participated) in tournament competition often slip to tournament norms in their teaching, this can be prevented by having most of the lesson oriented around the students actively doing stuff – speaking, working together, and presenting. The ultimate active learning class would be arranged around re-iteration – there would be work, presentations, evaluation, then rework. I think we had a great peer learning environment because we punted most of the class time to the class to speak and engage with one another while the students who were teaching provided prompts, group and individual guidance, and critique and evaluation at the end. In the classroom, everyone is a teacher and everyone is a student, until the authoritarian who loves to discipline shows up under the title of “professor.”

Actively Create Regular Space for Reflection

Every night at dinner I tried to make sure to ask, “What’s going on that we all need to know about?” or “Are there any issues going on that we need to address in the classroom?” The group was open to critique and also understood teaching to be a cooperative art, as opposed to the mastery of transmitting material to others who don’t want it (a popular interpretation of teaching I hear regularly). This was part of the long preparation of course, but at these meetings students felt empowered and comfortable enough to speak up and say what bugged them. A universal concern was that we speak too fast for people learning in a third language, and we need to give them more time to translate and prepare for their presentations. One student expressed concern about exercising authority over a class that was distracted – there was a need to return to the group to cover something else or deal with a question. I was able to bring up Freire’s famous quote that the democratic teacher gives up authoritarianism not authority in the classroom, because it would be unethical to let students choose what to attend to or not without experiencing, or hearing it, first. Another issue was ethos in the classroom, which we discussed a bit as well. But for the most part, it went great. Such space is essential to identify the potential problems in the classes for sure, but on another level it identifies teaching as a fungible art, something that is fluid and more a practice than a certainty. Such an identification is essential for getting teaching right.

Remove the Teaching Authority from the Classroom

The temptation to watch all this play out in the classroom after thinking about it for weeks and anticipating how well your students will do is a real struggle. But when peer teaching is going on under the gaze of the professor, everyone contorts their behavior to please the professor instead of themselves. I stayed out of the classroom as much as possible. Grading and planning other events helped a lot with that for sure – there are a lot of things I must do all the time, but I could have easily justified putting them off to watch the students teach. The presence of a teaching authority in the class, even if you are there for critical/assessment reasons, means everything will act for you in the way they think will please you. Eye contact of everyone is on the authorized teacher. Every small move you make is read as containing answers to what must happen next. Instead, leaving the classroom creates a situation where the students (all of them) must decide how to identify and judge the activities and interaction as valuable in the service of figuring out what is to be known and how to know it. Furthermore, who says being present in the class is the best way to assess what goes on in there? I could have the students who were the class speak with me or perform for me to assess how well things went. I could ask the students who taught for their reflection. There is also the risk of simplistic journalism, where being present and observing reveals what’s really going on. Proximity to an event doesn’t make you a better subject of knowledge, just a different one. Discussing the value of that difference is much more vital than simplistic presence, the root of up to 30% of some students’ grades at the university these says. How easy is it to construct an epistemically powerful alternative?

That’s all I have so far – there’s a lot more to say but now that I’ve spent twice as much time on this post as I needed to it’s time to catch up on the rest of the day! I just wish I had some Moroccan pancakes.

I feel like I just posted here, but clearly that’s not true. Being here makes the time slip by so quickly. I’ll sit down to do a simple task like grade or read something and hours will fly by. We’ll arrive at the school for our teaching day and it will be 2PM before I know it. I hope the Moroccan students are experiencing the program a bit slower than we are.  I regret not finding or forcing the time to update my thoughts at the conclusion of each day.

Aside from a lost (stolen?) phone, things have gone great. Probably one of my better programs overall. There are no judges, no teaching of format, no ballots, no wins, no losses, and no problems. 

The tournament vernacular, a Burkean “trained incapacity” whispers here and there in the teaching of the students, but it’s nowhere near as terrible as it could be. Mostly we are discussing arguments, positions, places, institutions in the world where controversies circulate. We have built in a lot of speaking, but several of the students have approached me to ask for more opportunities to practice speaking. I think this is a good sign.

Starting to believe that the best debating of the late 19th and early 20th century is going to be the best debating of the early 21st. Seems to me that this could be taken further – the debate club, or debate team, could be the “literary society,” a very old school organization that has all but disappeared from the world, and is clearly extinct on American university campuses. These clubs were gatherings of intellectual-leaning students to share ideas, debate, argue, speak, and hang out together. They sound pretty good given the lack of intellectual development opportunities on our campuses. The salon is the old/new debate club. I think that attention to the local, campus community is a lot more valuable than spiriting away 4 people to argue about a topic to an empty classroom at 9AM on a Sunday. 

These thoughts are mixed in with my reading, which I have found time to do even though I don’t find time to write. I think it was Sergio Pitol or some other Mexican writer (perhaps even South American) that said, “Reading is more important than writing.” Never believed it, and I also never thought it was important to make these sorts of judgements or differences, but today I’m in strong support of this enabling quote. 

John McPhee’s Draft No. 4 I thought was going to be a much different book. I’m happy with it, but it’s just a bunch of vignettes about different stories he wrote and how he approached the order (dispositio) of the story. This seems somewhat boring, but it turns out that organization serves as a site of invention for the story. The question, “What is this about?” is answered in the way that chronological events are presented in a non-chronological way. It’s really helpful for the drafting of a speech I’m working on at the moment, and the help is welcome but unexpected. Not sure about the total book (I’m only halfway through) but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be all good. He is someone who thinks of writing as a craft where you are building something out of available parts in a context that you don’t have a lot of control over. In this way it seems like a natural offshoot of the book Shopclass as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford. 

Finally started Ghetto by Mitchel Duneier and over 40 pages in it’s a great book. Reading it under the guise of assigning it to my senior seminar course in the spring. Not going to work – the book is great but doesn’t get into the issues I need it to, at least not for a while. It does seem to have some application as he starts off with the great tease that the Ghetto is an example of scholars not looking at an event or a moment properly in order to draw conclusions from it. He details the history of the differences of the ghettos by region, time, and state, and pretty clearly shows (so far) that there are huge distinctions ignored by scholars. Might be relevant for a class on research method or on epistemology but seems like a lot to get there. We have other things to read and do too.

Ok so I wrote this post and tried to add images, no dice. The internet wants to fight me all the time here.

Just lost the post and had to retype it from my notes. That was great. In between then and now I walked around in the 40C heat looking for the post office. I’m a bit wiped out. I wonder if this post would be better with the images? I think this might be the primary reason, besides business, that the blog stayed pretty quiet this week.