The New York Sophist

This weekend is the King’s tournament, and it looks like the end of the 2014-15 season for us in terms of general tournaments. Of course, there’s USU, but as soon as I bought the flights and had the numbers in front of me, I was overcome with a feeling of immediate buyers remorse. I wondered about the value of spending nearly 8 grand in order to have my students debate Cornell, Vermont, NYU, and the like – something we could arrange for well under half that figure. But nationals is in Alaska, and the pull and drive to go is stronger than the sense behind it. 

I tab a lot these days. I really like feeling helpful, and feeling like I am doing something productive and meaningful for debating. I also like variety. I am a believer that being in the judge pool is the best way to advance change in debate practices, but one doesn’t really want to become an activist judge. Being outside the parabola, or even the perception of such, marks any of your comments to the debaters as “just for him.” We certainly don’t want an event where people are adapting their speeches for this particular mind or that one. We like the illusion of a reasonable public, so we attempt, to our best ability, to constitute one. 

What’s the result of all this tournament travelling around? The constitution of the reasonable public is crafting a civic space, one where we have norms and values that nobody set but just are. We live in them, we have created the content of this sea. Our actions, statements, decisions – all of it, no matter if you set a motion or if you just speak a lot – contribute to the constitution of a civic order that many really feel strongly about and want to defend. But what is this civic, what does it do, why do we feel so strongly about it? Apparently, I feel strongly enough about it to cut down my normal, mass exodus tournament schedule in order to attend the civic crowning event in Anchorage. 

One defense of this civic comes from the pedagogy of music, such as violin conservatory or operatic training, and that is the idea of the repertoire. In a conservatory, musicians are put on a path of particular works they should know. Eventually, they become so familiar with them they can play them from memory. At the same time, the memorization and familiarity with the works transform the musician. They reinforce particular habits, modes of playing, or are valuable because of their difficulty in getting them out properly. Propriety in these cases is a judgement made between the perceived intent of the composer, the situation, the quality of instrument, and the interpretation the community buys into at the moment. 

We tend to focus quite a bit on the first aspect of repertoire – the list of songs any debater should be able to sing – economics, liberty, free speech, governmental control, agency, oppression – the list can go on for quite a while. We tend to think that debaters improve as they get better and better at “playing” the stock of arguments and tropes at the right times, under the conditions of the motion, which sets the interpretation as a conductor might. Speakers also play with other members of the orchestra, and must adjust to make the concert whole. A good virtuoso doesn’t blast through the orchestra, but lifts it as the orchestra lifts the virtuoso (currently thinking I should go find that Bryn Terfel CD that so aptly illustrates this sense). 

But the hidden curriculum of debate is that playing this rep of whatever the debating civic feels is good and appropriate changes the way that the debater will play or will be able to play future works. It leaves a sediment, a fingerprint, a style, a certain taste, an approach – there are a lot of ways to describe it – that might not be noticed at all, and might not be shaken off. Sometimes you can identify a former debater in class by the way they speak about the reading, for example. This hidden curriculum might be more than just style – it could also be a relationship to texts and knowledge – epistemology – that goes unnoticed. We think about it in the terms of the contest, but there are broader implications for how the debater approaches the world (which we can conceive of, and many scholars have, as a text). This is not entirely a bad thing, but it can be if we don’t think about what we are valorizing within a civic sphere we’ve created to be both attractive and representative of something other than a mere game. I hope most debaters out there are with me in thinking we have more than amusement on our hands when we attend a debating competition. 

What’s the repertoire I want to teach? What is it that I want the repertoire to teach to the debaters? What will I allow into the constituted civic as heroic discourse? What will be the scapegoat? As judges we have a lot of influence here in our decisions. As people responsible for explaining “how debate works” to the new, potential virtuoso, we have all the power to make this thing whatever it is we want it to be.

This weekend is the King’s tournament, and it looks like the end of the 2014-15 season for us in terms of general tournaments. Of course, there’s USU, but as soon as I bought the flights and had the numbers in front of me, I was overcome with a feeling of immediate buyers remorse. I wondered about the value of spending nearly 8 grand in order to have my students debate Cornell, Vermont, NYU, and the like – something we could arrange for well under half that figure. But nationals is in Alaska, and the pull and drive to go is stronger than the sense behind it. 

I tab a lot these days. I really like feeling helpful, and feeling like I am doing something productive and meaningful for debating. I also like variety. I am a believer that being in the judge pool is the best way to advance change in debate practices, but one doesn’t really want to become an activist judge. Being outside the parabola, or even the perception of such, marks any of your comments to the debaters as “just for him.” We certainly don’t want an event where people are adapting their speeches for this particular mind or that one. We like the illusion of a reasonable public, so we attempt, to our best ability, to constitute one. 

What’s the result of all this tournament travelling around? The constitution of the reasonable public is crafting a civic space, one where we have norms and values that nobody set but just are. We live in them, we have created the content of this sea. Our actions, statements, decisions – all of it, no matter if you set a motion or if you just speak a lot – contribute to the constitution of a civic order that many really feel strongly about and want to defend. But what is this civic, what does it do, why do we feel so strongly about it? Apparently, I feel strongly enough about it to cut down my normal, mass exodus tournament schedule in order to attend the civic crowning event in Anchorage. 

One defense of this civic comes from the pedagogy of music, such as violin conservatory or operatic training, and that is the idea of the repertoire. In a conservatory, musicians are put on a path of particular works they should know. Eventually, they become so familiar with them they can play them from memory. At the same time, the memorization and familiarity with the works transform the musician. They reinforce particular habits, modes of playing, or are valuable because of their difficulty in getting them out properly. Propriety in these cases is a judgement made between the perceived intent of the composer, the situation, the quality of instrument, and the interpretation the community buys into at the moment. 

We tend to focus quite a bit on the first aspect of repertoire – the list of songs any debater should be able to sing – economics, liberty, free speech, governmental control, agency, oppression – the list can go on for quite a while. We tend to think that debaters improve as they get better and better at “playing” the stock of arguments and tropes at the right times, under the conditions of the motion, which sets the interpretation as a conductor might. Speakers also play with other members of the orchestra, and must adjust to make the concert whole. A good virtuoso doesn’t blast through the orchestra, but lifts it as the orchestra lifts the virtuoso (currently thinking I should go find that Bryn Terfel CD that so aptly illustrates this sense). 

But the hidden curriculum of debate is that playing this rep of whatever the debating civic feels is good and appropriate changes the way that the debater will play or will be able to play future works. It leaves a sediment, a fingerprint, a style, a certain taste, an approach – there are a lot of ways to describe it – that might not be noticed at all, and might not be shaken off. Sometimes you can identify a former debater in class by the way they speak about the reading, for example. This hidden curriculum might be more than just style – it could also be a relationship to texts and knowledge – epistemology – that goes unnoticed. We think about it in the terms of the contest, but there are broader implications for how the debater approaches the world (which we can conceive of, and many scholars have, as a text). This is not entirely a bad thing, but it can be if we don’t think about what we are valorizing within a civic sphere we’ve created to be both attractive and representative of something other than a mere game. I hope most debaters out there are with me in thinking we have more than amusement on our hands when we attend a debating competition. 

What’s the repertoire I want to teach? What is it that I want the repertoire to teach to the debaters? What will I allow into the constituted civic as heroic discourse? What will be the scapegoat? As judges we have a lot of influence here in our decisions. As people responsible for explaining “how debate works” to the new, potential virtuoso, we have all the power to make this thing whatever it is we want it to be.

I’m here to challenge a trope – well, more than a trope, something that is the nearest thing to holy writ in U.S. debating circles. That trope: More debate is good.

It took a terrible surprise snowstorm in CT this February to question this assertion that masks itself as the truth. On Saturday night, we had to quickly call the tournament around 8:30 PM due to increasingly bad road conditions, the failure of the City of Danbury to plow anything, and the continued harassment of my bus driver by the Danbury Police. The ice and snow meant the campus wouldn’t open until 10AM the next day, so we decided to break to semifinals instead of quarterfinals. 

Starting at 10AM was amazing. My students seemed refreshed, and staying though the final debate didn’t seem impossible. Normally, students are asleep in all positions, in all seats, usually halfway through some homework or studying or something like that. The final round is a great experience, but ending a day at 11PM or later and starting the next one at 8AM isn’t conducive to making this happen, much less valuable. 

In the U.S. there is a tradition of big breaks. They are seen as ways to keep university students interested in debating and keep coming back. They reward success, allowing all those who win a good number of debates to have the opportunity to become champion. I used to think this was a wonderful way to operate a tournament competition, but now I believe it to be harmful to the experience of debating, and what we can get from it. 

Big breaks and lots of elimination debates harm the competition. It puts people who have done well in the preliminary debates in positions where they could lose everything very quickly before the final round. The value of success in the preliminary debates is heavily discounted. We see this reinforced with the recent wins from way down in the brackets at the last couple of World Championships. 

It skews the value of competition. Competition has a large valence of benefits, and large breaks and lots of elimination debates make that value breaking and breaking only. If a team doesn’t break, they might turn their attention to their arguments or sense of argument. If they break, mission accomplished. Teachers of debating, coaches and professors (or whatever we should be called) become comfortable in using the break as the only assessment for student learning. What about reflection, conversation, and other metrics? They are marginalized by the break.

And what a break it can be. In the northeast, policy tournaments often break to partial triple octafinals, just to make sure everyone is “rewarded.” Try holding such a competition over a weekend, and the time gets away from you. There’s no time for reflection or conversation. There’s little to focus on but the next strategy. And perhaps on the way home you can talk about what it all meant, if you are still able to remain conscious after 12 to 14 hours of engaged speaking and thinking. 

BP is not much different. A small break feels mean and harmful, but it encourages community. People tend to stay around longer to watch the elimination debates, forming ideas and ideals about community. Shared rhetorical experiences constitute much more than a present audience, they are constituted as the audience, setting the tone for the ideal audience – what is the BP community? Who are we? Questions such as this are answered or at least engaged operationally through the act of being addressed and interpolated as the audience for a large, elimination round debate. 

The weather can be a lot of things, in this case it was frustration and inspiration for the small break. My students got much more out of not breaking and observing the remainder of the competition than they would slogging through a quarterfinal and six prelims. Ultimately, we will be better off as a competition, a community, and an educational environment when we can learn how to disconnect the rhetoric of success from breaking, and reconnect it to the value of sharing ideas within a community that is constituted through competition and reflection.

One of the greatest advantages one has as a teacher of debating is that you get to work with students at strange times in strange places and under weird conditions. You are also free of those overpowered structures of degree credits, grades, assignments, and classroom authority (which professors are way too obsessed with these days I think – why not let the students run the class once in a while? or often? they are overpaying for what’s being offered anyway).

Professors where I teach spend a lot of time talking about the students. The style they most generally employ I have named Cynical Pedagogy – it’s identifiable in its sarcastic tone when suggesting an interesting assignment or a normative demand on what to offer to the students, then it’s followed by laughter and a description of the nightmare that would appear if such an assignment was offered. The key to the discourse, I think, is that it is always about the students. This is the center of the discourse, it is what structures it and drives it forward, giving it life all its own. And it’s hard to resist – most metrics at the university point out that students are the fuel for the departmental budget. Students are what keep things moving. Students are what we both serve and make at the university. We depend on them to give back later as well, once they are set in their careers.

But debate teaching is not like this. When a topic comes out, a student might know more about it than the teacher. Likewise, and much more frequently, is that nobody knows much about it at all. We come together over ideas. Nobody is in charge, just the demand for good arguments that lead judges to a decision so we can win the debate. Thinking together is the only way that can be accomplished.

We can improve the lot of university pedagogy by switching this one preposition around – instead of thinking about students, start thinking with students. It seems simple, and it is. But it asks professors to give up some long held assumptions about their power, their role, and the nature of the subjects before us in the classroom that we call “students.”

Debate done well should place all participants on a level of equality. This is most forcefully advocated by professor William Hawley Davis in 1916 when he argues that debate works best when it maintains verisimilitude to the external world. In most problem-posing situations in daily life, nobody knows the proper course of action, but beliefs are plentiful. Debate shows us what to do and how to act when we are faced with such a situation. We must think together, not about one another. 

Students in a classroom are very often thought about. What do they need? What can I do for them? What can they handle? What is it that they are going to try to do to get out of this paper/test/assignment? There are no questions that appear these days that don’t associate to the preposition “about.”

Alternatively, think like a debate teacher.  What does this topic mean? What can we say about it? What are the best sources? What are the controversies here? – all of these questions require posing to the students – they require “with” in order to work. I cannot answer these on my own, because I don’t know. Argument is a collective activity, as we know from Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca. We cannot argue unless we are with. 

Assign reading that is new to you as well as to the students. If you assign writing, do it with them. If you design a test, think about how the test can assist the student, instead of figuring out what they are about. When they offer interpretations in the classroom, try the Peter Elbow suggestion of playing the believing game with them, rather than finding what’s wrong with it. Considering the students as with you in the class, instead of what the class is about, will help the experience become better for the professor and the student. Colleagues, not creations. Students arrive in courses fully formed, not lacking. Professors do too. Focusing on being with allows all participants the chance to contribute to something greater than what the total of the classroom provides. Planning a course about the students’ needs encourages a construction of students that is lacking, incomplete, and needy. And the attitude of the professor will also come off that way. Nobody wants to be receptive to someone like this.

I suggest that we start thinking with students rather than about them. We can make them allies and colleagues, or we can make them products and representatives of what our collegiate brand is. The latter is what our collective discourse suggests to us that we should be up to. Perhaps something as simple as a change in grammar can change our motives and our actions – and eventually our classroom culture. 

One of the greatest advantages one has as a teacher of debating is that you get to work with students at strange times in strange places and under weird conditions. You are also free of those overpowered structures of degree credits, grades, assignments, and classroom authority (which professors are way too obsessed with these days I think – why not let the students run the class once in a while? or often? they are overpaying for what’s being offered anyway).

Professors where I teach spend a lot of time talking about the students. The style they most generally employ I have named Cynical Pedagogy – it’s identifiable in its sarcastic tone when suggesting an interesting assignment or a normative demand on what to offer to the students, then it’s followed by laughter and a description of the nightmare that would appear if such an assignment was offered. The key to the discourse, I think, is that it is always about the students. This is the center of the discourse, it is what structures it and drives it forward, giving it life all its own. And it’s hard to resist – most metrics at the university point out that students are the fuel for the departmental budget. Students are what keep things moving. Students are what we both serve and make at the university. We depend on them to give back later as well, once they are set in their careers.

But debate teaching is not like this. When a topic comes out, a student might know more about it than the teacher. Likewise, and much more frequently, is that nobody knows much about it at all. We come together over ideas. Nobody is in charge, just the demand for good arguments that lead judges to a decision so we can win the debate. Thinking together is the only way that can be accomplished.

We can improve the lot of university pedagogy by switching this one preposition around – instead of thinking about students, start thinking with students. It seems simple, and it is. But it asks professors to give up some long held assumptions about their power, their role, and the nature of the subjects before us in the classroom that we call “students.”

Debate done well should place all participants on a level of equality. This is most forcefully advocated by professor William Hawley Davis in 1916 when he argues that debate works best when it maintains verisimilitude to the external world. In most problem-posing situations in daily life, nobody knows the proper course of action, but beliefs are plentiful. Debate shows us what to do and how to act when we are faced with such a situation. We must think together, not about one another. 

Students in a classroom are very often thought about. What do they need? What can I do for them? What can they handle? What is it that they are going to try to do to get out of this paper/test/assignment? There are no questions that appear these days that don’t associate to the preposition “about.”

Alternatively, think like a debate teacher.  What does this topic mean? What can we say about it? What are the best sources? What are the controversies here? – all of these questions require posing to the students – they require “with” in order to work. I cannot answer these on my own, because I don’t know. Argument is a collective activity, as we know from Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca. We cannot argue unless we are with. 

Assign reading that is new to you as well as to the students. If you assign writing, do it with them. If you design a test, think about how the test can assist the student, instead of figuring out what they are about. When they offer interpretations in the classroom, try the Peter Elbow suggestion of playing the believing game with them, rather than finding what’s wrong with it. Considering the students as with you in the class, instead of what the class is about, will help the experience become better for the professor and the student. Colleagues, not creations. Students arrive in courses fully formed, not lacking. Professors do too. Focusing on being with allows all participants the chance to contribute to something greater than what the total of the classroom provides. Planning a course about the students’ needs encourages a construction of students that is lacking, incomplete, and needy. And the attitude of the professor will also come off that way. Nobody wants to be receptive to someone like this.

I suggest that we start thinking with students rather than about them. We can make them allies and colleagues, or we can make them products and representatives of what our collegiate brand is. The latter is what our collective discourse suggests to us that we should be up to. Perhaps something as simple as a change in grammar can change our motives and our actions – and eventually our classroom culture.