Opportunity, to teach

This article is timed perfectly for me.

I’ve been thinking about how to re-create (recreate?) my public speaking class. Like a computer, public speaking gets slow, frustrating, and doesn’t help you produce anything good unless you reformat it and do a clean install of the operating system from time to time.

This essay is really full of great ideas to teach it. The thing I thought of after reading it was how to craft an assignment centered around kairos. “Trolling,” as discussed in the link, is a good idea, but what about campus issues? How was this taught in ancient times? I think a more homogeneous culture, like Athens, would have a lot more agreement on what constitutes opportunity wrapped in timing (timing wrapped in opportunity?) compared to our society.

If it can be engineered, how about an assignment that has them link up something happening in the news, or something controversial, to something they think is important. Crafting those links rhetorically takes a lot of skill and practice. Perhaps the public speaking class is the place to do that.

Opportunity, to teach

This article is timed perfectly for me.

I’ve been thinking about how to re-create (recreate?) my public speaking class. Like a computer, public speaking gets slow, frustrating, and doesn’t help you produce anything good unless you reformat it and do a clean install of the operating system from time to time.

This essay is really full of great ideas to teach it. The thing I thought of after reading it was how to craft an assignment centered around kairos. “Trolling,” as discussed in the link, is a good idea, but what about campus issues? How was this taught in ancient times? I think a more homogeneous culture, like Athens, would have a lot more agreement on what constitutes opportunity wrapped in timing (timing wrapped in opportunity?) compared to our society.

If it can be engineered, how about an assignment that has them link up something happening in the news, or something controversial, to something they think is important. Crafting those links rhetorically takes a lot of skill and practice. Perhaps the public speaking class is the place to do that.

Style and Performance and Argument

Image via Wikipedia

Lama Tsony on Crazy Wisdom

Crazy Wisdom is a new film about the life of Chogyam Trunga. I like this piece from Tricycle because of the metaphor – “he embodied a quality of fearlessness that was like licking honey off a razor blade.”


Getting the best out of a precarious and harmful situation – what a great image for it. My question now is, can this be taught? What would the Rinpoches say about teaching this? Is it an effect of Enlightenment, or a cause? Perhaps neither – perhaps it’s a rhetorical dimension necessary to recognize one as Enlightened.


Buddhists don’t like to talk about rhetoric, per se, they do like to talk about “right speech,” one of the precepts given by the Buddha. Right speech can and should include rhetoric. I’m certain it happens in Buddhist pedagogy, and has always happened. I think it’s a lot more overt than we might suspect. I think there’s some fertile ground for research here.


For practice, how does one teach the debate student to perform argumentation this way? How do you lick the honey from the razor’s edge? Sounds like a question of style to me. And a question of many hours of difficult practice.

Style and Performance and Argument

Image via Wikipedia

Lama Tsony on Crazy Wisdom

Crazy Wisdom is a new film about the life of Chogyam Trunga. I like this piece from Tricycle because of the metaphor – “he embodied a quality of fearlessness that was like licking honey off a razor blade.”


Getting the best out of a precarious and harmful situation – what a great image for it. My question now is, can this be taught? What would the Rinpoches say about teaching this? Is it an effect of Enlightenment, or a cause? Perhaps neither – perhaps it’s a rhetorical dimension necessary to recognize one as Enlightened.


Buddhists don’t like to talk about rhetoric, per se, they do like to talk about “right speech,” one of the precepts given by the Buddha. Right speech can and should include rhetoric. I’m certain it happens in Buddhist pedagogy, and has always happened. I think it’s a lot more overt than we might suspect. I think there’s some fertile ground for research here.


For practice, how does one teach the debate student to perform argumentation this way? How do you lick the honey from the razor’s edge? Sounds like a question of style to me. And a question of many hours of difficult practice.

Internet Debate Workshop in the Arctic Circle


UVM debater Karen Nelson, one of the founders of the University of Tampere Debate Society with me on the webcam.

This morning was my second encounter with the debaters from The University of Tampere, Finland in a debate context and I have to say that again I am impressed. We did about an hour and twenty minutes of exercises where students came up with some opening and whip speeches based on motions. I think they have some good speakers there that will be outstanding debaters with some refinement and some more public speaking experience.

Karen, pictured above, was a UVM debater near the beginning of “The Experiment,” which by now you know is the term used to describe the introduction of WUDC/BP debating in the Northeastern United States. Now studying abroad, Karen has done a great job of introducing the BP format to her colleagues and peers at Tampere. The UTA Debate Society blog chronicles a lot of their great activities. Most importantly (in a selfish way) the experience she’s invited me to participate in has me thinking in new ways about the relationship of the internet to teaching.

What is the model of education that we have been placed in our whole lives? What terrain does that model inhabit? This brings us to the thoughtless requirements of one board, desks facing a certain way, a lectern, four walls, and a closed door. Classes meet at a particular set of four dimensional coordinates. Internet communication technologies have the potential to shatter this model, placing student engagement and adaptation to student need on a different metric of education entirely.
Observing debate practice in Finland from my study in Queens. I really like my super-serious academic face in this picture.

Teaching over the internet is something that I am convinced we are going to have to accept as a part of our daily lives as educators. The extreme costs of physical, embodied and immediate education combined with a political will (at least in my country of the United States) that wants to see fewer resources go toward education make it a necessity that communication technologies over the internet be explored by those who understand the value of good teaching. Without that important pioneer work, we are going to be left thrown into the world of online education without a lot of thought, principles or ideas to help us figure out how to do it well. And the students will suffer.

A good example of this is the unthoughtful uncritical application of Powerpoint at all levels of the University. Nobody questions following the generic slide order, slide style, or thinks about ignoring the demand for a title and a name on slide one. Everyone uses the bullet points without reflection. How did we miss the part where we interrogate the new communication technology in order to bend it to our purposes? Does communication always bend to the demands of the new technology? They aren’t even demands, so perhaps the frames offered by the new technology are read as demands? This would be in line with Freud’s observation that a capacity quickly becomes an obligation. “Because I can, I should.”

In the fall I hope to do a lot of experimenting with another instructor from the University of Vermont with our debate classes. With this new inexpensive technology available, why teach in a vaccum at all? Why must online courses replicate the closed off, walled-in classroom? I see a future where online courses are not just bad copies of physical classrooms, but challenge the idea of a classroom directly. What sort of distinction is this, and what are we endorsing when we make such distinctions?

Breaking out of a paradigm of education that extends at least as far back as the Roman Republic is not easy. But we kid ourselves we are making advancements in education when we simply inject these technologies into our pedagogical frame and fail to light the fuse. Debate and these newer modes of internet communication have explosive potential and I look forward to seeing what innovations to the paradigm as a whole come out of this mix.