The New York Sophist

I didn’t mean to leave this site empty for so long. Unfortunately, I contracted COVID-19 and have been out of commission for nearly three weeks. I’m finally feeling better, and my struggles to summit this mountain of work are paying off. So it’s time to return to writing some interesting things from time to time.

I’d like to start by commenting about the winter. This is the roughest winter we’ve had in New York in several years. I managed to take some good video of the three different storms we’ve had so far.

The Noreaster on December 16th

And the Noreaster we had on February 1st

Then the follow up snowstorm on February 7th

This has pretty much been my view the whole time during quarantine. I’m very lucky and glad I had a mild case of COVID-19, confirmed by my antibody test. Things are returning to normal around here, even if we are still somewhat frozen over.

Classes are not off to a good start, but I’m trying to catch up by trying not to be such a perfectionist about every video I make for class. I think given another week I should be back on track. Then I’m going to start to work ahead in order to avoid such problems in the future. I usually do that, but this winter break I just didn’t. Is that one of the impacts of the quarantine?

I don’t put a lot of personal stuff on here, but thought I might start doing some different kinds of posts to keep up the variety. You can of course blow past these if you are here to read my thoughts on education, debate, and rhetoric.

We had a big Noreaster -biggest one in a few years – yesterday and it was impressive. I wasn’t brave enough to go out in it last night, but here’s the tail end of it the morning after the storm hit.

This was shot with my new GoPro 9 that I was suspicious about at first but really do think is a vast improvement over my trusty GoPro 7.

Blue State Coffee Pour from Professor Steve Llano, Ph.D. on Vimeo.

For the greater part of a year I put a short video like this one up every morning on my social media – mostly on Snapchat, since that’s what my students used at the time.

They loved it and we’d talk about the different stickers and things I would put on there and how I would put a motivational phrase on there every day. This video is pretty basic compared to what I used to make in Snapchat.

But times change, and students no longer look at or even use Snapchat anymore. All of them are on Instagram, and that program just never really caught on for me.

Years ago I tried to eliminate Facebook from my life. At the time, it was really the only social media out there so the students used it all the time. I had to return to the platform because students would not respond quickly to other forms of communication – Facebook was the best way to get things to happen when trying to organize people to do stuff related to debate.

Now that reason has evaporated and I think my life will improve greatly just publishing my thoughts here and having conversations. Already since announcing that I’m going to be departing those platforms I’ve had some pretty wonderful conversations with people that were much more in depth and interesting than anything I’ve been posting or reading there in the past year.

In the end I think that I’ll have to keep those platforms open simply because one never knows who or what might come along or happen. For instance, I got in touch with someone who wanted to give away some old debate books through Facebook. Once they get here (more challenging than expected) I’ll be posting their story here as well. I tried in the past to keep them open and unused, but wasn’t successful. I’m jealous of my many friends who have their accounts still open, but their last update or post was from 2012 or even earlier. Occasionally someone who doesn’t pay that much attention might wish them happy birthday or something on their wall, leaving this strange annual pattern of bursts of unliked posts occurring in clusters around the same day every year.

I want to practice writing where I have to develop interesting reasons at length, and Facebook and Instagram do not encourage this. I like to write, and I like the practice of conjuring up a universal audience to address with some claims. I find writing here – even if very few people ever read it – a lot more fun and interesting than posting something on my social media accounts.

I do wonder if pedagogically I’ll need my accounts again. From time to time I have chatted with various students using Instagram recently, but even that has died down. I think that with Discord and the LMS we use (currently Canvas) and some other things like email and Google Voice, online teaching won’t require social media. This is really my only concern.

But everywhere I go
I see it all, I see it all
‘Cause everywhere I go I can’t even hide my love
I see it all, I see it all
But everywhere I go
I see it all I see it all

Everywhere I go by ALPHA 9

It’s been a couple of years since I put my debate program down like the dog it was. I was very happy to be rid of it, and a lot of that happiness came out in long lists of what was wrong with it – primarily, that I had been deceiving myself that I was teaching rhetoric. Doing it the way I was doing it was nearly purely anti-rhetorical, primarily because there’s just no way around that audience question (or lack of one period).

These long lists of what was wrong have disturbed many friends, readers, colleagues, and the like. I still maintain that I have no bigger regret in my life than the way I operated that program and what it turned out to be.

But just this past week I’ve been feeling some gratitude about the program and some of the things that I did and was permitted to do because of what I prioritized and did. I think it’s just because this was the strangest Thanksgiving I’ve had. Being alone in my apartment here is odd on holidays, primarily because I have never done it in my whole 14 years of living here.

For several years I spent Thanksgiving in Ormoz, Slovenia teaching debate with some of the most wonderful teachers I’ve been allowed to work with so far in my career. I would not have any of those memories if it were not for my hope and/or faith that this debate program would work.

I have been thinking about NCA a bit and how negative I can get about the tropes around it (people talking at the bar about going to write their paper), but if I’m honest I always leave NCA feeling somewhat inspired to work a bit harder next time or to do more research, read more, or think differently about things.

Gratitude is something that isn’t the opposite of anything, it’s bound up in everything. This is how I am experiencing it now and perhaps how I’ve always experienced it (perhaps). Even if things are pretty bad or pretty cloudy, those experiences are ones that later on you reflect on and see that you got something out of it.

These two experiences are ones that, until this year, I didn’t really associate with the Thanksgiving holiday, but they are very much connected to it for me. I didn’t feel alone or sad or frustrated at all. I was just very grateful for my past experiences, my luck, and also grateful for the holiday alone to reflect on how fortunate I was to celebrate this holiday in some pretty unique ways over the years.

The debate program wasn’t a cur, and wasn’t something to kill, but an experience that ran its course and offered much. What the quality of those offerings were depends on the attitude one has when they are approached. I still wish I hadn’t done the vast majority of the things I did in that program, but that feeling is not exclusive to feeling grateful that I had those experiences. It’s not just utilitarian – i.e. “Now I’ve learned X,” it’s also in many ways the definition of just living life.

Debate belongs in a classroom anyway, in all the classrooms, among all the students, the campus community, and so on – all the memberships present and to be formed. It’s not like I can’t generate future regrets and gratitude without the program.

It’s coming up on the first official day of summer. So what have I been doing since April?

Reading
I really enjoy the blogosphere these days. And my Kindle. And the library. Ok, well since I don’t have much of a regular schedule, I can sit down and read whenever I wish. It’s a bit overwhelming, but I am at the point now where some writing is necessary in order to make sense of any of it. Here are some go-to blogs that I look at these days:
Forgotten Bookmarks– Blog about things left in books that are found  by a book buyer. Really cool stuff here.


Ox Herding – Great, thoughtful blog about Buddhist issues, social issues, and teaching issues.

The National Poetry Foundation Blog – Cool news, fascinating and insightful criticism, and the occasional eyebrow-raising reading list. Of course this is “National” in the USA sense of national, since that’s where it’s from.


I suppose we can’t just watch online debate videos all the time, can we? Don’t answer that, at least with words anyway.

Writing
I am working on a number of writing projects, some of which I will discuss here as they get a bit more mature. There’s always that MDR deadline that hits around July, sometime, and I have a couple of things I think might be worth sending in. Other than that I am working on a book review essay, a couple of academic essays, and the rough beginnings of a book that started as a late-night attempt to synthesise some of my wilder interests – debate, buddhism, and rhetorical theory to name three.

Mostly my attention has been on putting together a clean and coherent paper for the upcoming Alta Argumentation Conference in Utah this July. I’m presenting a paper on a theory of debate judging – and if I’m permitted, I plan to record the session along with responses from the audience of intimidating, smart, expert argumentation theorists. Keep an eye on this blog starting July 28th, as I plan to give frequent updates on what is being discussed at this premiere, global argumentation conference.

Goofing Off
Finishing the TV series Legend of the Seeker and in between those episodes digging into the Netflix collection of trippy 1970s foreign films about weird stuff. Mostly sci-fi.

So there’s the summary as of the start of summer. I hope it keeps being this fun.