The New York Sophist

Debate’s structure makes structural demands on speakers. When entering a debate, one enters carrying the immense ideological weight of what you think a debate should look like. All the debates you’ve seen, all that you have thought debate is and should be, every debate you’ve hated and enjoyed – we all walk into the debate carrying these bags like a Sherpa of discourse.

This isn’t necessarily bad. In debates with friends and family, in the bar, or at work about political issues, this makes and marks the speech as a particular type. That marking of speech – your tone, speed, and intensity – communicates to interlocutors what the appropriate responses can consist of. This is why we change our tone, speed, and non-verbals when we are losing the debate or getting too frustrated and want the discourse to change. Sometimes we want to stop the conversation and indicate that through discourse.

These markers for what works and what doesn’t work are handed down to us through social practice, mired with power and the history of who, or what types of subjects, have been authorized to speak in certain ways and at certain places throughout that culture/society’s history. For example, I always ask my students what the difference is between them speaking in the front of the classroom and me speaking in the front of the classroom. We have trouble moving beyond “authorization via degree and employment” most of the time.

This is the root of the problem with the debate tournament, or as many debaters and coaches hilariously call it – “debate.” I’ve wondered how to mark my work when I’m writing and speaking about debate. Writing might be easier: I can always say there’s debate and Debate, the difference being clear. Verbally I often say debate and contest debate to show that what most debate coaches and participants/addicts mean when they talk about debate is the very narrow, very limited, very privileged, very private, and very exclusive world of the tournament debate where the public isn’t invited or even made aware it’s happening.

The demands of a tournament competition of any kind shave off practices and habits from anything that you might want to put into a tournament form. Based on how the tournament is evaluated, the strategies will change and alter toward winning. The debate tournament is the practice of eristics, or in this case the shaving off of appropriate debate moves or practices in order to win. Most judges recognize this shaving off of what would “count” in a debate outside the tournament through some metric – often a paradigm in the American tradition – and call this recognition the practice of adaptation. This is not adaptation to the audience but adaptation to the tournament, and is rewarded as such.

Debate tournaments are fine if they aren’t the only debate education available, but often they are. The only exception I can think of is Stoneman Douglas High School where all the students received their instruction through an imbedded debate curriculum. After the mass shooting it became clear that these students were well prepared to engage the public in argumentation.

I don’t think debate teaches much except how to skirt rules and policies, how to mirror an appropriate discourse when everyone is in on the game, how to sound like you care about something other than winning (eristic style), and perhaps the answer to Herbert Marcuse’s Great Refusal: I’m happy to play a game when I’ve seen the dice loaded because I have practice in dice loading.

Excellent debating and winning tournament rounds reifies the importance and certainty of the tournament. It doesn’t question the tournament’s existence or bring attention to what’s outside of the tournament round. Something that did that would lose every time, as it would undercut the root of the pleasure those who administrate and judge tournaments feel. It would call out their symptom. And as Lacan tells us, we will kill to preserve our symptom.

The most valuable things for me in college were reading books and discussing them (or listening to the professor talk about them). The other valuable thing was being in clubs, meeting people and making relationships.

I don’t think either of these are possible any longer. Students are on campus a minimal amount of time due to the cost and that runs interference on these kinds of relationships – there’s no downtime. Secondly, they are taking 18 hours a term to reduce cost as well, which obviously interferes.

I also don’t think students can or want to read a book anymore. They try, but they can’t do it. So assigning a book is like assigning something they don’t know how to do. But they won’t say it, because they feel they should know how to do it.

So assigning a chapter or two is all you can do, but the students are so well-trained to think of school as cutting corners, trickery, breaking rules, deception of the teacher that you really don’t know if they read it or not.

Therefore the only reason I wanted to be a professor – to share in these experiences from the other side, to make them possible, is no longer possible.

I’ve become a very bad teacher recently and I’d like to figure out why.

Reflecting on what a bad teacher is, I’ve come up with the following ideas

1. More interest in the material and the value of the material outside of the students’ interest
2. Dismissal of student concerns as equaling in importance to the course material or events
3. Inability to make easy, meaningful connections between course material and the sphere of student engagement (i.e. what’s on their minds)
4. Inability to create meaningful assessment experiences for the students

All of these things are elements of bad teaching and being bad at teaching, but perhaps the bad teacher is someone who just disregards these and doesn’t worry about them popping up in their pedagogy.

The bad teacher might not be bad teaching, but bad teaching is still a problem.

What can be done?
Perhaps more attention to what students think and concern themselves with would be helpful. More supplemental material for the course would be good too, such as audio and video recordings that help support class time.

Trying to reconstruct narratives of the teacher’s first contact with the material to determine how it made an impact on them, then considering ways to make that same sort of connection today with the situation we face.

Distributing power over the course activities to the students in a major way without any intervention or refusal to accept what they propose.

Maybe these things will work. I might try to return to Neil Postman’s 4 declarative sentences and 30 questions rule for having a class – what that means is that is all you are allowed to say if you are the instructor.

Still thinking about what makes bad teaching/good teaching. I found this atrocious lecture from “debate coaches” supposedly teaching the best and brightest young debaters at an exclusive “forum” for debate at Emory University.

The Barkley Forum doesn’t seem to have any quality control standards. We get a route lecture that is thin, vapid, and incorrect by most people’s read of the things that these two are teaching (“teaching”) about.

It’s sad to me. I see the immediate sediment of people who think that their tournament debating experience has made them more intelligent, more educated, more well-read, more brilliant than other people in the population. This means that when they instruct people on one of the most “complex” forms of tournament debate argument they feel they have to really dumb it down so that the regular people, the uninitiated, can understand the complicated nature of what is going on here.

Instead, debate should teach humility, respect for doxa, respect for people’s daily thinking, and try to improve it in some way – or at least call attention to it. A good kritik lecture would be to set up the scene: You are debating with a group of people about public assistance, welfare, unemployment, whatever it might be. One of the people in the group is making arguments that are good but their tone and the terms they use to describe those who are on public assistance is offensive – they are speaking about them like they are a disease, like they are animals. What should the response be?

That’s all you need to start off an educational conversation about kritik arguments. But these two clowns treat it like it’s some kind of precious and holy discourse that can only be understood through an incredibly bad reading of the ancient world. I don’t think this lecturer has ever read or probably heard about the essential books for discussing the sophistic situation in Athens. It’s so bad that I wouldn’t even call it an interpretation, I would call it plain ignorance.

The most incredible thing is that Emory put this video out for the public to see, clearly unaware at the incredibly poor teaching in the video, the ridiculous interpretation of quite interesting/serious/well researched subjects, and the demeaning way that philosophical argument is being characterized to high school (I’m assuming) students who make philosophical arguments all day, every day with teachers, friends, and family.

The ignorance of hubris here is astounding. And it’s one of the many reasons why I dislike debate coaches, never liked being called one, and think that debate coaches and tournaments have obliterated any value that comes from a serious study of debating.

I thought the class would be great. Why was it so bad?

First of all, what’s a bad class? Definitions abound! I would say for me a bad class means:

1. I could have talked more in depth about the material adding deeper value to it but didn’t.
2. I didn’t connect the material to the students on the terms and ideas they were thinking about or brought into the classroom.
3. I didn’t conclude with a question or something for them to take with them as they left the class.

I should have prepared differently. I should have spent more time thinking about the material, which was very familiar to me. The death of good teaching is familiarity, either perceived or actual, with the material for the class. What I typically do is I meditate with the material meaning I try to think about it as if I were looking at it the way the students might. Then I try to write down, on paper, some of the major ideas I want to communicate about the topic/readings. I leave a lot of time at the end for the students to question or add in what they thought was meaningful.

Today I typed up my notes the night before and didn’t print them. I didn’t read them over just before class. I also read the material a couple of days ago. Not a great look.

I should stick to the plan and keep doing what works. Students are a mess these days – COVID and looming global disaster don’t make one eager and positive to think about tough ideas for the future that might not come. Still, I believe that offering a high-quality class every time can help them see the value even given this generally reasonable attitude about humanities courses.