I thought I would start making the Monday post something a bit more personal and reflective, a snapshot of where my mind is for the week, and make the other 2 to 3 posts more “publishable” posts than the Monday ones.

I’m thinking blogging is far superior to social media as it forces you to explain yourself a lot more. There’s no thrill or excitement in posting a take-down, two-line clap back here. It’s a lot more satisfying to write about a thousand words and send it out there into the universe for response and thought.

So here’s what’s on my mind on Sunday afternoon, the time when I traditionally get out my paper planner and start to think about goals for the week, what I want to accomplish, and all that.

What’s that Sound?

I have had a Synology NAS for quite some time and it’s never really worked correctly. Up until this past week it’s really just been a very expensive, very bulky flash drive, holding onto my documents and photos and such. It’s done well, but the power of an NAS is to have a central server for a great number of files, particularly things like music and video.

I spent several hours cleaning off the thing and now it works great. This means that now I have access to my vast collection of MP3 and FLAC music that I made and collected for years and years and years (remember when you could get free iTunes songs off the Pepsi caps?). But now they are all mistagged, mis-labeled, and they have to be deciphered. Spending a some time each day this week identifying various sounds from the past. Luckily, I have help.

Musicbrainz/Picard is a pretty amazing piece of software for having the computer listen to your songs and decide what they are. It’s not perfect, but it is bringing some order to this overgrown garden of sound.

Time to rediscover a lot of my old favorites that might not have made it onto Spotify (can it be?) and enjoy a different kind of sound quality. I think some of these FLAC recordings are much higher fidelity than the Spotify ones. It could just be nostalgia.

Style and Pedagogy

Question for the week: Why do old debate textbooks start with the importance of style and delivery, whereas modern debate textbooks start with a declamation-style defense of logic, reason, and argument for Democratic government?

One answer: Democracy was much more stable in the 1930s (hah!)

Another: We are starting to realize that Democracy is not that great if you don’t have a critical audience or a critical citizenry helping to shape it. Like a plant, it needs to be watered if you want it to keep looking nice (Jefferson had some interesting ideas about this). In the past, this was a given; today, not so much.

I think that a very productive investigation of why starting debate pedagogy with style is superior would be a great thing to take some notes on this week. I’m starting to work on some specific chapters for a book idea I have, and one of them is investigating Richard Rorty’s idea of the Liberal Ironist along side Ed Black’s idea of the Second Persona. These two concepts seem to me to be valuable pedagogical structures within debate education. Of course, my idea of debate education is not the popular conception of how to get my arguments right, but how to deal with only having access to arguments that are ambivalent. This latter conception is the Democratic norm whereas the prior conception is more for party vanguard, limited and expert audiences.

I might shoot a video or two about some of these older books as well.

Thanksgiving

It’s American Thanksgiving this week and although I’m not seeing anyone, going anywhere, or doing anything really special, I’m still excited. Looking for some Black Friday deals as well online and found a couple that might suit me. Thinking about the GoPro 9. My 7 is still great, but it might be nice to have one with a better built in microphone.

The holiday also marks the start of the end of the term for me, with only one assignment and some random redos left to grade. Last night I was in a Zoom call with some friends from graduate school, which I still think of as immediate, but it was quite a few years ago now.

That call brought up how weird it was not to have the tradition of attending the NCA conference. Although I’m not a big fan of this conference, I always wind up learning a lot, getting new insight from friends, and leaving with pages of notes for ideas in my notebook. This year what was highlighted was the importance of that ritual in my mental preparation for the winter holidays. Something to reflect on this week when the world has already changed so significantly, and there are no doubt more massive changes to come.