Hey there audience, hope you are gearing up for a Merry Christmas or happy holiday whatever it is you are into celebrating.

I’m deep in reflection on teaching as I often am this time of year so haven’t been publishing much here. But I hope to have some starting points soon. The biggest issue on my mind is how to adapt to people who experienced the transition to higher education and its demands during the lockdown.

This isn’t a temporary thing, nor is it going to go away in four or five years. The pandemic has given pedagogy “long COVID” and this means lifestyle changes to how we approach teaching and learning.

The end of 2022 is the end of caring what happens to intercollegiate debate for me. After attending the NCA Convention and hosting the Civic Debate Conference in the summer here on campus, I’m finally convinced the future there is self-serving, and completely devoid from what it should be about – how to teach people to make cases for what they think is best (aka: rhetoric; the rhetorical tradition).

In 2023 the plan is to try to bring what I love about writing studies and composition into what I love about debate as a practice and what I think is most valuable about the rhetorical tradition. These three things do not fit too well together for a lot of reasons, most of which are fake.

As for now I’m just going to read and enjoy the cold weather as we move through the rest of December