Author: Steve
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Rhetoric, Kairos, Metallica, and PBS
It’s 202o, so of course PBS is airing the San Francisco Symphony and Metallica’s second live concert together. Such a strange combination might just be evidence of getting older, nothing else. Probably not going to get over that this is on PBS. But PBS is where I discovered Doctor Who, so perhaps this is on…
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Favorite American History Documents and The Pedagogy of Argument and Debate
Two days ago, someone asked me what my favorite American historical text was. It wasn’t that weird of a question: This is the time of year where I start to plan out my next semester’s courses and figure out the themes I want to teach. Something that has been on my mind since the Amy…
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Why I am Looking Forward to Grading This Week
This seems to be a good track to start the week. Roxanne Emery is one of my very favorite singers. Kind of a dark song if you really listen to the lyrics, but most dance music has pretty sad themes now that I think of it. This week is halfway full of meetings and other…
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Competitive Debate is not in the Hands of Educators
The biggest issue facing the Tournament Debate Regime around the world is that they willfully exclude the educational perspective and also work to exclude educators from participating in the creation and administration of debate events. The biggest shock during the pandemic is that debate tournaments continued, unimpeded through online means. There was no discussion and…
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Procrasti Nation
Ok so poking around and procrastinating, I learned that the person placed in charge of publishing the Constitutional Convention of 1787 debate transcripts was John Quincy Adams. Mr. Rhetoric himself from the 19th century was ordered to edit and publish them in 1818. This guy really loved words. I wonder if I could teach a…
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Is There Anything to say about Yesterday’s Speeches?
A return to the standard formulation of political speech at the highest levels of government seems to be the message I got from yesterday’s event. Was this a victory speech? It didn’t feel like it. It felt more like a return to the familiar and comfortable structure and cadence of professional political speech. From my…
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I Gave an Impromptu Lecture on Debate and it wasn’t Terrible
Not advisable, but I gave this lecture as a favor to a friend last minute. It went a lot better than I hoped it would. The question I’ve been thinking about endlessly this year is: How do we recover a workable, everyday model of debate? I explore some of these ideas here. It must be…
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Wading into the Relationship between Professor and Teacher
For some reason I have been reflecting on my career and work a lot lately, probably because I’m starting to feel strange about how the days are not broken up by wandering from room to room at the university. Those walks are so essential for clearing the head as you are preparing to teach, or…
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The Problem with My Lecture Videos
I thought I’d start out this semester by offering students a number of 10 to 12 minute videos on different topics. It did not turn out that way. Most of the videos I’ve made have been 20 minutes or more. And for my Argumentation course, the videos are always around 40 minutes. I’m not sure…
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Explaining Pragmadialectics to Undergraduates, or Why Do I Assign Readings Like This?
Well another week, another slew of video lectures to record. I much prefer doing it this way to doing it on Zoom live or something. At least this way I can say everything I need to, and the students can use it more as a reference rather than a one-off “I attended” check box sort…
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