I even bought a new bag and took a photo of it next to an old computer. Cannot believe that there’s only one more full day before I embark for another trip to Morocco. Debate has given me many things since I started following its path and teachings, but the thing that never fails to…

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Tomorrow starts the Learning Community on mid-career undergraduate writing on campus and I’m pretty eager to hear what everyone has to say. I oddly feel pretty solid about my own ideas and points of view, which is unusual for me. I usually like to have a few questions to share but don’t feel as strongly…

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My facebook feed is packed with nonsense that is hard to decipher. This is peak Facebook, and what I think is the reason I engage on the platform. The only reason I have it is because it’s the best way to communicate with students for activities and such. Without it, it was very hard to…

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Is it time for the University to abandon the rhetoric of “skills?” I’m starting to think so. Several experiences I have had over the last few days make me think that if the University, or any department, cannot beat back the ideological addiction to speaking about what they do in terms of “skills,” they won’t…

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In the last post I suggested work on pedagogical methods that would help distinguish the classical categories of episteme and doxa. After thinking about it for a day or so, I think this is not the issue at all – these forms of knowing could not be more separated. Episteme is considered to be knowledge, and…

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I am slowly figuring out how to get a pretty good sound quality out of these recordings. This one might be the best one yet. This debate was also pretty good, here are some thoughts about it in general.  At the start of the debate I spoke for a little bit about the idea of…

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In lieu of a long, wordy narrative, here’s my Thursday – which was super busy- through my Snapchat Spectacles. I have a long notebook page full of good posts so don’t worry, this isn’t turning into some sort of vlog depository. There will still be a ton of writing here.  It was just one of…

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St. John’s University Debaters and the 2017 British Tour Debaters pose after the first debate of the 2017 tour. For all of my criticism of BP the event we had on Monday night in Manhattan had me double checking the old inventory of what BP has that gives it advantage in reaching public audiences.  First,…

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Last weekend in Montana I opened myself up to all questions from the debaters. One asked, “How do you keep everything in your head so that you can recall it to be able to use it in debates?” This question struck me as being at the heart of debate and rhetorical education – the question…

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Weekends are not something I have thought about for much of my adult life. They were the times that I would go off to debate tournaments, the places where real education happened, the places where I could really feel like I was learning and doing something that mattered. Plus, they were really fun. It was…

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