We are in the midst of hiring, and it’s a lot of work. It seems like all my time has evaporated between this and trying to make some very new approaches to teaching (which aren’t satisfying). The approaches to teaching I’m trying are based on a deep distrust of my intuitive ways of approaching the…

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Why do tournament debate people keep saying this weird thing?

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We stan an endless series. Should I even still number these?

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Twitch might not be around much longer. Amazon announcing that they are cutting 35% of their workforce is grim news indeed. It is hard for me to believe it’s doing so poorly since I have always thought Twitch was an underdeveloped idea. I was very lucky to talk to Twitch staff years ago by offering…

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Reviewing my teaching (read “teaching”) this semester is depressing. That’s the thesis of this piece. My first-year students are not accessible via the normal commonplaces of the classroom which would include: Read this text, what was interesting about it to you? What do you think about this piece? What stands out to you as interesting…

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This is an essay about incapacity in two variants sparked by having what I currently feel is the worst semester of teaching I’ve ever had. I believe the issues origins are interesting to discuss but are not relevant, as the quest for origins and starting points isn’t something that should interest a rhetorician. Instead the…

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The never-ending series

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I’m not having any fun teaching public speaking this semester – first time that’s happened in many years. The reason is that the students are incapable of interacting at the level that makes the class work. They do not see the value, or how-to, or why they should do anything but passively listen to me…

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Not many people think about there being a relationship between these synonyms, but that’s exactly the point – they are not synonyms and have a wide variance of possible relations we can put them in. It is our binary-oriented society that is high on the supposed power of empiricism and statistics that conflates the two…

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The film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the perfect film to explain why there are so many different American debate formats. It’s because we cannot erase our past relationships to what we love; we can only build upon/around/between that love. We can only articulate what we love about the target of our…

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