It needs to start at a reasonable hour. Maybe at 3 or 4 on a Friday, run until about 8 at the latest. On Saturday, nothing before 10 in the morning. Except maybe a breakfast at 9 where everyone can talk about what happened Friday. On Sunday, one final event at noon. Or maybe nothing…

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Nobody wants to be accused of “teaching to the test” – a trope used quite a bit in the public education policy discussion where state exams often radically overdetermine things such as campus or district funding, teacher or principal bonus pay, or the continuation of particular extra-curricular activities. The trope functions by degrading the teacher…

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This weekend is the King’s tournament, and it looks like the end of the 2014-15 season for us in terms of general tournaments. Of course, there’s USU, but as soon as I bought the flights and had the numbers in front of me, I was overcome with a feeling of immediate buyers remorse. I wondered…

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I’m here to challenge a trope – well, more than a trope, something that is the nearest thing to holy writ in U.S. debating circles. That trope: More debate is good. It took a terrible surprise snowstorm in CT this February to question this assertion that masks itself as the truth. On Saturday night, we…

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One of the greatest advantages one has as a teacher of debating is that you get to work with students at strange times in strange places and under weird conditions. You are also free of those overpowered structures of degree credits, grades, assignments, and classroom authority (which professors are way too obsessed with these days…

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Welcome to the new blog site! I thought a change was in order after not posting for so long.  I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the role and place of debate in my life. As I am assessing this, I take a lot of notes. I make a lot of lists. I think…

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It fell out from the back of the book I was flipping through, looking for a quote for a piece I am writing about conceptualizing debate as a spiritual practice. Upon seeing this paper, in a book on koans, of all things, made me realize that debating, for me, has always invoked a certain rhetoric…

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English: Bakhtin in the twenties. Español: Mijaíl Bajtín en los años ’20. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Not everything is meant to be accessible to the public. The definition of “public intellectual” these days seems to be someone associated with a university who is a professional explainer. Someone who can reduce what research they are doing into…

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This week I will be travelling to Montana for my now apparently annual debating workshop that I present there. This started a couple of years ago after meeting people in Mexico after the IDEA youth forum. At the forum, it became clear to me that it is important to create an environment of solid argumentation…

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Summer’s over folks, and that means back to the classroom for most of us. The positive spin is that debate begins to heat up with the return of the regular competitive debating season in the United States. September also means the ramp-up to WUDC as well, with the first big IVs coming along in Europe…

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