Tag: teaching

  • What’s in a Debate Name?

    Debate Coach makes me cringe for so many reasons. I’m not sure I can list them all here. The first concern with this term I share with William Hawley Davis, Professor of Speech at Case Western in 1916, who worried that teaching debate for competition made his role “adjunct to sport.” If there is a…

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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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  • 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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  • 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 Presidential Debates in the Context of How Bad We Are at having Debates at Any Kind

    Monday night I gave a talk to Cornell Law School’s American Constitution Society about the history and development of Presidential Debates. I thought I had shared this already, but it looks like I forgot to post the thing I was originally writing about it. It’s a good thing too – these debates are well beyond…

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  • A Course Description for a Class About Argumentation

    A friend of mine clued me into a new program called Gitbook, which is sort of like a blog, but more of a private journal/documentation site. I signed up for one, but not sure if I am going to use it. It might be a great place to keep notes on the classes I’m currently…

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  • The Fallacy of the Banned Public Speaking Class Topic

    Just finished assessing the first round of student speeches for the term and the average grades were around an 88 to 90, high B to low A. This is atypical for me; most first speeches are closer to a C and slowly move up to this point over a course of four to five speeches.…

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  • Bad Teaching, Bad Graduate Student Mentoring, Bad Pedagogy

    There really isn’t such a thing as “graduate student pedagogy,” but I thought I would write about it anyway. I’m always hopeful about it, but I know why it doesn’t exist: People who want to teach graduate students don’t understand how teaching works, they aren’t interested in thinking or talking about teaching, and they also…

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