debate ideas?
Lyla Wolfenstein
my son is interested in debating. anyone have any good resources or experience for debate topics, styles, ideas? we'd probably start with little debates in our family and maybe eventually find a few other unschoolers interested....
thanks!
Lyla
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thanks!
Lyla
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Sandra Dodd
-=my son is interested in debating. anyone have any good resources or
experience for debate topics, styles, ideas? we'd probably start with
little debates in our family and maybe eventually find a few other
unschoolers interested....-=-
Is he interested in formal debate rules?
Some of the best debating I've seen these days is in blog comments.
Some of the worst, too, for sure, but some blogs have actually USEful
comments! <g>
Sandra
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experience for debate topics, styles, ideas? we'd probably start with
little debates in our family and maybe eventually find a few other
unschoolers interested....-=-
Is he interested in formal debate rules?
Some of the best debating I've seen these days is in blog comments.
Some of the worst, too, for sure, but some blogs have actually USEful
comments! <g>
Sandra
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Lyla Wolfenstein
>>>>Is he interested in formal debate rules?>>>---------------------------------------
he *might* be! just blogs in general you mean? we end up in discussions that interest us and then we explore both sides of the issue, in an informal debate style - "playing devil's advocate", etc. but i feel stumped for some creative topic ideas and would love a list of ideas to spur my imagination!
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Sandra Dodd
-=-i feel stumped for some creative topic ideas and would love a list
of ideas to spur my imagination!=-
Maybe you could work from some kind of current events source and pick
a topic, and if some really good arguments come out of your arguments
or reseach, maybe one of you could post there, and then see what
responses come. Seems that could flower into more discussions of
types of arguments.
A tool for debating (and for just about everything, all kinds of
logic) is to play 20 questions a bit, and learn what kinds of guesses
are bad guesses and which are good ones.
You could start with the numerical version, where someone guesses a
number between 1 and 1000 in 20 guesses. Here's an online version of
that if you don't want to do it on your own. The only answer to each
guess can be "higher" or "lower" or "that's it."
http://www.funbrain.com/funbrain/guess/
I thought I had written about 20 questions, but I guess I spoke about
it at a conference. The strategy is to try to divide the world in
half with each question.
With debate, when someone is trying to divide the world in half, it's
usually a logical fallacy, or it's creating a dichotomy when ends up
being kind of "good guy" and "stupid bad guy," so by playing the game
some, you could learn to recognize when someone's doing that, or in
your own arguments, to only divide in half that part of the world/
thinking that you're dealing with. If you don't want to compare
apples to oranges, how will you divide and compare the apples? And
if you're talking about apples produced commercially, for shipping,
there's no sense talking about fragile kinds of apples that people
grow and eat at home but aren't suitable for packing up and storing
and shipping.
One of the recent videos of me is on a blog I was looking at this
morning. It's a kind of "everything" blog and today there's a bit by
Jim Carey about vaccinations and autism.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
Oh! There's an article there about the family of one of the slumdog
millionaire child actors offering to sell their child, or something.
A doctor says he can clone a human.
On Youtube there was some criticism of my support of unschooling (sort
of) and I've already responded, but that might be the kind of thing
you could get involved in as both practice AND real use of debate
skills.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoG6j8eTjyY
Sandra
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of ideas to spur my imagination!=-
Maybe you could work from some kind of current events source and pick
a topic, and if some really good arguments come out of your arguments
or reseach, maybe one of you could post there, and then see what
responses come. Seems that could flower into more discussions of
types of arguments.
A tool for debating (and for just about everything, all kinds of
logic) is to play 20 questions a bit, and learn what kinds of guesses
are bad guesses and which are good ones.
You could start with the numerical version, where someone guesses a
number between 1 and 1000 in 20 guesses. Here's an online version of
that if you don't want to do it on your own. The only answer to each
guess can be "higher" or "lower" or "that's it."
http://www.funbrain.com/funbrain/guess/
I thought I had written about 20 questions, but I guess I spoke about
it at a conference. The strategy is to try to divide the world in
half with each question.
With debate, when someone is trying to divide the world in half, it's
usually a logical fallacy, or it's creating a dichotomy when ends up
being kind of "good guy" and "stupid bad guy," so by playing the game
some, you could learn to recognize when someone's doing that, or in
your own arguments, to only divide in half that part of the world/
thinking that you're dealing with. If you don't want to compare
apples to oranges, how will you divide and compare the apples? And
if you're talking about apples produced commercially, for shipping,
there's no sense talking about fragile kinds of apples that people
grow and eat at home but aren't suitable for packing up and storing
and shipping.
One of the recent videos of me is on a blog I was looking at this
morning. It's a kind of "everything" blog and today there's a bit by
Jim Carey about vaccinations and autism.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
Oh! There's an article there about the family of one of the slumdog
millionaire child actors offering to sell their child, or something.
A doctor says he can clone a human.
On Youtube there was some criticism of my support of unschooling (sort
of) and I've already responded, but that might be the kind of thing
you could get involved in as both practice AND real use of debate
skills.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoG6j8eTjyY
Sandra
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Three Mommies
I loved speech and debate in high school and college. I enjoyed
extemporaneous and Lincoln-Douglas Debate. Maybe he would enjoy trying out
L-D debate with you or one of his friends?
Here<http://www.scribd.com/doc/3265420/Introduction-to-Lincoln-Douglas->is
a site that explains L-D debate format. L-D is about values, not
policy,
so if it's the nuts and bolts of a topic, you'd have to tweak the debate a
bit, but that could be interesting in its own right.
Peace,
Jean Elizabeth
http://3mommies.blogspot.com
extemporaneous and Lincoln-Douglas Debate. Maybe he would enjoy trying out
L-D debate with you or one of his friends?
Here<http://www.scribd.com/doc/3265420/Introduction-to-Lincoln-Douglas->is
a site that explains L-D debate format. L-D is about values, not
policy,
so if it's the nuts and bolts of a topic, you'd have to tweak the debate a
bit, but that could be interesting in its own right.
Peace,
Jean Elizabeth
http://3mommies.blogspot.com
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 2:12 PM, Lyla Wolfenstein <lylaw@...> wrote:
>
>
> my son is interested in debating. anyone have any good resources or
> experience for debate topics, styles, ideas? we'd probably start with little
> debates in our family and maybe eventually find a few other unschoolers
> interested....
>
> thanks!
>
> Lyla
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]