I’ve been off the high school debate circuit for a good long while by now. At my high point in participation I co-chaperoned our Cleveland Cannibals to nationals in Indianapolis. Our other chaperone was an assistant coach for the team and an army recruiter who had served in Afghanistan. He did all the driving in our rented Jeep Cherokee.
Gonzo, the lead coach, generously gave me first dibs on the Indianapolis meetup as my daughter had played a pivotal role in both forming the team and propelling it to fame and glory. He’d waited a long time to see the National Forensic League national level game and had earlier accompanied the team to Dallas after their previous best in state showing.
I’ve written about these events before, and shared pictures. I’d never been to a national level National Forensic League championship either and found the whole adventure a highly educational experience.
What I’m wondering about today, from my sideline position, with no contacts in the local high schools to speak of, is whether teams are using current affairs as an opportunity to educate themselves. To what extent have the Cannibals been wrestling with the war in Ukraine for example, or the genocide in Gaza?
I’m turning 67 today and predictably have no kids in high school. My offspring are both working professionals.
So my habit,, when looking for such information, is to turn to YouTube and search on high school debate teams as a topic, looking for maybe a juicy Lincoln Douglas debate on whether said war in Ukraine was provoked or unprovoked, to use the semantics of this time frame. Or are all such debates confined to Model NATO or Model UN?
To some extent the debate world became self-ostracizing when it came up with “spreading” as somehow a sporting technique. The Lincoln Douglas format was not degraded to quite the same extent in my experience. The sport should work backwards from what’s actually a needed skill, such as speaking in measured tones amenable to simultaneous translation.
Getting good at spreading i.e. learning to talk insanely fast with breath control coaching, was mostly useful if your career goal was to read those fast-scrolling disclaimers tacked on to some commercials, especially drug commercials.
But those careers have been turned over to bots by now, for the most part. Real humans aren’t needed when it comes to speed-reading those scripted legal-language voiceovers.
