Debriefing the Double Up
Some thoughts from this weekend:
1) The tournament really benefited from the great Midwestern schools that swelled the ranks. Some great debaters to watch, and got to hang a bit with Glenn Prince again.
2) The cultural gulf between L/D in the Midwest and L/D in California is fairly wide. Some evidence: One California judge reported to me that he was called out in a loud manner in front of students by a non-California judge who said, “How dare you tell us what ‘conversational’ means!” after the California judge voted on a speed position. What’s sad about this horrible argument is that not only is the judge a, you know, judge, so he’s kinda supposed to have an opinion on who won the arguments about the meanings of words, but the argument is of course self defeating. He was trying to argue that “conversational” can’t have an objective meaning, but that his interpretation was more correct. Critical thinking fail.
The good Midwestern debaters adapted, the poor ones didn’t adapt and got frustrated. My advice to several was to “at least have the ability” to read your case with more dynamic vocal patterns if you want to do well at Pt. Loma.
3) This is an oversimplification, but may be clarifying for some. Midwestern debate teams see L/D as an alternative to IEs, since it normally runs along side them at their tournaments. This means that L/D should not be like impromptu and extemp, and should include more speed and more arguments. California debate teams see L/D as an alternative to Parli and CEDA, and so as Parli (especially in Open) gets faster and more nonsensical in California, the L/D teams I see tend to get more persuasive and logical in their speed.
4) Tough weekend. One of my debaters and at least one other young lady I spoke to were 3-1 and didn’t break. The CBU affirmative went 9-1, which shows the earliness of the season. My guess is that affirmatives based on some sort of economic sanction will get less popular as the year goes on.
5) Friday will be epic, because most of the local schools got copies of each other’s affs and will be poking massive holes in them.
6) W. Kentucky was doing something so obvious, I can’t believe more debaters aren’t doing this. Instead of writing down cites furiously, they were taking pictures of evidence with smartphones. CA debaters were so thrown off by this, at least two claimed this was “cheating”, which of course it is not. Anything presented in a round is the intellectual property of your opponent, regardless of method. Great idea, wish I had thought of it.
7) Public congrats to Matt “DeathHawk” Phillips of CBU who won the tournament (Novice L/D at least) at his first ever forensics competition. Welcome to Junior, sir.
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Comments
SDSU was also excited to see everyone this weekend! I only got to judge Wky once, but it was great to see other schools coming to Cali for LD this early in the year!
Out of 8 ballots for our Aff we got 7 (2-1 in sems). We won both of our neg rounds. What I noticed from watching Alex’s rounds was that other neg’s don’t collapse, but we did. I think that made the difference. Having a good generic neg strat you know in and out makes a lot of difference.
As for the aff, it is posted and we are writing more responses to T, although all of our judges seem to think we are topical…
We are anxiously awaiting cumes to see exactly how wicked this tournament was. It was a rough break and a great tournament.
You can believe that Alex will be there Friday and if he doesn’t get a bid to the RR at UoP he will be in LD there, too.
Totally agree, Ian. Team structures sometimes do what you’re saying. Most teams have some sort of “I won’t take you across the country if you’re only doing Parli” policy. From a pedagogical perspective, its probably a good thing. The question become, what event do I choose if I don’t especially like any of the alternatives? I see one of my roles as coach to “sell” some of the individual events as not only helping your ability to win debate rounds, but as at least equally (if not more) applicable to life after graduation.
#3 and Speed
This is certainly not the case for our debate team. (WKU) All debaters on our team also compete in IEs. I sympathize with the concern about speed, and I hope that none of my debaters reacted negatively to criticisms about their presentation. I’ve noticed an increase both in speed and use of technical language specific to the topic on our team after we made LD the only debate platform that we compete in. For most on our team that desire to speak faster comes from wanting to include more of their research into the round. Our team is instructed that the difference between “spreading” and merely speaking quickly is that spreading is an attempt to decrease clash by making as many arguments as possible with no filter in hopes that your opponent drops something. We also try to emphasize that speaking quickly should not come at the expense of persuasion. All individual events are done at different speeds. ADS is faster than INFO, and an Introduction in an interp is slower than a climax. I believe/hope that speaking quickly can be done in a way that enhances clash and is in line with the spirit of the NFA-LD charter. I appreciate your feedback Mike, and I will share your comments with my team at our next meeting.
Also, Thank You for your comments about taking pictures. We instructed our students to ask before they snapped pictures. We did receive some backlash, but on the whole I think most people shared your sentiment.
Chad, thanks for your thoughts. As with all cultural exchanges, we (in this case I) start out with ham-handed stereotypes and proceed to nuanced understanding. To be clear, my statements serve as a gross generalization as to how many midwestern tournaments run L/D along side IEs, versus how many do so in So. California (only two I believe, including last weekend and Pt. Loma).
I found the WKY debaters extraordinarily polite and willing to adjust. I also very much appreciate your point that sometimes as coaches we ask our debaters to debate a certain way, and when they sometimes don’t it should not reflect on the program, the coach, or the region. We are all works in progress.
To be sure, we have come a long way when you consider that your LDers of five years ago had no place at all to debate in Southern California, and now we can at least have this conversation.
I am still hearing complaints from other debaters about taking pictures of evidence. I think this is ridiculous, unless debaters are trying to hide dishonest citations. Should debaters just take pictures during prep-time without asking?
I think you should ask them if they would rather have you take an extra 20 minutes of their day to write the cites.
Maybe people don’t understand that you can actually take cites?
Since most LD debaters in Cali are actually parli debaters who do LD (for various reasons) – evidence based debate formats are foreign to them and they do not understand what should be community norms.
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on your #3:
I think a lot of the SoCal debaters view LD as an alternative to IEs rather than as an alternative to Parli. They compete at programs that make them do IEs, but they would rather be debating than half-assing it in the other events that they hate (but do anyway so they can still be allowed to do Parli). LD offers them an alternative to that. So, LD becomes a compliment to Parli rather than an alternative. This is especially true when the trade-off in most tournament schedules isn’t between LD and Parli, but between LD and IEs.