I now know everything there is to know about baseball. The Brewers beat the Yankees last night. This means that, A) the Brewers are probably in the American League (I was wondering about that), and B) the Yankees must really suck. With this information in hand, I'm ready for everything. Maybe I'll take up sports betting...
And then there's the Lincoln-Douglas Education Project (people.hws.edu/barnes/ldep). Going back to my ruminations following TOCs, apparently the fears go deeper than I had understood. I just got an open email from Jason Baldwin explaining that the feeling is that this is the moment to save LD, otherwise it's over. That's sort of scary, because if these feelings have spread as much as they have around the coaching community (Timmons, Wycoff, and Miller are among the founding board members of LDEP) then we're talking serious fears. I've been protected by being in too many tabrooms and by not giving a horse's patoot about national circuit. The good thing is, LD is held together by a pretty thin thread, that thread being the handful of folks who actually throw tournaments. If all the tournament directors are in agreement about stuff, and can actually come up with ways to improve that stuff, we could really see positive change. I have, of course, signed up to join this illustrious group. It will be interesting to see what we come up with. I, for one, look to lay judging as one possible savior. The further we move away from general (albeit informed) adjudication, the further we move toward specialized and possible agenda-laden adjudication. Regardless of what that agenda might be, it would undermine the academic value of LD: learning to read, write and speak. Implicit in RWS is that students read, write and speak English. At the point where it's Chinese, or meta-Chinese, it's policy with one person per team. At which point, no parent chaperones. At which point, fewer participants. At which point, Hello Public Forum.
The possibilities are mind-numbing.
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