Friday, November 17, 2006

Coach's log, supplemental

I'm on the way to Lexington in a few minutes, and I just read Ryan's response to the theory/natcirc article by Kiri Camara. RH says much of what I would, so I won't bother adding much to it, although I do admit that I read the thing with a measure of dropped jaw that probably hit the ground lower and faster than any other Doomer you can think of, including Smilin' J, who alerted the Legion to take a look at it. (Membership in the Legion of Doom seems to include paying no attention to the world of debate, especially WTF, which is one reason I'm on the outs with them, but that's neither here nor there.)

I will simply quote one line from the article. "We will spend about $32,000 on out-of-state tournaments alone for a 10-debater national-circuit squad." Am I misreading this? Is there more to the squad than ten people? Or are they spending 32K on the circuit plus more for those ten locally? Regardless, that's about twice what I will spend on a 30-40-person team mixing speech and debate. If there are benefits of forensics, shouldn't those benefits be spread around as much as possible if one truly believes in education? Maybe I'm just extrapolating the wrong thing from this. Anyhow, any question of whether to call it the national $ircuit has now been removed.

We really are doomed.

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