The countdown to the TOC continues with—
Wait a minute. I don’t count down to TOC. And neither should you. Keep repeating: It’s just another debate tournament. It’s just another debate tournament. It’s just another debate tournament…
I’m in the processing of putting my brain into vacation mode, which is easier said than done. Most of the plans are made, except for some oddball things like day trips to Toledo, but I need to figure logistics to and from airports, find hotels on the maps (again), figure out how to pack half as much as I usually do (my daughter can travel six continents for three years with nothing but the contents of a fanny pack which, of course, she refuses to wear because, well, it’s a fanny pack), find the correct reading material (the latest Pynchon is leading at the moment, but I fear that it won’t make the cut), and generally get into the swing of things. Last night I put up the final Nostrum before the break, leaving the proceedings in the middle of the Manhattan Lodestone OriginalVaganza (All Other Vaganzas are Extra). The episode concerned a parent judge who made a tournament run about an hour late, and I remembered as I read it the real incident that led to this fictionalization. If you are a Nostrumian, I will remind you, as Jules and the Mite often did during its original presentation, making it in fact an occasional slogan, that they often referred to it as “Nostrum: based on a true story.” I just love the sound of that.
I put a link to the feed over there on the right yesterday, to put Coachean Eating more front and center. Concentrating my attention as it has, I’ve noticed that, while it has been relatively easy to come up with facts and opinions on education hither and yon, I have yet to post a story on Native Americans. If a Pfffft topic is supposed to be reflective of current events, then the Cats seem to have outdone themselves this year in getting it wrong. I was also catching up on my old Rostrums last night (I’m a couple of months behind, and just read this interview with some guy from Scarsdale who claims to be their coach) and read the Rev B.A.’s latest on the problems of PF, and, inter alia, his belief that the Cat approach (fixed sides) does nothing to solve them. Mostly, though, he talks about the judge pool as a moderation device on the activity, with which I agree, although I don’t think it’s likely any time soon that we will actually have two judges in every round, as he suggests. The way it works in real life is problematic, though. As a for instance, we have a tournament with LD, PF and Policy, a standard-issue event. Inevitably the Policy judging is so tight that every judge is judging every round, and there isn’t a lot of discretion over the proceedings other than putting all the varsity judges in the varsity pool and the novice judges in the novice pool, with, if you’re lucky, an occasional run off of the former into the latter in bubble rounds. PF judging also, for some reason, remains tight. There will be a few PF parents about, and we’ll use them as much as we can, but if the pools are small, judges get dirty fast and you quickly start importing LD judges one or two at a time, which can work wonders in terms of clean adjudication. But what happens is maybe not good. There might be one or two judges in the LD pool who are fans of PF and would prefer to be there (some of my own ex-Sailors, for instance), and I’ll do my best to accommodate as that seems a good thing for all the parties concerned. But after that, what we might be doing is siphoning off the judges from LD that the LD pool doesn’t want, thus bolstering the parochialism of LD while doing nothing to secure a lack of parochialism in PF. The siphoning is of judges who are so struck by the LD pool that there’s nowhere else for them to go, or of the LD parents who we think would be great for PF, but whose defection homogenizes the LD pool. Of course, we also throw in a few people who just happen to have team cleanliness on their side (e.g., great LD judges who were hired by the tournament and therefore able to judge everyone), but you can just do so much of that because you’re always conscious of your bubbles in LD. At TNC, for instance, we had three LD divisions, meaning fields with three sets of bubbles. There aren’t too many A judges left by the time you pair those rounds. Anyhow, my point is that, in the normal practice, we’re probably doing an okay job with the PF judge pools, a balance of all sorts of lay and non-, but the very existence of that PF pool is acting as a parochializing agent on the LD pool. And, as everyone in the VCA knows, I am a strong proponent of parent judging in LD, for all sorts of reasons. So I may be acting against my own principles when I get into the tab room.
I have no solution for this, aside from tournaments not selling PF judging (you end up with professional judges) and not overloading the field with one school (you end up with plenty of judges who can’t judge anyone, which happens all the time at our local CFL events with unlimited Regis Pffffters). In other words, strictly enforced team limits and judge requirements. But we want PF to grow, and these strictures may not be particularly nurturing.
We live in interesting times.
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