Practical practicum

It may sound vaguely pornographic, but we here at WTF are all about practicum. We take nasty, brutish and short high school students and, through rigorous training, turn them into nasty, brutish high school students who seem to have grown a couple of inches over the summer. Here are some examples of our patented techniques guaranteed to make better debaters out of anyone.

The Wheel of Cross-Ex.
While many of our students prefer flex prep, thus eliminating the need for cross-ex altogether, we here at WTF feel that a good bracing cross-ex is the best part of a debate round. The Wheel of Cross-Ex is used exclusively in WTF labs (eat your hearts out, NDF!) to make sure that when we ask a question, we get an answer, dammit! There’s no beating around the bush in our rounds.



The Mumble Box.
No one can understand a word you say? Haven’t had a straightforward communication with another human being since as long ago as when Al Gore was thin because you talk like you have a family of ferrets parked in your mouth? Fear not. A few hours in WTF’s West Coast exclusive Mumble Box (eat your hearts out, Kentucky!) will turn you into James Earl Jones. The next time you say, “Luke, I am your father,” people will sit up and take notice.



Six-Minute Abs Cases.
Have trouble writing a case to take up all six minutes of your aff time? Here WTF instructor Craven Savage (AKA the Iron Maiden) demonstrates the case-stretching rack on one of our novices, Flute Freihoffer from Holy Moly Tech (Wa). A couple of days in the rack and Flute will be cutting his cases down rather than filling them up as he has been prior to joining our camp with quotes taken at random from his copy of Jacques Derrida and the Way of the Cowboy.



Fluffy the Rabid Kitty.
Fluffy may look gentle, but be warned! Inside her blood stream is enough rabies virus to eliminate the entire state of North Dakota, not that anyone would ever notice. Fluffy is only used by our top, specially licensed practicummers for training rising seniors in spreading, spreading seniors in rising, budding cake chefs in icing, and icing sheik chefs in budding.*



The Comfy Chair.
The crack heads heads of our crack staff demonstrate our latest exclusive addition to our labs (eat your hearts out, Iowa!), a comfy chair acquired directly from the BBC, guaranteed to have been used not only by Monty Python but also by the Duchess of Cornwall, Nicolas Sarkozy and Liberace’s brother George (but probably not all at the same time). Students whose practicum takes them to the comfy chair are never heard from again, except in YouTube videos of Frederich Nietzche’s (TOC co-champion of 1879) annual vacations in Baden-Baden, Pago Pago and Walla Walla. Woo-hoo!



* Coachean secrets revealed: I actually did come up with Fluffy's picture on an image search for torture devices...