Having had only two rounds on Friday, we ended up getting home earlier than ever on the usually notoriously long first day of Big Jake, and thus we were bright eyed and bushy tailed first thing Saturday morning. Round 3 was paired and ballots were ready, and all we had to do was hand them out. A cinch.
As we had been warned, our Saturday/Sunday venue had security procedures which could not be bypassed. So when we arrived we were met by a mob of forensicians lined up to work their way through the NYC gendarmerie, and it was rather a forbidding sight. Further, we had nowhere to go for tabbing and ballot distribution aside from the crowded front hallway, but by the logic of tournaments, which demands that day one is always the dissolution of confusion while day two is merely the playing out of the inevitable, we had all the LD rounds started by 8:30. This is comparable to any Saturday I’ve ever seen at an invitational, where one expects things to be in swing about a half hour after the posted time as people arrive on their own sweet time and whatnot. Here, the sweet time was absorbed by the needs of the New York City educational system which are beyond our control, and the result was the same. This surprised all of us, I’ll admit. A happy surprise, in the event.
On the other hand, the building itself was less than elysian. Clinton High School (named after a former governor, not a former president or a sitting senator) is about the size of your average federal penitentiary, without the amenities. The walls were not only painted an institutional green that demands that the human spirit be immediately sapped on sight, but they were sloppily painted institutional green. Bleak hallways stretched for miles in every direction both real and metaphysical, and it took two full days before I could confidently get from point A to point B without also visiting point 666 along the way. There were classrooms unlike any I know from personal experience. How many high schools do you know that offer not only childcare and an onsite dentist, but also animal care? The photographs of the cheerful personal hygiene counseling staff were enough to make you really fear personal hygiene counseling, but one got the feeling that much counseling was required (hence the childcare facilities, something of a daily reminder of the failure of the counseling, I would suspect). We forget sometimes the realities of the world we live in, or at least some other people’s realities. We see high school as a step in our education, bolstered by this great activity we all love. For some, it’s just a hassle to be gotten through on the way to nowhere. I feel that we are learning how to make the best society possible when we are doing the best debate has to offer. That best society should remember those whose situations are so radically different, and include them in the distribution of its important resources. I firmly believe that the experience of debate will help people keep that in mind when they are in positions to do something about it, and I also feel that the experience of debate will help put them into those positions. I wouldn’t do this otherwise.
Anyhow, we managed eventually to find a room with an air conditioner, which was a good thing because most of the building was rather of the hot swamp persuasion. It was Kaz and I and Sabrina on PF and Stefan on Policy, plus various slaves and assistants and so forth. We survived remarkably well, given the close quarters. There was no question that, at least acoustically, Clinton beats Science hands down. You could actually hear yourself think when there was someone speaking in the room, which is not true in the Science classrooms. I can’t imagine what it’s like to teach in any of them. Still, it wasn’t until late afternoon before I broke out the MegaPod, with mostly very low-key stuff in the background. The head-banger tracks just didn’t seem right for the situation.
Tabbing Saturday was mostly navigating the switch from double to single slights. What this meant was having enough good judges to handle the rounds still in contention. We figured (correctly) that no 4-3s would break, so the deal was to have As in the down 2 and, if possible, down 1 brackets. As it turned out, we were even able to A up the undefeateds, where the issue of speaker order was playing out. Not bad. Add to that the fact that we added a number of judges after the rating system ended, which meant that people couldn’t vote on them. As a result, we had to put those judges in as Cs, despite the fact that most of them were As on anyone’s agenda. So there were an awful lot of good judges throughout the field, and I can’t imagine anyone feeling that they didn’t get some solid adjudicating over the weekend. And one did get 8 strikes, if one was so inclined. We did pick up on one or two TRPC quirks along the way, as when judges aren’t automatically placed into the (only) division when you enter them; they should default to the only possibility by logic, and we were acting on that logic. Not so, though, which meant we would enter judges but then we couldn’t see them to place them. But no one sat around much, because we found this early on, and if a judge didn’t judge almost every round it’s not for want of trying on our part. Aside from eyeballing that everything was working, Kaz and I didn’t have to do much on that end. The only real issue was occasionally someone O’C was paying would get a round off, and he was not going to let that happen, so those who seemed to be tortured beyond endurance were, at least, recompensed for their virtual water-boarding.
All in all, as far as tabbing was concerned, this was a piece of cake. I think we waited a couple of minutes for one tardy ballot at some point, as the Jacobites did an excellent job all throughout Saturday of collecting ballots from the far-flung provinces of the building, a fact about which they can be quite proud. So even though we cut a round on Friday, nastily sending everyone home early, we pretty much caught up on Saturday thanks to single flights with phenomenal judging. How could anyone complain about that?
1 comment:
As always, your Tab skill amazes me.
But I was taken aback by the description of a school even more depressing and industrial than Bronx Science. Too bad there were no classes in Animal Husbandry. At least Tastes of the World would indeed have some meat in it.
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