I spent an inordinate amount of time swearing at Little Elvis last night for losing my iTunes music library before I noticed the firewire drive wasn’t plugged it. Maybe Steve Jobs is right. What good are firewire connections if we don’t really use them? Anyhow, the issue is resolved, and my blood pressure is back to normal.
Saturday was the MHL for the first-timers, and it was quite a gala. 97 LD novices, which has to be some kind of record. (I’d ask O’C, but then he’d publish it in “Stump the Chump,” and who needs that?) We were over 200 teams in the whole shebang, and having set ourselves a goal of 4 rounds, we went about making it happen. First of all, there was the 9:00 registration thing. Some teams didn’t make it, and came to me as I was printing out the pairings asking me to put them in. I hated being adamant, but, well, that was the thing we said we weren’t going to do. We were done on Saturday by about 6:30, which is reasonable for a one-day tournament. If we were waiting till people came whenever they decided to come, it would make the day unbearably long. MHLs are not endurance contests. Doing 4 rounds is something we attempt because we think we can do so efficiently, not because we don’t want people ever to go home. For the most part, we did it, and did it well, including an amazing amount of hand-pairing of the heavily Regisian-weighted PF rounds. We would have been done a half hour earlier if it wasn’t for one 3-0 round that started late in an undisclosed location. We sent this one poor judge to double-booked rooms every round, and then we’d send him somewhere else a little later, and he was, understandably, the last to show up with ballots after 4 rounds of this disorientation. I tried to send runners to get his ballot, but no one knew where to go. This could only happen at Bronx Science. But the rest of it was pretty good. We should try to schedule the first event of the season in the city every year. The turnout is great, and we’ve got the space to run it. Except for that one poor guy that kept getting double-booked.
One magic moment of the tournament was getting to meet Jessica Rabbit in person. That is, a student debater who was judging came by and explained to us that his paradigm for picking people up in the round was, he was telling his debaters, “the one who made him laugh.” In other words, yet another person who will be a C judge for the rest of their born days, and who additionally will henceforth be known forever and always as Jessica Rabbit, making this a double play. What, one wonders, are these people thinking? You judge a round the way you yourself would want to be judged. If I remember correctly, it was Kant who first posited this as a pretty good judge paradigm (“eine kindagutenadjudinung” paradigm, in the original German). Students work hard so they can come and entertain you? That’s not what debate is all about. Vice-presidential political campaigns, maybe, but not debates. (The truly sad thing is how unoriginal this is. Year after year we have to ban judges for exactly the same reason. Why they think that this activity they’ve spent so much time on is suddenly supposed to be a joke is beyond me. End of rant.)
O’C was thrilled by the award medals he was giving out, but nothing thrills O’C like debate hardware. He was wearing one around his own neck for the entire day. I will admit to wearing one myself for a few minutes, but I got tired fairly early in the day of looking like a veteran of the French Foreign Legion.
One thing that seems certain, by the way, after the debacle that was this year’s choice of Sept-Oct resolution, is that the Modest Novice will be rearing it’s cute little head again. Coaches were going so far as to claim that this topic actually lost them novices, giving everyone a big hit to recruitment. Needless to say, I’m all for the use of a single topic specially selected for novices for the first few months of the season. We’ll sort it out over the next few weeks and commit to it as quickly as possible. Last time it was vetoed as being a bit complicated. This time, weighing debaters lost forever versus coaches having to sort out some minor complications, I think we’ll get it through. If not, we’ll just send novices to events that subscribe to the idea. That being 90% of them, well, there you are. (I’ve noticed that no one thinks that the Modest Novice was my idea anymore; thank God the VCA has a long memory, but then again, I work for the good of debatekind, so what do I care? &^%#$@^±!!!)
4 comments:
If by a few minutes you mean throughout the first three rounds, then yes.
Whoa whoa whoa... I never said I picked up the debater that made me laugh. I only said I'd give them 30 speaks.
hahaha fischer is a c judge.
guess that makes me an a
To continue to defend myself, I love judging a good debate. Anybody who had me as a judge at Scarsdale last year knows this- I wrote out an entire real paradigm and flowed with more devotion than I usually flow my own rounds. The 30 speaker points thing is an incentive to try to make the round a little more interesting. Too often, the people who do the best rounds are really boring. It doesn't take anything away from the round if somebody says something funny in cross-ex or chooses to emphasize the ridiculousness of one of their opponent's arguments in a humorous manner. The two PF teams were arguing about using firewood as a primary source of energy (not as a main argument but as a little joke based off of what one of the debaters had said in the first crossfire)- we all were having a good time and there was still a really good clash to the round. The 30-30 in that round was well deserved- not only did they perform nearly flawlessly, but they made the round enjoyable for themselves, their opponents, and their judge. If the round had been terrible and funny, that would be a completely different matter. I'd appreciate not being stuck in C judge hell for all eternity as my punishment.
Post a Comment