All right. Vacation’s over. Back to business.
I’ve put the Modest Novice stuff onto a web page, http://www.jimmenick.com/modnov.html. CP has promised to work up the odd wiki for things like lessons and the like. The plan is to select the topic at Bigle X and then refine the wording and then go for it. Simple as that, once you make your mind up. It was curious, the question brought up in the comment to the previous post, that somehow coaches and upperclassmen might unscrupulously overdo the training and case-writing for the newbies. Curious, I say, because that’s almost the point. Case-writing is a long-term skill, and not the first thing one needs to learn. Fewer people have a fear of the white page than a fear of public speaking, and much less adrenaline is expended in typing than in actually debating. The most important things one learns early on is how to listen, how to take notes, how to respond in a meaningful way, things like that. And, of course, one of the points of the plan is to have a topic that is relevant to the agreed-to early training of novices, so even if a case were handed to the poor newbie, he or she would be learning to draw from the reserve of information underlying it that has been gleaned from early team meetings and readings. Plus that information would inform many other topics in the future. It all connects. (The commentator also assumes that novices aren’t already given cases by their upperclassmen or coaches, which is far from true in my experience. And as I said in my response, something like this is rather standard in the policy world.) Anyhow, the Modest Novice is on track. Toot toot, as they say in railroad circles.
I spent a lot of time over the break doing things like cleaning up my hard drive and polishing my websites, boring stuff that nonetheless needs to be done on occasion. While Little Elvis seems to have, at least as far as the Mac’s Disk Utility is concerned, disk errors beyond one’s wildest imagination and/or repair (I guess I’ll seek out some third-party software), my expedition into the bowels of my stuff did uncover a copy of V2 of Safari, which I immediately installed in place of the latest version, Safari DITW (Dead in the Water). I just seem to need two browsers, logged in as different users, especially with the Feed going. What can I say? Anyhow, things have been perked up a little, in preparation for what I imagine will be a hardware upgrade sometime this year. My Dell is falling apart, and Little E is getting creaky, so what else is there to do? I hate spending the money, but if the Day Job keeps those paychecks coming, I won’t have much choice.
Saturday night we had the annual alumni dinner. It looked somewhat like the judges’ lounge at Bump: quite a fine assortment of former Sailors, if I do say so myself, representing both debaters and Speecho-Americans. As one might expect, the usual subjects were discussed, among them film and music and the like, but at some point we got around to Famous Former Sailors. One story was told that pretty much was untoppable, about someone we will call Sailor X. Sailor X had been, to put it mildly, somewhat problematic as a team member, but somehow he had made it into the ethereal realms of upperclassmanness without really putting in much serious time as either a novice or a JV. He did show up at occasional meetings, however, and at the odd tournament when the spirit moved him. Newcomer McLean, in this particular instance, was a young newbie, fresh as a peach on a Georgia summer morning. McLean had just written his very first cases, and announced this at a meeting. Sailor X, hearing this, told McLean to send them along to him for review, and McLean obliged, hoping to get the wisdom of the ages from experience forged in hard debate labor. But as time passed, no reply was forthcoming from the old veteran to the young Turk. Sailor X has essentially disappeared, until finally showing up on the bus to head to the next tournament. Somehow emboldening himself to the task, McLean asked Sailor X for his opinion of his cases. “Oh, they were fine,” Sailor X replied. “I’ll be running them this weekend.”
Of such are debate legends made.
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