The News from Scarswegia

Scarsdale was the first tournament around here (around anywhere?) to try to have varsity and novice divisions of LD, where participants in the former judge participants in the latter. This has always struck me as a good idea, and A. L. Johnson has also taken on this approach. I’ve always felt that judging is one of the most important learning aspects of the activity: debating is all well and good, but adjudicating rounds takes you out of the competition and into the overall flow of the event, and you get to see a lot more than just your own competitive record. And judging skill is not necessarily the same as debating skill. You can be quite good at one and quite a stinker at the other; they’re two different businesses. Of course, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, in the roll call of bad judges, I’ve always ranked high school students as number one, because they are so often prisoners of their own view of the resolution, and unable to see past their interpretations, which are sometimes not particularly good. Tabula rasa they ain’t. But with a little bit of training, and a little bit of eye opening, they can quickly get past their own biases into good, neutral adjudication. That’s the learning process, to see beyond their own noses. (For the record, college students who think they’re still in high school and hold similar prisoner-of-my-interpretation views of resolutions rank second in stinkerdom; for that matter, college students also are guilty of things like believing there’s a presumption for the negative, or that there are no rules to the activity. Parent judges? Well, if they’ve been carefully trained, I’ll take ‘em every time. Their paradigm is, ahem, adjudicate by the rules. Oh, the horror. By this token, parents ought to be the easiest judges to appeal to. Any LDer who can’t or refuses to adjust their styles to the relatively uniform concept of parent judges is really not a particularly good communicator. And since one main point of doing LD is to learn to become a good communicator, hey, you gotta wonder…)

There are those who believe that judging while competing somehow damages their chances, but given that the winner of the varsity division was judging novices in prelims, this doesn’t seem to stand. As a matter of fact, most of the elim debaters had been judging (and the same was true at ALJ). Granted it is a bit tiring, but in tab we do try to get you at least one round off, and more if possible. Scarsdale, unfortunately, was a little light in loose novice judges because of a local science fair (which also deprived me of a decent Sailor entry). Then again, it simply means that the LDers don’t spend half of the tournament sitting around playing tiddlywinks. Just like Policians. I mean, most LDers want to be (bad) Policy debaters, and at least when they’re judging and debating, if nothing else they acquire the schedules of Policy debaters. Let’s see how the other half really lives! For that matter, the winner of Scarsdale was in fact a Polician. Responses to this over at WTF were as if the winner of Scarsdale was a Venusian. Jeesh! The two types of debate aren’t all that different, especially with a topic like Jan-Feb, which has a lot of real-world aspects. It’s amazing how people get so locked into their parochial views of things. On the other hand, you’ve gotta love those schools where students do pretty much every single activity over their four year careers, from debate to speech to international cucumbering. Those are those folks cited in Rostrum for having 1,283,238 NFL points, all of whom go on to be governors, senators and federal judges. Must be more Venusians, I guess. (And why does Microsoft think Venusians is a word, but that Venusian isn’t? They must know more about aliens than they’re letting on.)

Anyhow, Scarsdale ran fine, and as far as I can tell, JV’s blood pressure never rose above the standard setting of DEFCON 2. As always, the food was superior; Scarswegian parents do not believe in debate ziti. And there was no blizzard, which was nice, but also no official name for the tournament, although the suggestion “The You-Know-Who is Failing English Invitational” had a nice ring to it. Also there was no cell phone reception, but how can you not like a tournament that generates a message from O’C afterwards with the subject line “I still have your beans!”? Oh, yeah, somewhere during the tournament I gave up and ordered a Wii from Amazon. I mean, the empty season is soon to begin. I have to do something on those warm summer nights.