Wednesday, July 01, 2009

PF 2009 Part 1

You’re going to thing that this is all old-hat, but look at it from the perspective from which I’ll be saying it. Amongst Sailors, one starts as a novice in LD. At present I believe that this is the best way to learn the basics of debate like case writing, presentation, argument structure, etc. Plus, there’s a lot of opportunities to debate as an LD novice, so if a student is looking to gain experience, it will happen. After LD boot camp, Sailors can, if they so desire, begin doing PF. So, the starting point for Sailors in PF is a year’s experience in LD, with all that entails.

Last night I began writing up my new materials on PF (I don’t know exactly what form this will take—lecture, handout, podcast—it’s still early days). I didn’t get far, but the first two things that occurred to me were preliminary to any actual discussion of the activity. They were also results of that boot camp year in LD. I think they may be the biggest spiritual differences a student must accept at the onset of the activity.

First of all, the nature of research is entirely different from LD research. Obviously research = research at some level, but the nature of LD is, ideally, that we are attempting to achieve some lofty goal like justice or morality in our actions. Often the resolutions are removed from real life contexts (think kill one to save five), or are only tangentially related to real life. If we discuss nukes we do not discuss the politics of nuclear weapons but the morality of nuclear weapons. Compare: The policy debater handling nukes will certainly research some moral aspects of the issue but will research facts and figures and political stances in incredible depth, while the LDer will certainly research some facts and figures but will concentrate on the morality aspect in the greatest depth. Realistically, PF follows the Policy research approach. It’s about the facts and the figures. Not exclusively, but nonetheless primarily, and exhaustively (or as exhaustively as can be done in a month or so, versus the full year of topic maturation on the Policy side). This is a change of mindset that newbie PFers coming from LD might not be prepared for. But it’s an important one to understand and embrace. Good PFers never talk out their butts, or to be more precise, good PFers, when talking out their butts, bring facts out of their butts as well. An LDer walking into a round with a well-stuffed folder of evidence looks like a goober. A PFer walking into a round without a well-stuffed folder of evidence looks like a goober. Therein lies one key difference between the activities.

The second big difference is, of course, the partnership aspect. Policy has always had partners, and policy coaches have various approaches to the unions and breakups of their pairs over their debating careers. Some people are not that well suited for team debate, at least not initially. Some Policians become LDers because they can’t do the two-person thing. The bottom line is, having to debate as a team brings in a totally new dimension to the activity. If you have a big team, you can match-dot-com them and find the right pairings, perhaps. With a small team, it’s more of a default pairing. It’s still pairings, though. Learning to work as a team requires a specific set of skills different from working alone. Tennis doubles is still tennis, but it’s played differently. There’s a lot of opportunity for people to bump into each other, or for neither of them to be where they should have been. Meshing with a partner is a good skill all its own. I would like to be able to promise everyone on my team that, for the rest of their lives, they will only work with people with whom they are compatible, but it just isn’t true. As often as not, they’ll be forced to work with yabbos of the most yabbonian persuasion, and they won’t be able to just blame failure on their partners. Teams work because the members of the team capitalize on their assets and minimize their deficits. Sometimes teams will be more an exigency than a meeting of the minds, but that should not limit results.

As I say, these are new problems, or new approaches, for the LD novice graduating up into PF. For that matter, they’re still issues that must be addressed even if the Pffffter has never done LD, but at least in that case one is not going counter to previous experience.

So that’s my starting point with good old Pfffft. This is going to be fun.

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