Monday, December 30, 2013

2013-2014 Part Deux - the second half of the season commences

Life goes on.

With Newark pressing, some work needed to be done last week on the RR. 8 people, 1 pod, enough judges over the two days. Pretty much one hit the buttons and the thing came to life, although the rooms were the last thing to go in (the Newark debater needed to go into the Auditorium, and I guess I could have made it and him high priority, but I just plugged it in manually). Without all the roomage, tabroom (AKA CP) has a new warning animation that pretty much broke me up every time, for a while, and then sort of didn’t anymore as I waited for it to play through. Other than that, round 5 would not give me 2 judges. I tried again. No 2 judges. Again. No 2 judges. Checked everything. Tried again. No 2 judges. Tried again. 2 judges. Which just goes to show you what I’ve seen before with this system, that if something doesn’t work, doing the exact same thing again might in fact get it to work. Compare this to the standard working definition of insanity, and CP’s evil plan to send me to the Home for the Terminally Tabbing Impaired (Mental Substation) becomes ever more clear. But more to the point, it worked fine. This is so much better than having to set up an RR by hand, believe me. Of course, if one of the judges doesn’t show up, all bets are off, but that’s always true, program choice notwithstanding.

Meanwhile, I’m looking at Sailor cases for the tournament, and very much not quite coming to grips with team assignments. I’m kind of operating under an assumption that, starting out, teams should be flexible. This allows you to be in different positions with different people and develop individual habits before team habits, which is another reason why I start everybody on LD. Secondly, a smallish team means that there’s only so many people to debate with in the first place, and I don’t want anyone getting peremptorily shot out for any reason (yet). For all practical purposes they’re all first year PFers, so everything should be experimental. Or so I’m thinking. Maybe I’m wrong. One problem is that I’m having people write a side for Newark, and go first speaker when they flip that side. In other words, everybody plays lead-off and clean-up. That seems right to me also, because it seems awfully soon to decide who’s better where. But that means that if I team you up at the next tournament and try to keep you on the side you had before, it may not work. Oy. Given that there’s lots of signups for all the January tournaments, this is all getting confusing. The bottom line is that everything is open for the time being. It’s easy enough for me to see who writes the best cases or who are the best speakers, but I don’t particularly see any point in trying to create teams solely on the basis of competitive strength at this point. I want them to learn. I may be going about it all wrong, but at least I’m going about it.

In other words, PF is a brave new world for us old LD people. If I ever figure it out, I’ll let you know.

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