There is something to be said for a weekend off. Following
three busy weekends at Newark, Bigle and Gem, I spent this last weekend
completely not debate-busy. I saw to a few chores, went out to eat, read a bit,
did some vacation planning. I’d forgotten how enjoyable being not debate-busy
could be. I even started wondering about what would happen if I weren’t
debate-busy every weekend, but then I realized that I’d be bored stiff, so I
put that one away for a while.
I did meditate a bit on debate as fun. Remember, I learned
about debate from my daughter, whose philosophy on the subject was always fun
first. Of course, she enjoyed actually debating—don’t get me wrong—and she was
quite good at it, earning her full allotment of TOC bids over the years. But she
never went to TOC, because the one year she would have, when she was a senior,
it conflicted with the state tournament, where all her friends were going to
be. It was no contest. She was known to blow off competing in a final round if
she hadn’t eaten all day. "I'm hungry" was reason enough. And she was arguably the world’s worst cheater in
Spades, although a bunch of her card-playing cronies at tournaments would give her a run for
her money for that title. The point is, she used debate to learn and enjoy
debate stuff, and then to travel around a little bit and expand her pool of
friends and to generally augment her high school education.
Those were the good old days. As I said, I learned from her.
I still believe that debate qua debate is great fun, including the learning
that goes into doing it well, but I also like all the socializing one gets
outside of one’s own home base. One of the things that saddens me is to see
schools who never talk to a soul outside of their own school, who haul the
wagons into a circle no outsider can intrude upon. You have the opportunity to
meet all kinds of new people, and you actively avoid it? Granted, defining
one’s clique may be a primal urge, especially in the young, but one would think
that the intellectual adventuring required in debate would help nibble away at that.
If you’ve been a debater for a few years and you haven’t made friends with
people on other teams, you’re missing out on something. If it’s because it’s
hard for you to make friends, I get it. If it’s because you stay behind the
curtain with the rest of your school, then I don’t.
Worse than this is what I see as the tendency to make debate
itself not fun. Intellectual adventure is one of the great experiences of life.
Learning new stuff, being exposed to new ideas, venturing in unexplored
territory—that’s one of the things that life is all about. But there’s a whole
branch of debate these days that instead of choosing growth has chosen
exclusion, proselytizing and general bitterness. I can hear it coming from the
rooms where debates are taking place, where everyone is so damned angry you
wonder why they’re even bothering. And it’s not just the students. The coaches
and judges are just as angry and negative. Axes are being ground, presumably to
get messages across, but I’ve always maintained that debate rounds are pretty
limited in their ability to send messages. There’s better forums, and, I wonder
if, as often as not, it’s the choir that’s being preached to. Regardless, the
pounding grind not of axes but of weekly $ircuit debate is deadening enough.
One tries to get so very good at something so very narrow and, in the broader
scope of things, not particularly important, to the exclusion of everything
else. To paraphrase Auntie Mame, life is a buffet, and too many poor sucker
debaters are sitting at one corner of the table eating the same hardtack meal
after meal.
I promise you that, no matter how many years pass, you will
remember pretty much all of your debate rounds. You will remember thirty years
hence that you beat so-and-so by running such-and-such. If you make debating in
high school that important, its importance to your existence won’t diminish
over time. But is that really what you want to remember thirty hears hence? Do
you want to remember the time you debated 16 hours straight and beat the crap
out of all comers, or do you want to remember the time you said screw it and
your team and that other team from two states over went out and had barbecue
and ended up at the miniature golf course?
Yeah, I don’t take debate that seriously. And I don’t consider
that a failing on my part.
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