Wednesday, May 25, 2016

In which it takes us nearly 25 years to find the obvious name for the the attendees at CatNats

Twas the Wednesday before CatNats, and all through the social media, all the Nats Cats were packing their bags and their cases and saying Californie is the place they oughta be… Sigh. I’ve often said that I’m especially fond of CatNats, even though on some levels it’s a bit of a Cloud Cuckoo Land. But then again, that’s part of its charm. Enjoy Sacramento, my Nats Cats. I’m going to be at a barbecue in New Jersey. Same church, different pew.

Today or tomorrow I’m going to post a draft of a document for judges at tournaments. This is something the NDCA board has been discussing for a while: what are the obligations, and requirements, of a judge? There are certain behavior issues, but realistically, that is not a terrible problem. If a debater commits an illegal action in a round, the judge must respond in an appropriate fashion. Sure. But it’s not as if every round is filled to the brim with felonious activity. At least I hope not. More important is the idea that the judge is, first and foremost, an educator, and should act accordingly. Secondly, the judge is the (often brevet) adult in the room, and should act accordingly as far as that is concerned as well. The point of the exercise will be to create a document that can be distributed before a tournament, outlining what is expected of judges. Possibly the most important thing, in a quantitative sense, is that judges start rounds on time and end them efficiently with reasonably terse critiques. The usual, if not inevitable, reason for tournaments to go off schedule is that rounds are not starting and ending when they’re supposed to, based entirely on what is going on in the debate room. I can blast assignments with a note that a round is supposed to start in 20 minutes or whatever, but it’s up to the judges and the debaters to be there and start those rounds in 20 minutes. By the time the tab room learns that a round hasn’t started on time and, if necessary, fixed the problem, the clock has already been ticking for a while. Don’t credit me with on-time or off-time performance. That’s all in the hands of participants at the tournament.

I guess I’ll post this on the NDCA Facebook page, as it has members up the wazoo and it’s easy to follow threads, if any. I mean, it’s not as if I’m going to post anything terribly controversial. The only real problem is the distinction between safety and discomfort, that is, when something happens in a round that is especially heated or problematic. The examples that have been discussed are so specific that they really can’t serve very well as prescriptive, but maybe I’m wrong about that. Honestly, the problematic situations all seemed to go beyond the immediate area of the debate room, needing to be handled by the tournament staff, with all the coaches involved participating in the conversation. But, I hope, at least we can alert judges to the need to be thoughtful about such situations.


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