First of all, the Article of the Day: “And what’s on your desk?”
And now, on to business:
E-TOC
It doesn’t take a research genius to determine that historically the TOC has been populated by roughly the same schools over and over again. The key reason for this is money. The first essential bottom-line necessity of playing on the TOC circuit is a steady participation at a handful of tournaments scattered around the country. The programs that can afford this participation (transportation, lodging, meals, high registration fees) tend to be in the game for the duration. These programs additionally have the resources to afford the education (coaches, assistant coaches, camps) that results in winning teams. On top of that, these programs are supported by schools that accept that an aggressive forensics program can turn students into virtual part-timers as far as the rest of their curriculum, and that for the right students, this is not a bad thing.
I do not dispute that these circuit programs are good at what they do. Given those educational resources, one would expect nothing else. I also don’t maintain that these programs are all from fabled moneyed districts or elitist private schools, although the minute you get on an airplane you probably are talking maybe a thousand dollars a weekend per person per tournament. That money has to come from somewhere. So let’s face it. The TOC circuit is what it is. It’s an elite establishment of schools that can afford to do it. Occasionally a lone wolf can break into it, but that lone wolf—individual or team—comes privately funded both as far as attending the tournaments and personal coaching.
I have nothing against any of this, as long as we recognize it for what it is. After all, I was a coach for 20 years with plenty of TOC success for my team and I’ve run endless numbers of tournaments in aid of this circuit. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with having money, and spending it on debate. I wish every school had the resources to take on a serious commitment to debate. And I don’t want to undervalue the educators who have built their careers on it. If we took some of the storied TOC coaches and put them into a school district without a penny to its name, they would still develop outstanding teams—I have no doubt about that—although those teams wouldn’t be able to do much more than local competing.
I’m not going to go into the impact of TOC, which I have done over the years ad nauseum. Over and over I have said that if TOC didn’t exist, I wouldn’t invent it. But it’s there, and it’s not going away any time soon, so there’s not much point in pretending otherwise. I have to admit though that I find the upcoming e-TOC…shall we say…interesting?
The idea of debate-by-internet has been with us for a while. The first minute there was connectivity there was the thought of e-rounds. I think there was some sort of dream that e-debating would tear down barriers, ushering in a new utopia of access for all. No longer would “high level” debate be limited to those with the funds to travel the country weekend after weekend. Every student everywhere would simply log on and start mouthing off. I don’t think we ever thought about it much (although I would imagine there are some people who have tried it and, for all I know, it might be quite popular on parts of the web I don’t visit). It would happen some day, but meanwhile, the bus is leaving at 8:00 a.m. so get moving.
The first thing that struck me about e-TOC was that it costs as much as IRL-TOC, aside from not having to pay a surcharge per judge to eat the bagels in the judges’ lounge. (I don’t remember them ever having a judges’ lounge back in my day, not that anyone in their right mind would want a Kentucky bagel.) Aren’t they at least saving money on the Monday morning breakfast? It was suggested to me that, instead of room fees and custodial costs they now have software fees. To be honest, I really don’t believe this, but I have no evidence to dispute it, so I’ll let it go.
When I read the instructions for the tournament, which are wildly elaborate, for a while I completely disbelieved that the enterprise was even possible. I’ve communicated with others remotely for decades: back in the DJ, not all that long ago, we had state of the art videoconferencing, and I’m on the horn one way or another with my daughter in London on a regular basis. Based on my own not always ideal experience, my mind was having trouble grokking how teammates and judges would all somehow sort this out. But looking at how Zoom works, I’ve come to see that it is, in fact, quite possible to conduct a fairly decent simulation of a round electronically. I’m willing to ignore the hoo-ha of the real world when in a lot of rounds teams spend more time ineptly flashing cases and evidence and looking for outlets and cursing the wifi than they do debating, and where flooding a tidal wave of evidence on all and sundry is taught as a winning strategy (as compared to, I don’t know, debating good cases well). Let’s, for argument’s sake, assume a perfect world where everyone is the Master of the Tech Universe. Even if that’s not true today, it’s not an unreasonable expectation in the not-so-distant future.
I begin to see that, given today’s tech, e-rounds may not be so farfetched after all, manageable on a fairly large tournament-sized basis. And this does begin to fulfill that utopian dream of ultimate resource parity. Unfortunately, the dream has a few holes in it, at least as far as e-TOC is concerned. First, it assumes equal bandwidth for all, which certainly isn’t true in every household in the US. Secondly, if I’m using a device for my communicating, complete with mic and headphones and cam, I probably need a second device for my materials like cases and research, and maybe even a third device for private communication with my partner. In the world of social distancing, that means all that hardware for each and every participant. And you thought flying to Lexington for the weekend was going to be expensive?
If you think about all of that, you quickly come to realize that, at the moment, the e-round idea does anything but democratize debate. But to be honest, I’m actually thinking that, in the long run, our preliminary steps on the road to e-debate might pay off. Covid-19 won’t be keeping us all locked up forever. And most if not all of the drawbacks to e-debating alone in our individual closets will be removed if we were back in school. Yes, I know that all schools do not have all the tech they need, but that’s more likely than all individual students having that tech. If my teams at Imaginary High School wanted to debate at a virtual tournament, even today, there’s probably enough tech for them to do it. And the thing is, the present situation, however inadvertently, is showing that it might indeed be possible. We will all, before long, be competent Zoomers. We will all, eventually, be back in school (well, not me, but you know what I mean) where the resources for e-debating are probably even now readily available. Will we begin to take advantage of this? Will we learn the lessons of the pandemic to take a giant leap in communication in the one high school activity that is entirely about communication? Will the e-TOC actually be an unwitting catalyst in democratizing the activity in which it is the very paradigm of elitism?
It could happen.
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