Showing posts with label Coaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Coaching. Show all posts
Thursday, March 08, 2012
The end of the eleven top ten
I look at the new iPad and have no interest; my good Republican cloth coat original iPad still does the job perfectly well. No wonder my LD list seems so out-of-date.
4. Fast thinking
You have to be able to think fast, both in CX and when prepping rebuttals. Preparation in advance of a round, and remembering the responses you've already developed -- rather than creating them on the spot -- is the best approach because it requires that you save your fast thinking for the unexpected, while using your memory for the predictable.
This one is interesting. For lots of debaters once upon a time, responding to arguments meant, for all practical purposes, making something up on the spot. Over the years we’ve evolved into finding the response on your computer (not true when this was written). Fast thinking is still required, but the skill is totally different. Before it was fast creative thinking, now it’s fast recalling. You know you’ve got the response there somewhere; you’ve just got to find it. This is actually a good skill, learning to organize in such a way that when you need something, you can find it. The way this is worded wouldn’t require much if any rewriting for PF.
3. Time management
Use your all time in a round correctly. Your constructives should be timed perfectly. 1ARs should be half and half Aff and Neg (although some varsity think 1:30/1:30 + 1 for V/C analysis, overviews, underviews, middleviews, views of the lake from the cabin, the view from tab, a dim view of the proceedings as a whole). NRs should end with a minute or two of crystallization, while 2ARs should be all crystallization. Use all your prep time, even if it's only to take a deep breath.
Well, when was the last time you heard a 2AR that was all crystallization? Nowadays they just replay all the arguments and give you 27 sufficient and independent reasons to affirm as if they really believe there could be such a number. Judges buy into the pretense, presumably because they get caught up in the magic. Dream on. Still, voting issues are required…
Anyhow, using time efficiently is always important; this can be easily revised for PF rounds, although the emphasis on using prep won’t be so important because there isn’t much of it and it’s mostly spent finding files.
2. Judge adaptation
Since ballots come from judges, working with your judges is, at least according to the HH coach, who will always rank this as #1, the greatest key to success. With former debaters and coaches, you can confidently use a certain measure of speed and LD lingo (almost always -- you'll know the exceptions). With parents, assume that they are rational adults who would like you to be clear and simple in your analysis (see Simplicity, above). They'll also respond to knowledge and confidence, not to mention speaking well. They will be less accepting of speed. If you actually know the individual, that is, if you know the judge, you are best off, because you can -- and must -- adapt to what you know that judge likes.
Here’s the deal about public speaking, aside from high school forensics. Rule number one is to know your audience, and adjust your speech accordingly. Let’s say you are giving a talk about the future of personal computing. If you are giving this talk at Apple HQ, you would do it differently than if you were giving it at my mother’s nursing home, even though the content would be roughly identical. You have to know what it is that your audience knows, and doesn’t know, so that when you’re addressing them, you don’t lose them. If you tell them what they already know, or talk in terms they don’t know, they’re lost.
In LD, back in the day when at any given tournament you could be judged by a wide range of adjudicators, this was absolutely the number one rule of debate. Nowadays, where you can engineer your way through MJP to a reasonably narrow band of judges at least in your most important rounds, it is still required—you will get the odd inexperienced judge, or a coach like me wheeled out from tab because no one else will fit, etc.—and you have no choice but to slow down and simplify, or lose (provided your opponent is smart enough to slow down and simplify; if neither of you do, you both deserve to lose the ballot coin-flip that will transpire, at least metaphorically). Adaptation is still required, but not from round to round, and hence, it is not a top priority.
There isn’t a lot of need for judge adaptation in PF at the moment, given that most PF judges do tend to be lay, even though some of them might be mightily experienced. All of them want what PF proclaims to offer, which ultimately is good speaking and clear points and big picture. So, for entirely different reasons than with LD, this doesn’t loom all that large.
1. Knowledge
There is no such thing as too much research. At the highest levels of debate, all debaters are created roughly equal skillwise; it's the work they do in advance that can make the difference. Contrariwise, if you don't know it, don't use it. Know what you know and avoid what you don't know. Of course, the more you know, the less you'll have to avoid!
It was revolutionary when the Sailors voted this number one over judge adaptation. A sign of the future, you might say. I’d reword this a tad, perhaps, but knowing your topic inside and out is the best thing you can do in aid of winning a round. So, probably, number one again.
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
Continuing with the eleven top ten...
Somebody called me yesterday from Rippin’ wondering why I hadn’t re-upped for the year. I think I showed remarkable restraint, which is similarly demonstrated here on a daily basis. ‘Nuff said.
When last we looked at the eleven items on the top ten list, we were up to here:
8. Speaking well
If you sound like your mouth is filled with month-old molasses, yet everything you say is intelligent, you will win some rounds. If you sound like a polished Shakespearean actor, with resonant tones that soothe the judgic ear, yet everything you say is idiotic, you will win even more rounds. If you sound good AND talk smart, you will dominate. Practice speaking exercises. Listen to the advice at meetings. Never underestimate oratorical skill.
I would say that this has become way less important in LD (it was on its dying legs even when we last espoused it) and absolutely crucial in PF, where the audience is almost entirely parents. Plus, the paradigm for PF in the first place was presentation, when it was called Crossfire and based on the TV news commentator idea. I can’t say I’m upset that this will feature higher up on the final PF list. Speaking well is a good thing, and while I have nothing against the other skills being taught/learned in Policy and LD that have replaced classic public speaking, I nonetheless like that it is still alive and well somewhere in the debate forum.
7. Opponent adaptation
Adjust your style appropriately. Treat lesser opponents with respect. Treat stronger opponents with the understanding that anyone can be beat. Don't speed-talk against a slow talker. Getting good speaker points often depends on your keeping your cool in tough, unbalanced pairings, regardless of where you yourself are in the balance.
This one probably still holds true in LD, and will be true in PF, although most people don’t practice it as much as they should. Not the treating opponents with respect part; I think that most debaters know enough to be polite in their LD rounds when they know they’re capable of eating their opponents alive. But adjusting to the opponent, absent competitiveness? That’s something else. For the judge, when it’s not so match a matter of talent balance but a question of approach, if the two debaters are coming from totally different directions, the judge must immediately intervene by deciding which approach is preferable. If both debaters are coming from the same place, life is much easier for everyone in the room. In the new rules, this one will probably be rewritten, but one way or the other will continue in the running.
6. Fast flowing
Practice flowing from day one, and never attend a round without flowing it. Even practice rounds. You will simply continue to get better at it. Fast, accurate flowing will mean the difference in your toughest rounds. Learn all the different flow styles and use (or create) one that works best for you, not the one that works best for someone else.
Why would I change a word of this?
5. Confidence
If you act like you know what you're doing, you might actually convince your opponents and judges that you do, in fact, know what you're doing. It is easiest to act as if you know what you're doing, by the way, if, in reality, you do know what you're doing.
Also hard to improve. How many rounds have been lost the very second that debaters look at the schematics and see that they’re hitting someone they think is better than they are? You don’t have to even walk into the room to lose the round, in other words, because it’s already lost in your head. Do the best debaters always debate the best? Is every round completely predictable? But I think more to the point on this one is that people (judges) respond in a certain way to confidence (as compared to visible abject dismay) that is favorable. Not arrogance, just a belief that you belong there, and have something to say worth listening to. It’s usually true, so why not act as if it’s true?
When last we looked at the eleven items on the top ten list, we were up to here:
8. Speaking well
If you sound like your mouth is filled with month-old molasses, yet everything you say is intelligent, you will win some rounds. If you sound like a polished Shakespearean actor, with resonant tones that soothe the judgic ear, yet everything you say is idiotic, you will win even more rounds. If you sound good AND talk smart, you will dominate. Practice speaking exercises. Listen to the advice at meetings. Never underestimate oratorical skill.
I would say that this has become way less important in LD (it was on its dying legs even when we last espoused it) and absolutely crucial in PF, where the audience is almost entirely parents. Plus, the paradigm for PF in the first place was presentation, when it was called Crossfire and based on the TV news commentator idea. I can’t say I’m upset that this will feature higher up on the final PF list. Speaking well is a good thing, and while I have nothing against the other skills being taught/learned in Policy and LD that have replaced classic public speaking, I nonetheless like that it is still alive and well somewhere in the debate forum.
7. Opponent adaptation
Adjust your style appropriately. Treat lesser opponents with respect. Treat stronger opponents with the understanding that anyone can be beat. Don't speed-talk against a slow talker. Getting good speaker points often depends on your keeping your cool in tough, unbalanced pairings, regardless of where you yourself are in the balance.
This one probably still holds true in LD, and will be true in PF, although most people don’t practice it as much as they should. Not the treating opponents with respect part; I think that most debaters know enough to be polite in their LD rounds when they know they’re capable of eating their opponents alive. But adjusting to the opponent, absent competitiveness? That’s something else. For the judge, when it’s not so match a matter of talent balance but a question of approach, if the two debaters are coming from totally different directions, the judge must immediately intervene by deciding which approach is preferable. If both debaters are coming from the same place, life is much easier for everyone in the room. In the new rules, this one will probably be rewritten, but one way or the other will continue in the running.
6. Fast flowing
Practice flowing from day one, and never attend a round without flowing it. Even practice rounds. You will simply continue to get better at it. Fast, accurate flowing will mean the difference in your toughest rounds. Learn all the different flow styles and use (or create) one that works best for you, not the one that works best for someone else.
Why would I change a word of this?
5. Confidence
If you act like you know what you're doing, you might actually convince your opponents and judges that you do, in fact, know what you're doing. It is easiest to act as if you know what you're doing, by the way, if, in reality, you do know what you're doing.
Also hard to improve. How many rounds have been lost the very second that debaters look at the schematics and see that they’re hitting someone they think is better than they are? You don’t have to even walk into the room to lose the round, in other words, because it’s already lost in your head. Do the best debaters always debate the best? Is every round completely predictable? But I think more to the point on this one is that people (judges) respond in a certain way to confidence (as compared to visible abject dismay) that is favorable. Not arrogance, just a belief that you belong there, and have something to say worth listening to. It’s usually true, so why not act as if it’s true?
Monday, March 05, 2012
The Seven Debating Santini Brothers continue the move
The old LD curriculum, after the initial meetings where everyone tried on the sorting hat and headed off either to Debateland or Speecho-Americana, began with rights, the social contract and morality. Occasionally, just for a change of pace, I’d kick off with morality. One could, I guess, tie right and wrong into the protection of rights, but traditionally we look at deontological and consequential analyses, which are a different business altogether than weighing conflicting rights claims. So we would mostly talk about these concepts, rights and morality, independently. I tended to talk about justice a little later in the game, primarily because the mind has so much vacant space available at any given time, and it seemed to make sense to let a few other basics sink in first. But before long we would have covered those three key ethical concepts in some depth, i.e., rights, justice and morality.
Next up we would talk about the structure of an LD round. Then the nature of arguments. Then the writing of cases. And of course the topic at hand (in our case, Modest Novice). Figure that now we’re at about the middle of October.
I can live with that. The elders on the team can contribute, and we can switch over to them regularly enough to discuss their PF topics of the month.
When November 1 rolls around, we’ll have a new topic (for December). We can all start talking about that together, which finally puts us on the same track resolution-wise, although I would expect participation from all on any topic discussion. What also needs to come up at this point, after the newbies have debated those 3 opportunities from the first-timers to the first MHL, is the beginning of training for PF.
What seems to me that is most different about PF and LD, and what I’m putting as my number one in the top ten rules for PFers, is that facts/evidence dominate. The rule, to my recollection, is that you should never open your mouth in a PF round unless there’s a piece of evidence in it. There’s other rules as well in the top ten, but I haven’t sorted them out yet completely. When I do, I’ll share them. Meanwhile, this indicates to me that the first PFish thing that we train on is research.
Having no debate over the weekend (and watching the calendar count down until the end of the season on—yikes!—April Fools), I did more work on the cur, but so far I’ve only tackled the easy stuff, moving things around and putting in “debate” where it says “LD.” When it came to research in LD, I never pushed much, on the assumption that research was the idea that cut out the ribbon clerks. I demanded little or nothing; if they didn’t do it, they would eventually drop by the wayside. But in PF, research is the heart and soul, and some other means of cutting out the ribbon clerks needs to be determined.
A paradigm shift if there ever was one.
Next up we would talk about the structure of an LD round. Then the nature of arguments. Then the writing of cases. And of course the topic at hand (in our case, Modest Novice). Figure that now we’re at about the middle of October.
I can live with that. The elders on the team can contribute, and we can switch over to them regularly enough to discuss their PF topics of the month.
When November 1 rolls around, we’ll have a new topic (for December). We can all start talking about that together, which finally puts us on the same track resolution-wise, although I would expect participation from all on any topic discussion. What also needs to come up at this point, after the newbies have debated those 3 opportunities from the first-timers to the first MHL, is the beginning of training for PF.
What seems to me that is most different about PF and LD, and what I’m putting as my number one in the top ten rules for PFers, is that facts/evidence dominate. The rule, to my recollection, is that you should never open your mouth in a PF round unless there’s a piece of evidence in it. There’s other rules as well in the top ten, but I haven’t sorted them out yet completely. When I do, I’ll share them. Meanwhile, this indicates to me that the first PFish thing that we train on is research.
Having no debate over the weekend (and watching the calendar count down until the end of the season on—yikes!—April Fools), I did more work on the cur, but so far I’ve only tackled the easy stuff, moving things around and putting in “debate” where it says “LD.” When it came to research in LD, I never pushed much, on the assumption that research was the idea that cut out the ribbon clerks. I demanded little or nothing; if they didn’t do it, they would eventually drop by the wayside. But in PF, research is the heart and soul, and some other means of cutting out the ribbon clerks needs to be determined.
A paradigm shift if there ever was one.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Another way to switch from LD to PF is to throw a fat guy in front of the trolley
I’m going in deep and revamping everything.
Once upon a time I had a pretty decent curriculum for weekly LD meetings. I started with some key concepts like rights and morality, then went on to the structure of rounds, and the parts of an argument, etc., etc. Which was all swell and good when we were an LD team, but if we’re going to mostly be a PF team in the future, something’s got to give.
So, I’m rethinking everything, and planning everything out in my great book of debate life, AKA the Cur. Everything has to be looked at. Even my remarks on parents’ night are no longer entirely accurate. But the first big issue that arises, to which I have no particular answer, is when to switch the average novice from LD to PF. I still like the idea of starting people in LD. There’s no partner issues to worry about, for one thing, and an argument is an argument. Plus, early rounds have little to do with debate per se and much more to do with things like showing up and thinking on your feet and writing cases and public speaking. (Yes, novices in LD do engage in public speaking, although nowadays we quickly move them away from anything so unrewarding as speaking well.)
Because we run the Modest Novice topic from September through November, I can get three solid months taken care of without thinking about it. But what happens in December? I’ve been thinking that, since the team as a whole will hear the December PF topic on Nov 1, and we’ll quickly start brainstorming on it (provided I actually have repeat offenders next year), starting the noobs in PF in December makes some sense for that reason alone. Unfortunately, there are more novice LD opportunities after the turn of the year than there are novice PF ops. There’s no question that the debate community has yet to embrace Novice PF in this region, despite the popularity of PF overall. Old habits die hard, I guess.
Of course, the switch time will never be set as hard and fast. Some folks may never want to switch, and I’m certainly not going to force them. And maybe I’m deluding myself that I’ll have enough novices to create even a single PF team, considering how tiny the Huddian Navy is at the moment.
Oh, well. Thoughts to ponder as a plough the waters of the Cur.
Once upon a time I had a pretty decent curriculum for weekly LD meetings. I started with some key concepts like rights and morality, then went on to the structure of rounds, and the parts of an argument, etc., etc. Which was all swell and good when we were an LD team, but if we’re going to mostly be a PF team in the future, something’s got to give.
So, I’m rethinking everything, and planning everything out in my great book of debate life, AKA the Cur. Everything has to be looked at. Even my remarks on parents’ night are no longer entirely accurate. But the first big issue that arises, to which I have no particular answer, is when to switch the average novice from LD to PF. I still like the idea of starting people in LD. There’s no partner issues to worry about, for one thing, and an argument is an argument. Plus, early rounds have little to do with debate per se and much more to do with things like showing up and thinking on your feet and writing cases and public speaking. (Yes, novices in LD do engage in public speaking, although nowadays we quickly move them away from anything so unrewarding as speaking well.)
Because we run the Modest Novice topic from September through November, I can get three solid months taken care of without thinking about it. But what happens in December? I’ve been thinking that, since the team as a whole will hear the December PF topic on Nov 1, and we’ll quickly start brainstorming on it (provided I actually have repeat offenders next year), starting the noobs in PF in December makes some sense for that reason alone. Unfortunately, there are more novice LD opportunities after the turn of the year than there are novice PF ops. There’s no question that the debate community has yet to embrace Novice PF in this region, despite the popularity of PF overall. Old habits die hard, I guess.
Of course, the switch time will never be set as hard and fast. Some folks may never want to switch, and I’m certainly not going to force them. And maybe I’m deluding myself that I’ll have enough novices to create even a single PF team, considering how tiny the Huddian Navy is at the moment.
Oh, well. Thoughts to ponder as a plough the waters of the Cur.
Monday, August 08, 2011
Lost weekend
Somehow this weekend went to hell in a hand basket. It was supposed to start with Friday in the city and dinner with Kt and O'C, and that didn't happen, and then Saturday I had to clean out the basement—oh joy, oh rapture—and then Sunday we canceled golf because of rain that didn't happen (although it was 135% humidity out there, so maybe that wasn't such a bad idea after all) which meant I got to update the Bump invite just about completely. I repeat: Oh joy, oh rapture.
I passed the invite along to O'C for his input. He had done the same to me with the Bronx invite, but by the time I got around to reading it (about five minutes after he asked me about it) he had already posted it. The man has the patience of a saint, so to speak. PJ has commented on the Yes Virginia round, and I appreciate his concerns, but the benefits of half an hour aren't that many, really, on a trip of four hours. If everyone is out by 5 they're home by 9, which is the goal, unless you're winning the damned thing, in which case you'll be happy to stay until we throw you out. O'C, of course, thinks eliminating the Yes Virginia round is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but he's a saint, and there you are.
Ryan Miller sent me a note that they are doing their York County August workshop, "August 18-21, with Sept/Oct case workup and modules on ballot theory & kritiks, economic reasoning, and the meaning of justice." Ryan is rmm4pi8@gmail.com if you're interested. When he tells you the meaning of justice, please email it to me. I've been waiting to hear...
It turns out that you can play iPad Scrabble with Facebook friends. I like that, except that O'C is wiping the floor with me. As soon as he uses a word that I've heard of, I'll have him, though. He credits his non-English-speaking students with his great success at the game. [Sigh...]
I passed the invite along to O'C for his input. He had done the same to me with the Bronx invite, but by the time I got around to reading it (about five minutes after he asked me about it) he had already posted it. The man has the patience of a saint, so to speak. PJ has commented on the Yes Virginia round, and I appreciate his concerns, but the benefits of half an hour aren't that many, really, on a trip of four hours. If everyone is out by 5 they're home by 9, which is the goal, unless you're winning the damned thing, in which case you'll be happy to stay until we throw you out. O'C, of course, thinks eliminating the Yes Virginia round is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but he's a saint, and there you are.
Ryan Miller sent me a note that they are doing their York County August workshop, "August 18-21, with Sept/Oct case workup and modules on ballot theory & kritiks, economic reasoning, and the meaning of justice." Ryan is rmm4pi8@gmail.com if you're interested. When he tells you the meaning of justice, please email it to me. I've been waiting to hear...
It turns out that you can play iPad Scrabble with Facebook friends. I like that, except that O'C is wiping the floor with me. As soon as he uses a word that I've heard of, I'll have him, though. He credits his non-English-speaking students with his great success at the game. [Sigh...]
Monday, January 31, 2011
I remember...some of it
Ah, history.
This weekend the Panivore managed to tied the Sailor record for TOC bids in one year, which is seven. After a while the number of bids doesn’t really matter anymore. I mean, once you’re fully qualified, it’s nothing more than statistics. Which means, of course, that O’C’s ears immediately perked up. Statistics? Debate history? Awards? He thought he might have to go diving into the bilge water of Sailor legend to find out who exactly did what, but at least in what I guess we can safely refer to as the Menick Years, I know perfectly well. I haven’t forgotten all that much. Yet.
The daughter managed to scrape together five bids in her day in her senior year. Considering that she didn’t even go to the TOC, this was mostly of parenthetical interest at the time. That was the year the local state tournament was held the same weekend, and all her friends were going to be at that one, and she didn’t give the proverbial hoot about TOC by comparison. This was Kate through and through. Noah G managed to get seven bids as a senior, thus setting the modern team record. He started going to TOC as, if I remember correctly, a sophomore. I started going with him after a while, and there was a period there when Hen Hud had TOC types hanging from the rafters. We were lousy with bids, to put it mildly. We attracted them like fleas to a mutt. (Not that the Sailors were mutts, of course: the VCA knows well my inability to scrape together the two halves of a metaphor.) We just happened to have some good debaters, which I attribute to the water from the local nuclear power plant. If you had uranium enriching your daily bread, you’d get more bids too.
I have always believed that there is a combination of ingredients to $ircuit success, the first of which is the debater. You can’t make a silk purse, etc. Some people are just naturals at this business. It is possible for coaches to stymie that inherent ability, but if you don’t get in the way too much, it will blossom. Then, of course, there are coaches who obviously have ability that combines well with a source of good debaters. You couldn’t put, say, Bietz into the La Jolla Institute for the Criminally Insane and Sort of Dull Adolescent and expect his team to take home a national championship or two, but his record with solid raw material demonstrates that he must be doing something right again and again. In other words, bad coaching can inhibit good debaters and good coaching can develop better debaters. Neutral coaching—my specialty—at least won’t hurt them, but then again, my goal is to start them down the track. Where they go after that is up to them.
It all boils down to what you want to get out of the activity. I consider the competitive part of it important, but not at all as important as everything else. There’s all the learning that goes into understanding the topics, there’s all the maturity required to show up and get things done correctly and in a timely manner, there’s the opening up to new people and new ideas. Competition enables this stuff, which is why the competition is important. That this stuff enables the competition is beside the point, and isn’t at all why most coaches bother. Winning is great, but you can lose a lot of rounds and still get all the benefits of debate. Sure, some of us will remember who won what when, but most of us will remember more the students who grew and learned as a result of being team members; when you get together five years later, you probably won’t talk about that spike the aff ran in the third round. The trophies will be dusty in the basement (or the lack of trophies long forgotten). What will matter is having gone through the experiences. Debaters will be better for it than if they hadn’t gone through them. And they will know that, and remember those times fondly.
This weekend the Panivore managed to tied the Sailor record for TOC bids in one year, which is seven. After a while the number of bids doesn’t really matter anymore. I mean, once you’re fully qualified, it’s nothing more than statistics. Which means, of course, that O’C’s ears immediately perked up. Statistics? Debate history? Awards? He thought he might have to go diving into the bilge water of Sailor legend to find out who exactly did what, but at least in what I guess we can safely refer to as the Menick Years, I know perfectly well. I haven’t forgotten all that much. Yet.
The daughter managed to scrape together five bids in her day in her senior year. Considering that she didn’t even go to the TOC, this was mostly of parenthetical interest at the time. That was the year the local state tournament was held the same weekend, and all her friends were going to be at that one, and she didn’t give the proverbial hoot about TOC by comparison. This was Kate through and through. Noah G managed to get seven bids as a senior, thus setting the modern team record. He started going to TOC as, if I remember correctly, a sophomore. I started going with him after a while, and there was a period there when Hen Hud had TOC types hanging from the rafters. We were lousy with bids, to put it mildly. We attracted them like fleas to a mutt. (Not that the Sailors were mutts, of course: the VCA knows well my inability to scrape together the two halves of a metaphor.) We just happened to have some good debaters, which I attribute to the water from the local nuclear power plant. If you had uranium enriching your daily bread, you’d get more bids too.
I have always believed that there is a combination of ingredients to $ircuit success, the first of which is the debater. You can’t make a silk purse, etc. Some people are just naturals at this business. It is possible for coaches to stymie that inherent ability, but if you don’t get in the way too much, it will blossom. Then, of course, there are coaches who obviously have ability that combines well with a source of good debaters. You couldn’t put, say, Bietz into the La Jolla Institute for the Criminally Insane and Sort of Dull Adolescent and expect his team to take home a national championship or two, but his record with solid raw material demonstrates that he must be doing something right again and again. In other words, bad coaching can inhibit good debaters and good coaching can develop better debaters. Neutral coaching—my specialty—at least won’t hurt them, but then again, my goal is to start them down the track. Where they go after that is up to them.
It all boils down to what you want to get out of the activity. I consider the competitive part of it important, but not at all as important as everything else. There’s all the learning that goes into understanding the topics, there’s all the maturity required to show up and get things done correctly and in a timely manner, there’s the opening up to new people and new ideas. Competition enables this stuff, which is why the competition is important. That this stuff enables the competition is beside the point, and isn’t at all why most coaches bother. Winning is great, but you can lose a lot of rounds and still get all the benefits of debate. Sure, some of us will remember who won what when, but most of us will remember more the students who grew and learned as a result of being team members; when you get together five years later, you probably won’t talk about that spike the aff ran in the third round. The trophies will be dusty in the basement (or the lack of trophies long forgotten). What will matter is having gone through the experiences. Debaters will be better for it than if they hadn’t gone through them. And they will know that, and remember those times fondly.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Paeans for the peons (and other vocabulary words)
It’s quiet out there.
Too quiet.
There is this lacuna between the shutting down of registration and the shutting down of ranking, where there isn’t much to do aside from wondering if you’re using the word lacuna correctly, this being the very first time and all. Everything is working on tabroom.com, and I’ve checked it to see if it’s registering the strikes, and it is, and there isn’t much else for it until 9:00 tonight when I can port everything over to TRPC and get it running. I’ve got the chez to myself tonight, so I’ll get everything packed up. I’ve got trophies left from last year, WWMD tee shirts, reams of paper, mugs (probably the last year for these suckers), oxygen tanks, hazmat suits, rubber duckies, boxes of iCrappies (formerly crappy prizes), the Jon Cruz Award, etc., all waiting to be organized. That’ll kill a minute or two. I haven’t gotten many changes after the deadline, hence not many fines; presumably the real action will be on Friday at the table, where the money goes directly to Grameen. I’ve passed along the housing list and warned everyone that if they’re allergic to horny toads, now is the time to tell us before they get lodged at the House o’ Horny Toads or its equivalent. I’ve still got speaker point parameters to publish, and I’ll get them out at some point, probably by the time you read this, especially if you wait to read this for a month or two.
Otherwise, it’s business as usual. We Sailored last night, going over ballots from Montwegia for a while, for a start. There really is nothing like a ballot to find things to work on with Plebes. Even if you find the ballot incomprensibly weird, there’s probably something useful on it. I argued with the Panivore a bit (there’s a new one for you), this time on who the worst judges are. I always maintain that it’s high school students, who may believe too much in their own interpretation of resolutions and whatnot. This is not to say all high school students are bad—far from it—but there’s more bad ones of these than anything else. I posit that parent judges are better because they have learned orthodoxy (especially if they’ve come through our MHL/CFL training) and don’t have any horses in the race themselves. I’m not saying that you have to be a good high school debater to be a good judge, but you do have to be a good judge to be a good judge, if you don’t mind my putting it that way. Anyhow, no debate meeting is complete without a debate with the Panivore, so nothing new there. Anyhow, she also regaled us with tales of Minneapolis and whatfolks on drugs were running folks were running on drugs, uncovering little stockishness at this point. Some of it proved what I had been saying, but we managed to elide that. (God, it’s tough being right all the time, but somehow I bear the burden.) And, of course, we discussed Bump. Mostly I’ll put the P and the PC in charge of training all the noobs on ballots and running, rather than trying to do it myself, plus I have them doing everything else I usually have a dozen different people do.
Seriously, I don’t know what I’m going to do next year without these two. They’re doing most of my job for me, and probably better. [Sigh.]
Too quiet.
There is this lacuna between the shutting down of registration and the shutting down of ranking, where there isn’t much to do aside from wondering if you’re using the word lacuna correctly, this being the very first time and all. Everything is working on tabroom.com, and I’ve checked it to see if it’s registering the strikes, and it is, and there isn’t much else for it until 9:00 tonight when I can port everything over to TRPC and get it running. I’ve got the chez to myself tonight, so I’ll get everything packed up. I’ve got trophies left from last year, WWMD tee shirts, reams of paper, mugs (probably the last year for these suckers), oxygen tanks, hazmat suits, rubber duckies, boxes of iCrappies (formerly crappy prizes), the Jon Cruz Award, etc., all waiting to be organized. That’ll kill a minute or two. I haven’t gotten many changes after the deadline, hence not many fines; presumably the real action will be on Friday at the table, where the money goes directly to Grameen. I’ve passed along the housing list and warned everyone that if they’re allergic to horny toads, now is the time to tell us before they get lodged at the House o’ Horny Toads or its equivalent. I’ve still got speaker point parameters to publish, and I’ll get them out at some point, probably by the time you read this, especially if you wait to read this for a month or two.
Otherwise, it’s business as usual. We Sailored last night, going over ballots from Montwegia for a while, for a start. There really is nothing like a ballot to find things to work on with Plebes. Even if you find the ballot incomprensibly weird, there’s probably something useful on it. I argued with the Panivore a bit (there’s a new one for you), this time on who the worst judges are. I always maintain that it’s high school students, who may believe too much in their own interpretation of resolutions and whatnot. This is not to say all high school students are bad—far from it—but there’s more bad ones of these than anything else. I posit that parent judges are better because they have learned orthodoxy (especially if they’ve come through our MHL/CFL training) and don’t have any horses in the race themselves. I’m not saying that you have to be a good high school debater to be a good judge, but you do have to be a good judge to be a good judge, if you don’t mind my putting it that way. Anyhow, no debate meeting is complete without a debate with the Panivore, so nothing new there. Anyhow, she also regaled us with tales of Minneapolis and what
Seriously, I don’t know what I’m going to do next year without these two. They’re doing most of my job for me, and probably better. [Sigh.]
Friday, November 05, 2010
The fleet's in at the end of the day watching movies and studying up on Bumpiana
Kathy, the new Speech Admiral, came over last night to learn this and that. For those of us who’ve been doing this awhile, it’s easy to forget how much of this and that there is. Sign up on this, access to that, buses, custodians, organizations—and somewhere in there, work with students on their pieces. If it were only the latter, this would be a piece of cake. I guess that’s why, as they say, we earn the big bucks.
(And speaking of what they say, I just want to point this out, as a bulletin from the DJ. At some point it will, in fact, be the end of the day. What phrase will you then use over and over again to drive me crazy? Is “at the end of the day” the methadone to the heroin of PowerPoint? You’ve got to wonder. Or maybe teenagers who say “like” every other word grow up to say “at the end of the day” every other sentence. Could be.)
The Panivore is skying out to Minneapolis with the Scarswegians today, while locally we’re prepping for an MHL tomorrow. It’s much smaller than the last couple of adventures. Monticello is about as far away from civilization as you can get, and the idea of driving up there from civilization on a Saturday morning is pretty daunting for most people. The passport control alone is enough to slow them down. At least the weather forecast doesn’t include snow. The Montwegians usually shut down the city early in November and don’t reopen till the Fourth of July. I don’t envy them their weather. The bright side of this is, amazingly, an absolutely free Friday night, the first I’ve had (counting non-debate obligations) since Labor Day. A movie, definitely. Wow. What a thought!
I got the room list for Bump today. It is surprisingly similar to the room lists from 1996-2009. Ain’t life grand?
(And speaking of what they say, I just want to point this out, as a bulletin from the DJ. At some point it will, in fact, be the end of the day. What phrase will you then use over and over again to drive me crazy? Is “at the end of the day” the methadone to the heroin of PowerPoint? You’ve got to wonder. Or maybe teenagers who say “like” every other word grow up to say “at the end of the day” every other sentence. Could be.)
The Panivore is skying out to Minneapolis with the Scarswegians today, while locally we’re prepping for an MHL tomorrow. It’s much smaller than the last couple of adventures. Monticello is about as far away from civilization as you can get, and the idea of driving up there from civilization on a Saturday morning is pretty daunting for most people. The passport control alone is enough to slow them down. At least the weather forecast doesn’t include snow. The Montwegians usually shut down the city early in November and don’t reopen till the Fourth of July. I don’t envy them their weather. The bright side of this is, amazingly, an absolutely free Friday night, the first I’ve had (counting non-debate obligations) since Labor Day. A movie, definitely. Wow. What a thought!
I got the room list for Bump today. It is surprisingly similar to the room lists from 1996-2009. Ain’t life grand?
Friday, October 08, 2010
Parental units
Last night I met with the parents. This is always rather fun. I have notes of what to cover, of course, but to some extent when I talk like this—and talk I did, endlessly—it’s as much a race to see how much I’ll overlook as anything else. For instance, I forgot my favorite bit where I tell them that for tournaments they have to dress their kids like little lawyers. Always good for a larf. I’ve also used the paradigm, they should look as if their grandmother has dressed them for a religious service. They should not look as if they would be at home in a rap video, in other words, although I’ve never put it that way to the adults. Accordingly, I also forgot to tell them that, if they (the parents) accompany us, they can look exactly as if they’d be at home in a rap video. I certainly do, when I go to tournaments. People often stop me and ask me if I am a gangsta. I just give them a menacing look in reply.
[Insert musical interlude: “I see by your outfit / That you are a gangsta..”]
Anyhow, it was a good turnout, with some gaps, unfortunately. I should be used to that by now, and once or twice it’s only been because there’s many a slip between the kid finding out about the meeting and the parent actually getting the news that the meeting is happening, but generally it’s because the parents figure it doesn’t matter. And I guess, for them, it doesn’t. Another thing I didn’t say last night, but which is absolutely true, is that I’ve never seen a super forensician who didn’t have solid parental support, be it schlepping or judging or helping the coach run their own tournament or whatever. Fortunately, most parents are on the ball. What can I say? As any teacher will tell you, when there’s a need for parents to show up at the school for their kids, the ones who really didn’t have to show up always do, and the ones that should be showing up always don’t. Anybody can have a kid. Not anybody can be a parent, though.
My parent orientation spiel explains what the school does (Hen Hud pays for a lot but not all of it), how tournaments work and which ones we go to, and how the various activities are structured. I describe LD and the speech events. I tell them my door is always open and that there’s more brain dump on my website than is even marginally sane. I told them we’re working on getting a speech coach Real Soon Now. I tell them that if their kid goes to the Harvard tournament, their likelihood of getting into Harvard is as much improved as if they had simply kept the kid home with a plate of Harvard beets. I tell them that if their kid wants them to spend $500 or so a pop to fly around the country to the schmancy tournaments, it behooves them to discover if the kid has a warrant for being there, seeing that it’s their money, and that I will help them do the CBA on it. I tell them that we will train them to judge, and when they should show up. And finally, I enlist their aid in running Bump. I do this by throwing myself against the door and telling them that no one gets out alive until all the positions are filled. Last night they were well up to the challenge, and all the positions are indeed filled for the 2010 edition, and I am sanguine about the quality of grub in the judges’ lounge and in the cafeteria, and I am close to getting a guarantee of more housing slots.
So, all in all, it was a good session, well attended. I’m now back to only two nights a week in the hole. And when the Speech Coach comes on board, only one. And after the People’s Champion takes over my job, as O’C insists he well, I can finally stay home and catch up on Law & Order, which I’ve just started watching. The first season. I’ve seen 3 episodes. I have a lot of catching up to do.
[Insert musical interlude: “I see by your outfit / That you are a gangsta..”]
Anyhow, it was a good turnout, with some gaps, unfortunately. I should be used to that by now, and once or twice it’s only been because there’s many a slip between the kid finding out about the meeting and the parent actually getting the news that the meeting is happening, but generally it’s because the parents figure it doesn’t matter. And I guess, for them, it doesn’t. Another thing I didn’t say last night, but which is absolutely true, is that I’ve never seen a super forensician who didn’t have solid parental support, be it schlepping or judging or helping the coach run their own tournament or whatever. Fortunately, most parents are on the ball. What can I say? As any teacher will tell you, when there’s a need for parents to show up at the school for their kids, the ones who really didn’t have to show up always do, and the ones that should be showing up always don’t. Anybody can have a kid. Not anybody can be a parent, though.
My parent orientation spiel explains what the school does (Hen Hud pays for a lot but not all of it), how tournaments work and which ones we go to, and how the various activities are structured. I describe LD and the speech events. I tell them my door is always open and that there’s more brain dump on my website than is even marginally sane. I told them we’re working on getting a speech coach Real Soon Now. I tell them that if their kid goes to the Harvard tournament, their likelihood of getting into Harvard is as much improved as if they had simply kept the kid home with a plate of Harvard beets. I tell them that if their kid wants them to spend $500 or so a pop to fly around the country to the schmancy tournaments, it behooves them to discover if the kid has a warrant for being there, seeing that it’s their money, and that I will help them do the CBA on it. I tell them that we will train them to judge, and when they should show up. And finally, I enlist their aid in running Bump. I do this by throwing myself against the door and telling them that no one gets out alive until all the positions are filled. Last night they were well up to the challenge, and all the positions are indeed filled for the 2010 edition, and I am sanguine about the quality of grub in the judges’ lounge and in the cafeteria, and I am close to getting a guarantee of more housing slots.
So, all in all, it was a good session, well attended. I’m now back to only two nights a week in the hole. And when the Speech Coach comes on board, only one. And after the People’s Champion takes over my job, as O’C insists he well, I can finally stay home and catch up on Law & Order, which I’ve just started watching. The first season. I’ve seen 3 episodes. I have a lot of catching up to do.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Not the DiDeAd, for which the VCA breathes a sigh of relief
The discussion of case disclosure is not completely ended by any means, but I think that it has been dealt with fairly definitively for the time being, if you take the last TVFT into consideration. Much of the discussion has been an education process, at least for me. I absolutely began with an idea that case disclosure was X, and it turns out that case disclosure is actually Y. The reasons for my misconceptions don’t matter, because it seems other people have/had other misconceptions. While the idea is not set in stone at this point, and it is unclear where it will be or how it will affect the activity five years hence, we can make some general statements now. First, it is not onerous. I grabbed some instructions from Bill Batterman that I put into the Feed, if you need them. Provided that you have wireless at the venue, you’re fine. Second, it is not working as a wedge for big schools to trump little schools, but by the same token, it is not working as a shield for little schools against the prodigious abilities of big schools. It just changes things a little. Why? Because: three, it is disclosure of what you’ve done, not what you’re necessarily going to do. It captures for the record the case that is in the so-called public domain after you’ve run it. Which means that, four, it is really more a collection of strategically useful data than a tool of tactical useful data. In the real world, it is not turning debaters into the puppets of their aggressive assistant coaches, making them little preset response machines to preset cases. And to protect ourselves and our students from what we might call the misappropriation or at best the misunderstanding of this data, five, we will in the future lock it down from the outside world. The best thing we can do now is watch the experiment as it continues at Big Jake. It is another potential change in an activity that is constantly changing, another piece of the dialectic. Where it will go, no one knows. It might improve things, it might not, it might not even be much of an issue as time passes. As Jedi Master Bietz advises, one must wait and see.
Of course, over the last few days I’ve been debriefing the VCA on the DiDeAd more than addressing any debate issues, but then again, there haven’t been that many debate issues. Or in my case these days, speech and debate issues, until we get a new speech coach in. As is my wont, I’ve written up some elementary how-to material for my Speecho-Americans that I’m still polishing, but I would like to see them up the ante a bit on their choice of material. Also I’d like to see a little less death and destruction. What a gloomy bunch! Anyhow, I had hoped for inauguration of all of this year’s Plebes last night, but it turned out it was Open House at the Naval Academy, so tonight is the night. Which is not a bad thing actually, because it gives the Sailors another day to recruit after last week’s one-day-in two-days-out shortie. I love inauguration night. Sometimes we get newbies that we reckon by the dozens and sometimes we get two poor schlubs with dazed expressions that are never heard from again. Only time will tell.
Things will heat up next week for the Pups, none of whom read this blog, which means that only CP will be annoyed when I once again whine about their not entering judge names yet. The rest of you don’t have to read that previous sentence, but I guess it’s too late for that now. More importantly to all and sundry is the issue of judge rank assignments at the Pups in the world of MJP. If you haven’t done so already, read the take from Greenhill on the TVFT blog to see what they said they were going to do (which I presume they did). There’s lots of issues there, and we’ll be discussing it next week on the podcast. I think JV, who will be tabbing with me there as usual, will be joining us in the discussion. Needless to say, he brings a great numbers mind to the whole proceedings; he does teach physics after all.
So, wish us luck tonight at the inaugural. I wish you luck with your inaugurals too. May we all have more novices than we know what to do with!
And in a minute, a new DiDeAd posting. You didn’t think you’d get out of it that easily, did you?
Of course, over the last few days I’ve been debriefing the VCA on the DiDeAd more than addressing any debate issues, but then again, there haven’t been that many debate issues. Or in my case these days, speech and debate issues, until we get a new speech coach in. As is my wont, I’ve written up some elementary how-to material for my Speecho-Americans that I’m still polishing, but I would like to see them up the ante a bit on their choice of material. Also I’d like to see a little less death and destruction. What a gloomy bunch! Anyhow, I had hoped for inauguration of all of this year’s Plebes last night, but it turned out it was Open House at the Naval Academy, so tonight is the night. Which is not a bad thing actually, because it gives the Sailors another day to recruit after last week’s one-day-in two-days-out shortie. I love inauguration night. Sometimes we get newbies that we reckon by the dozens and sometimes we get two poor schlubs with dazed expressions that are never heard from again. Only time will tell.
Things will heat up next week for the Pups, none of whom read this blog, which means that only CP will be annoyed when I once again whine about their not entering judge names yet. The rest of you don’t have to read that previous sentence, but I guess it’s too late for that now. More importantly to all and sundry is the issue of judge rank assignments at the Pups in the world of MJP. If you haven’t done so already, read the take from Greenhill on the TVFT blog to see what they said they were going to do (which I presume they did). There’s lots of issues there, and we’ll be discussing it next week on the podcast. I think JV, who will be tabbing with me there as usual, will be joining us in the discussion. Needless to say, he brings a great numbers mind to the whole proceedings; he does teach physics after all.
So, wish us luck tonight at the inaugural. I wish you luck with your inaugurals too. May we all have more novices than we know what to do with!
And in a minute, a new DiDeAd posting. You didn’t think you’d get out of it that easily, did you?
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Hipmunk
This is a site worth looking at if you travel a lot, and need to find the best flights. It's new and still a little creaky, but it's also genius. Check it out: http://www.hipmunk.com/
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Viva la difference!
I don’t get sick very often, but when I do, it’s a doozy. Yesterday was my doozy day. But the good news is that I recover from my bouts of doozitis within 24 hours, returning to my usual, tottering at death’s door self, so here I am.
Apparently among the few things I was able to do yesterday in my delirium was add articles to the Feed (thank you, iPad). Which brought up that point about my not particularly supporting the things I put up. If you’ve been following the Feed, you would have seen good arguments in favor of SCOTUS putting a gun in each of our pockets, for instance, which I think is about as far from what the framers would do today as [enter your own metaphor here, preferably humorous, for some really unlikely occurrence; I’m still recuperating]. Some principles are timeless, like freedom of speech. Some principles are not timeless, like slaves are equal to three fifths of free persons for legislative purposes. Although I guess one could make the argument that, if we don’t want everybody carrying heat, we could put together an amendment to overturn #4. Sigh. Sometimes law is so…law-ish. It manages to evade common sense on all fronts. Anyhow, the article that got me posting this apologia was about gay marriage, where the argument was that it evaded the role of gender, and that gender is meaningful in the raising of children. The thing is, gender is a very interesting subject, and one that has scientifically been redefined in my lifetime. Historically there was always a belief or set of beliefs that men are different from women beyond obvious physicality. Feminism in its earliest stages was a rebellion against these beliefs, stating that women were entitled to the same treatment as men because they were no different from men. Aside from not being a guy, in other words, women were exactly the same. Their minds were the same, and any differences from men were from enculturation. This is a pretty strong argument for feminism, and was embraced, as I say, by early feminists. It was certainly the rallying thought of the 60s and 70s, and it was certainly what I believed. The problem is, it turns out not to be true. There is strong science that men and women are, indeed, different, and their minds work differently. This is not some sort of evidence that women can’t do math or something idiotic like that, but simply that our minds don’t work the same way. The problem with contemporary feminism then becomes not to believe in gender equality because of the lack of differences between the genders, but regardless of them. After all, they are not hierarchal, I’m better than you differences. They’re just differences. It is a lot more complicated to accept someone as an equal who is different than someone who is the same. The article I cited made an argument that the raising of children requires the balance of the differences of gender. You can read the article yourself if you want, and you might detect the central flaw in the argument, or not, but it is certainly well argued. The thing is, all of the articles in the Feed are, at least, thought-provoking. Some of them are very resolution specific (or potentially resolution specific, like the postings on net neutrality vis-Ã -vis the Google-Verizon proposal), some of them are philosophical, some of them are just bloody interesting pieces on items of current interest. If you scan no other articles on the net to keep your mind sharp as a debater, you could do worse… But don’t confuse them with my own opinions. My opinions are what I say here, not there. Those are just the fodder that my opinions feed on.
Meanwhile, I did crawl out from under yesterday late in the day to meet with the Sailor Speechies, who will be under my care for a while. My IE background is a little spotty, but, let’s see, I’ve been a book editor and book cutter for a bazillion years, and I sort of know a little bit about literature and drama and the like, so that should help. I’m not up on the latest trends, of course—do they have piece disclosure in Duo?—but I can pick that up. We are looking for someone who does know what to do; if you’re interested, give me a poke. In the interim I’ll be both hither and thither, for a while. I mean, I did have all this spare time I didn’t know what to do with…
And I have to admit that I’m disappointed that O’C doesn’t wish to embrace Princess Sarah. Then again, maybe he sees her more as a Disney Villain, a Maleficent for the new millennium. I could live with that. Come to think of it, I’ve heard rumors of a live action Cinderella coming down the pike from the Disney folks. They might want to take this casting tip. It is, so come full circle, a doozy.
Apparently among the few things I was able to do yesterday in my delirium was add articles to the Feed (thank you, iPad). Which brought up that point about my not particularly supporting the things I put up. If you’ve been following the Feed, you would have seen good arguments in favor of SCOTUS putting a gun in each of our pockets, for instance, which I think is about as far from what the framers would do today as [enter your own metaphor here, preferably humorous, for some really unlikely occurrence; I’m still recuperating]. Some principles are timeless, like freedom of speech. Some principles are not timeless, like slaves are equal to three fifths of free persons for legislative purposes. Although I guess one could make the argument that, if we don’t want everybody carrying heat, we could put together an amendment to overturn #4. Sigh. Sometimes law is so…law-ish. It manages to evade common sense on all fronts. Anyhow, the article that got me posting this apologia was about gay marriage, where the argument was that it evaded the role of gender, and that gender is meaningful in the raising of children. The thing is, gender is a very interesting subject, and one that has scientifically been redefined in my lifetime. Historically there was always a belief or set of beliefs that men are different from women beyond obvious physicality. Feminism in its earliest stages was a rebellion against these beliefs, stating that women were entitled to the same treatment as men because they were no different from men. Aside from not being a guy, in other words, women were exactly the same. Their minds were the same, and any differences from men were from enculturation. This is a pretty strong argument for feminism, and was embraced, as I say, by early feminists. It was certainly the rallying thought of the 60s and 70s, and it was certainly what I believed. The problem is, it turns out not to be true. There is strong science that men and women are, indeed, different, and their minds work differently. This is not some sort of evidence that women can’t do math or something idiotic like that, but simply that our minds don’t work the same way. The problem with contemporary feminism then becomes not to believe in gender equality because of the lack of differences between the genders, but regardless of them. After all, they are not hierarchal, I’m better than you differences. They’re just differences. It is a lot more complicated to accept someone as an equal who is different than someone who is the same. The article I cited made an argument that the raising of children requires the balance of the differences of gender. You can read the article yourself if you want, and you might detect the central flaw in the argument, or not, but it is certainly well argued. The thing is, all of the articles in the Feed are, at least, thought-provoking. Some of them are very resolution specific (or potentially resolution specific, like the postings on net neutrality vis-Ã -vis the Google-Verizon proposal), some of them are philosophical, some of them are just bloody interesting pieces on items of current interest. If you scan no other articles on the net to keep your mind sharp as a debater, you could do worse… But don’t confuse them with my own opinions. My opinions are what I say here, not there. Those are just the fodder that my opinions feed on.
Meanwhile, I did crawl out from under yesterday late in the day to meet with the Sailor Speechies, who will be under my care for a while. My IE background is a little spotty, but, let’s see, I’ve been a book editor and book cutter for a bazillion years, and I sort of know a little bit about literature and drama and the like, so that should help. I’m not up on the latest trends, of course—do they have piece disclosure in Duo?—but I can pick that up. We are looking for someone who does know what to do; if you’re interested, give me a poke. In the interim I’ll be both hither and thither, for a while. I mean, I did have all this spare time I didn’t know what to do with…
And I have to admit that I’m disappointed that O’C doesn’t wish to embrace Princess Sarah. Then again, maybe he sees her more as a Disney Villain, a Maleficent for the new millennium. I could live with that. Come to think of it, I’ve heard rumors of a live action Cinderella coming down the pike from the Disney folks. They might want to take this casting tip. It is, so come full circle, a doozy.
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
(Aside)
Elegantly put: http://www.azuen.net/2010/08/04/where-am-i/
So much of what seems to be the controlling element of the activity these days might be ruining it for everyone else. While I don't want to dumb LD down, do I want to smarten it up so much that it's inaccessible? I want as many people on my team, at as many different levels, as possible. Given the presumption that they do some work, everyone can gain from the activity, even though everyone can't win TOC. Should we be working so hard to design the activity for the TOC winners, and ignoring, and perhaps harming everyone else?
For writing like this, I'll forgive CP for wanting to vote for net neutrality!
So much of what seems to be the controlling element of the activity these days might be ruining it for everyone else. While I don't want to dumb LD down, do I want to smarten it up so much that it's inaccessible? I want as many people on my team, at as many different levels, as possible. Given the presumption that they do some work, everyone can gain from the activity, even though everyone can't win TOC. Should we be working so hard to design the activity for the TOC winners, and ignoring, and perhaps harming everyone else?
For writing like this, I'll forgive CP for wanting to vote for net neutrality!
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Wait a minute. Didn't we strike Judge Dredd?
Here’s the thing about MJP. It only works if everyone does it. But there are different levels of not doing it.
First of all, a team can ignore it completely. That is, for whatever reason, the debaters do not assign rankings to the judges. When this happens, the system automatically gives all the judges a rank of 1 for those debaters. In practice, this means that those debaters will always get the 1s that their opponents chose (assuming that their opponents did avail themselves of the system and didn’t also ignore it). This is not necessarily terrible, since most of the judges ranked highly are fairly universally so ranked, and there is a good chance that the ignoring debater is getting a judge that they would have ranked a 1 themselves anyhow. On the other hand, one debater’s 1 is another debater’s strike, so there is a possibility that the ignoring debater is heading into certain doom. So debaters who don’t rank can suffer, although they are not guaranteed to suffer. Why don’t some teams rank? I think that those teams that don’t find MJP to be wrong in principle. I certainly initially found it wrong in principle, until I learned more about it, and compared it to the alternatives. No judge-assignment system is perfect, and MJP is not the cherry-picking of judges that I had initially assumed, and I’ve come to appreciate it in the appropriate contexts, namely big, national-draw tournaments, where it allows the debaters to select a fairly wide pool of people with whom they are at least familiar as potential adjudicators. MJP equally helps the old-fashioned and the new-fangled debaters in finding judges attuned to their styles. (The idea that any good debater ought to be able to pick up any ballot is no longer true in LD. A good debater ought to be able to pick up the ballot of any judge he or she understands provided that judge isn’t prejudiced against them for some reason, but that’s about as far as it goes, and even then, sometimes the judge misses the reason you really did win and awards the ballot to the other side and there’s nothing you can do about that except bang your head against the wall. Such is life.)
So, a debater who chooses to ignore MJP could find that it doesn’t work in that debater’s favor, although that is not guaranteed to happen. That’s not particularly surprising.
On the other hand, everyone doing MJP means the following: that everyone who participates in the ranking of judges has entered their own judges (or purchased coverage), and that those judges are the ones that show up at the tournament. You may think that this is pretty obvious, but you’d be surprised how often people abuse it.
Here’s the problem. You enter your judge, Joe Dredd, to cover your entry. MJP is opened, and some people rank Judge Dredd a 1, some rank him a 3, some strike him, etc. The way MJP works, there is a proportion of each rank set by the tournament director. That is, you get a certain number of each. So, let’s say I strike Judge Dredd, and I was allowed 5 strikes. And then Judge Dredd doesn’t show up at the tournament. I now have 4 strikes. The debater who was going to bring Joe D along, however, gets 5 strikes, because, obviously, Joe Dredd was not on their list because he was their judge.
You can see the problem. In early days of MJP for us tabroom.com types, we occasionally had the judge drop/name-change capability still on while MJP entry was in process, which meant that every five minutes you had to reenter your data. We can fix that in the system, of course, but we can’t fix the fact that a judge is promised by the entry deadline, and between the deadline and the tournament, that judge doesn’t show up, and that absence is screwing up the tournament.
So, what can you do? Well, if you’re a coach, you bring the damned judges you entered. End of story.
And if you’re the tournament director? Well, you make sure that people bring the damned judges they entered, or as close as possible thereto, by eliminating all MJP from any teams who have promised but not delivered their judge(s). That is, at the registration table, if a judge is dropped, the team loses their preferences, period, end of story.
Draconian? No. Every single entry in the whole broad field is penalized somehow by every judge who doesn’t show up. It is not feasible to rerank every judge between the close of the registration table and round one, so since corrections can’t be made, punishments must be issued.
We’ve been kicking around this policy for Yale, and will presumably follow through at other tournaments we run with MJP, which isn’t all that many. But the few that do will put attendees on warning, that the shenanigan of blowing off judge requirements will not be allowed. The good news is, only a few teams really ever do this. The bad news is, it’s the same few teams tournament after tournament. The other good news is that, if they try it in the future, they’ll pay the price. The other bad news is that, knowing these people, it won’t stop them. Still, they’ll no longer get away with it. That is, I fear, the most we can hope for.
First of all, a team can ignore it completely. That is, for whatever reason, the debaters do not assign rankings to the judges. When this happens, the system automatically gives all the judges a rank of 1 for those debaters. In practice, this means that those debaters will always get the 1s that their opponents chose (assuming that their opponents did avail themselves of the system and didn’t also ignore it). This is not necessarily terrible, since most of the judges ranked highly are fairly universally so ranked, and there is a good chance that the ignoring debater is getting a judge that they would have ranked a 1 themselves anyhow. On the other hand, one debater’s 1 is another debater’s strike, so there is a possibility that the ignoring debater is heading into certain doom. So debaters who don’t rank can suffer, although they are not guaranteed to suffer. Why don’t some teams rank? I think that those teams that don’t find MJP to be wrong in principle. I certainly initially found it wrong in principle, until I learned more about it, and compared it to the alternatives. No judge-assignment system is perfect, and MJP is not the cherry-picking of judges that I had initially assumed, and I’ve come to appreciate it in the appropriate contexts, namely big, national-draw tournaments, where it allows the debaters to select a fairly wide pool of people with whom they are at least familiar as potential adjudicators. MJP equally helps the old-fashioned and the new-fangled debaters in finding judges attuned to their styles. (The idea that any good debater ought to be able to pick up any ballot is no longer true in LD. A good debater ought to be able to pick up the ballot of any judge he or she understands provided that judge isn’t prejudiced against them for some reason, but that’s about as far as it goes, and even then, sometimes the judge misses the reason you really did win and awards the ballot to the other side and there’s nothing you can do about that except bang your head against the wall. Such is life.)
So, a debater who chooses to ignore MJP could find that it doesn’t work in that debater’s favor, although that is not guaranteed to happen. That’s not particularly surprising.
On the other hand, everyone doing MJP means the following: that everyone who participates in the ranking of judges has entered their own judges (or purchased coverage), and that those judges are the ones that show up at the tournament. You may think that this is pretty obvious, but you’d be surprised how often people abuse it.
Here’s the problem. You enter your judge, Joe Dredd, to cover your entry. MJP is opened, and some people rank Judge Dredd a 1, some rank him a 3, some strike him, etc. The way MJP works, there is a proportion of each rank set by the tournament director. That is, you get a certain number of each. So, let’s say I strike Judge Dredd, and I was allowed 5 strikes. And then Judge Dredd doesn’t show up at the tournament. I now have 4 strikes. The debater who was going to bring Joe D along, however, gets 5 strikes, because, obviously, Joe Dredd was not on their list because he was their judge.
You can see the problem. In early days of MJP for us tabroom.com types, we occasionally had the judge drop/name-change capability still on while MJP entry was in process, which meant that every five minutes you had to reenter your data. We can fix that in the system, of course, but we can’t fix the fact that a judge is promised by the entry deadline, and between the deadline and the tournament, that judge doesn’t show up, and that absence is screwing up the tournament.
So, what can you do? Well, if you’re a coach, you bring the damned judges you entered. End of story.
And if you’re the tournament director? Well, you make sure that people bring the damned judges they entered, or as close as possible thereto, by eliminating all MJP from any teams who have promised but not delivered their judge(s). That is, at the registration table, if a judge is dropped, the team loses their preferences, period, end of story.
Draconian? No. Every single entry in the whole broad field is penalized somehow by every judge who doesn’t show up. It is not feasible to rerank every judge between the close of the registration table and round one, so since corrections can’t be made, punishments must be issued.
We’ve been kicking around this policy for Yale, and will presumably follow through at other tournaments we run with MJP, which isn’t all that many. But the few that do will put attendees on warning, that the shenanigan of blowing off judge requirements will not be allowed. The good news is, only a few teams really ever do this. The bad news is, it’s the same few teams tournament after tournament. The other good news is that, if they try it in the future, they’ll pay the price. The other bad news is that, knowing these people, it won’t stop them. Still, they’ll no longer get away with it. That is, I fear, the most we can hope for.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
I'm sending my precious offspring away for the weekend with—you?
Parent’s night is always fun. There’s so much to cover, and you don’t want to daunt them, but by the same token, you want them to understand that, if their kids fall in love with debate, they won’t be seeing them again until the second grandchild is born. Tough business.
One problem of meeting parents and planning for Bump simultaneously is the possibility that a parent who has volunteered for something will have a kid who drops out in a week or two. I don’t think we set ourselves up for that possibility this year, though. My handful of novices this year look pretty likely to me for at least the short term, although only one of them has signed up for the team listserver, the official act of enlistment. I fault my new novice coordinators for this. The People’s Champion and the Panivore? Feh. One of them needs a haircut and the other needs a square meal. What was I thinking?
(Seriously, one of the CatNats ballots from May, when Zack’s hair was about 5 months shorter, complained that he needed a haircut and hence lost the round. Gotta love CatNats. I usually set the bar at no white shoes before Memorial Day, but then again, I’m a more experienced judge.)
Anyhow, I managed to confuse the new parents no end and got enough traction on the more experienced ones to get the parental side of Bump sewn up. And the thing is, September is, somehow, almost over, and the season still doesn’t feel as if it’s started, the VassaRR not withstanding. I need to sit in front of a computer seeing which C judge is on a bubble. Until then, I’m just not doing my job.
Tonight Bietz and O’C and I will play around with Skype and GarageBand and see what we come up with. Probably nothing for publication, but a sense that either we can or we can’t. I’ll keep you posted.
One problem of meeting parents and planning for Bump simultaneously is the possibility that a parent who has volunteered for something will have a kid who drops out in a week or two. I don’t think we set ourselves up for that possibility this year, though. My handful of novices this year look pretty likely to me for at least the short term, although only one of them has signed up for the team listserver, the official act of enlistment. I fault my new novice coordinators for this. The People’s Champion and the Panivore? Feh. One of them needs a haircut and the other needs a square meal. What was I thinking?
(Seriously, one of the CatNats ballots from May, when Zack’s hair was about 5 months shorter, complained that he needed a haircut and hence lost the round. Gotta love CatNats. I usually set the bar at no white shoes before Memorial Day, but then again, I’m a more experienced judge.)
Anyhow, I managed to confuse the new parents no end and got enough traction on the more experienced ones to get the parental side of Bump sewn up. And the thing is, September is, somehow, almost over, and the season still doesn’t feel as if it’s started, the VassaRR not withstanding. I need to sit in front of a computer seeing which C judge is on a bubble. Until then, I’m just not doing my job.
Tonight Bietz and O’C and I will play around with Skype and GarageBand and see what we come up with. Probably nothing for publication, but a sense that either we can or we can’t. I’ll keep you posted.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Any site that tells J G to shut up can't be all bad. (Sorry. Private joke. Damned good one, though.)
Interesting meeting last night. Some Sailors I had thought long gone were short back. We lost General Will to the Mormons, but added a likely replacement. And we worked out of a different room, for no apparent reason.
Nothing is as comfortably predictable as change.
As usual at the beginning of the year, I break the meetings down into newbies first then everybody second including the newbies. I don’t like to separate the newbies completely because then they miss the sense of community that comes from being part of the whole group however dysfunctional it might be, but nonetheless, the most elementary discussion of natural rights in the first half of the evening is a far cry from my novice coordinators telling me that my weighing theorem is faulty during the second half of the evening. When the varsity arrived we went over some things I learned from the RR (the inherent weakness of the affirmative, the need to weigh arguments that are actually related to the weighing mechanism, the need to bring your own Babycakes), and some general business, like why it probably pays to sign up for a tournament a little sooner than two months after the signup has closed. If any of the novices come back, it will be a miracle.
I pestered CP a bit about the Pups yesterday, but he assures me that everything is keachy peen and stop annoying him. I can’t help it. Tournament in two weeks? First one in ages? One’s mind does turn to it on occasion.
I requested coaching materials from folks for the NYSFL website, and gotten some good stuff. If you have any good stuff, send it along and I’ll add it. We’re creating a “care package” of stuff for new coaches. The more we have, the better.
I made my first foray over to LDDebate.org yesterday. Things are pretty lively over there, let me tell you, some heavy duty discussions of what coaches can and should do. I guess O’C was wise to revive this old site. I still find it ungainly, not being a forum kind of person, but I guess I’ll get into it. But I won’t be arguing about what coaches can and should do. I’ve always felt that coaches should concentrate on Babycakes and let the students figure out the rest of it for themselves. I’m way too busy sorting crappy prizes to get drawn into actually educating anybody. I know my place in this activity.
Nothing is as comfortably predictable as change.
As usual at the beginning of the year, I break the meetings down into newbies first then everybody second including the newbies. I don’t like to separate the newbies completely because then they miss the sense of community that comes from being part of the whole group however dysfunctional it might be, but nonetheless, the most elementary discussion of natural rights in the first half of the evening is a far cry from my novice coordinators telling me that my weighing theorem is faulty during the second half of the evening. When the varsity arrived we went over some things I learned from the RR (the inherent weakness of the affirmative, the need to weigh arguments that are actually related to the weighing mechanism, the need to bring your own Babycakes), and some general business, like why it probably pays to sign up for a tournament a little sooner than two months after the signup has closed. If any of the novices come back, it will be a miracle.
I pestered CP a bit about the Pups yesterday, but he assures me that everything is keachy peen and stop annoying him. I can’t help it. Tournament in two weeks? First one in ages? One’s mind does turn to it on occasion.
I requested coaching materials from folks for the NYSFL website, and gotten some good stuff. If you have any good stuff, send it along and I’ll add it. We’re creating a “care package” of stuff for new coaches. The more we have, the better.
I made my first foray over to LDDebate.org yesterday. Things are pretty lively over there, let me tell you, some heavy duty discussions of what coaches can and should do. I guess O’C was wise to revive this old site. I still find it ungainly, not being a forum kind of person, but I guess I’ll get into it. But I won’t be arguing about what coaches can and should do. I’ve always felt that coaches should concentrate on Babycakes and let the students figure out the rest of it for themselves. I’m way too busy sorting crappy prizes to get drawn into actually educating anybody. I know my place in this activity.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
MHL is now MHL, topics, justice, Pups, orgs
I sent out an update on MHL today, although most of it was old news, aside from the fact that the MHLW will include modules for varsity team leaders. We have transitioned from the old name (MHL) to the new name (MHL). Anyone who has trouble with the change can use the mnemonic device More Hungry Latvians (MHL!). That’s how I remember it.
We talked a bit about topic choices Tuesday night at the Elder Hostel Chez, a natural since JV is on the selection committee. Which reminded me I’ve got to get my list put together. I was just looking it over again. How much you want to bet that if the nuke topic is selected, some yabbo critiques states as entities like Rhode Island? Can you imagine if Alaska had had WMDs during the tenure of the previous governor? Mama mia! We wouldn’t even have had death panels to help her choose who to nuke!
I played with my new thoughts on Justice against my old material on Justice last night, and decided that the new was better than the old but that the old did contain some good information left out of the new. Which got me going into the cur for the first time this season. Sure enough, last year I had kicked off with morality because of the fat-trolleyman topic. It worked okay, but I do sort of prefer a political theory kickoff over good old right and wrong. Anyhow, the cur is now pulled out of the dusty pile of old stuff and back into the get-on-it-bubbo pile of new stuff, which makes the season seem all that much closer. And, of course, it is.
Yale opened yesterday. As of my last look, the Pups had almost gotten VLD totally filled up. There’s a new look to tabroom.com, and it only took a minute to get used to it, and most of it works fine. The Sailors are totally organized, sort of, for the event. 10 ABs altogether, 4 LD and 6 Speecho-Americans, 3 judges, 6 hotel rooms. Kaz said that there’s going to be space for early-arriving Policians to hang out on Friday (they don’t start debating till Saturday) which solves a problem I had of a couple of S-As to dump somewhere without sending them off unchaperoned into the wilds of New Haven. One less thing to worry about.
Meanwhile I’ve got to find some time to drop in on lddebate.org, which O’C has unaccountably breathed new life into. I’ve never been a fan of bbds but I do recall following the org’s threads back in the day. The day is apparently here again. O’C even made me a moderator. I should go find out what it is I’m moderating…
We talked a bit about topic choices Tuesday night at the Elder Hostel Chez, a natural since JV is on the selection committee. Which reminded me I’ve got to get my list put together. I was just looking it over again. How much you want to bet that if the nuke topic is selected, some yabbo critiques states as entities like Rhode Island? Can you imagine if Alaska had had WMDs during the tenure of the previous governor? Mama mia! We wouldn’t even have had death panels to help her choose who to nuke!
I played with my new thoughts on Justice against my old material on Justice last night, and decided that the new was better than the old but that the old did contain some good information left out of the new. Which got me going into the cur for the first time this season. Sure enough, last year I had kicked off with morality because of the fat-trolleyman topic. It worked okay, but I do sort of prefer a political theory kickoff over good old right and wrong. Anyhow, the cur is now pulled out of the dusty pile of old stuff and back into the get-on-it-bubbo pile of new stuff, which makes the season seem all that much closer. And, of course, it is.
Yale opened yesterday. As of my last look, the Pups had almost gotten VLD totally filled up. There’s a new look to tabroom.com, and it only took a minute to get used to it, and most of it works fine. The Sailors are totally organized, sort of, for the event. 10 ABs altogether, 4 LD and 6 Speecho-Americans, 3 judges, 6 hotel rooms. Kaz said that there’s going to be space for early-arriving Policians to hang out on Friday (they don’t start debating till Saturday) which solves a problem I had of a couple of S-As to dump somewhere without sending them off unchaperoned into the wilds of New Haven. One less thing to worry about.
Meanwhile I’ve got to find some time to drop in on lddebate.org, which O’C has unaccountably breathed new life into. I’ve never been a fan of bbds but I do recall following the org’s threads back in the day. The day is apparently here again. O’C even made me a moderator. I should go find out what it is I’m moderating…
Monday, August 17, 2009
It's all in how you look at it
Resolved: Public high school students in the United States ought not be required to pass standardized exit exams to graduate.
When this was posted originally, I didn't comment on it much except to say that it was one of the hot-button issues in education, and that I was worried that it might not allow for the most creative positions. After all, I had recently judged roughly the same topic in PF at Districts, and heard roughly the same things over and over again, so I wasn't necessarily thrilled, but I wasn't aghast either. It's perfectly debatable because there's clear sides that clearly clash. A classic albeit special (in philosophical terms) subject area, the nature/goal of education. It will work out well enough.
I can't say that it gives me any second thoughts about ModNov, though. I like to begin novice training with broad principles about ethics and politics and morality, and later apply those principles to whatever topic is at hand. Granted that some topics don't easily allow such application, but most do. What this Sep-Oct does is favor coaches who like to start with the strategy and tactics of debate per se. Nothing wrong with that, and Anjan makes a good comment about that over at WTF, citing how this topic has an immediate recognition factor with noobs. Of course, the value of ModNov is long term, and certainly doesn't deter anyone with a practical startup approach, although God knows, it's way more philosophic to the poor ninth graders out there than something like this that has real relevancy to them.
My greatest disappointment/relief is that the marriage resolution didn't get voted in. On the one hand, if it had, we could have sold tickets to ModNov, but on the other hand, everyone else, poor devils, would have had to debate it. Anyhow, this reminds me to dust off next year's list and send it in. I know the rezzes I like, and what the Sailors like. It's just a matter of pinning down which goes where.
When this was posted originally, I didn't comment on it much except to say that it was one of the hot-button issues in education, and that I was worried that it might not allow for the most creative positions. After all, I had recently judged roughly the same topic in PF at Districts, and heard roughly the same things over and over again, so I wasn't necessarily thrilled, but I wasn't aghast either. It's perfectly debatable because there's clear sides that clearly clash. A classic albeit special (in philosophical terms) subject area, the nature/goal of education. It will work out well enough.
I can't say that it gives me any second thoughts about ModNov, though. I like to begin novice training with broad principles about ethics and politics and morality, and later apply those principles to whatever topic is at hand. Granted that some topics don't easily allow such application, but most do. What this Sep-Oct does is favor coaches who like to start with the strategy and tactics of debate per se. Nothing wrong with that, and Anjan makes a good comment about that over at WTF, citing how this topic has an immediate recognition factor with noobs. Of course, the value of ModNov is long term, and certainly doesn't deter anyone with a practical startup approach, although God knows, it's way more philosophic to the poor ninth graders out there than something like this that has real relevancy to them.
My greatest disappointment/relief is that the marriage resolution didn't get voted in. On the one hand, if it had, we could have sold tickets to ModNov, but on the other hand, everyone else, poor devils, would have had to debate it. Anyhow, this reminds me to dust off next year's list and send it in. I know the rezzes I like, and what the Sailors like. It's just a matter of pinning down which goes where.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Video fans worldwide rejoice, etc.
So for reasons that elude me completely, I decided I desperately needed a Flip. I just opened the box. I bought an older model that takes regular batteries; I don’t know why, but the idea of built-in batteries didn’t sit right with me (says the guy staring longingly at the MacBook Pro). My plan is not, I promise, to start doing this blog as a video. I don’t know what my plan is, to tell you the truth, beyond playing with a new toy. We’ll see.
I’m thinking that I should turn on AIM for one hour a day. Like the hour I’ll be at home and receiving visitors. Otherwise just leave your card in the silver tray. Speaking of AIM, I noticed that O’C appears, IMs, then wanders off. Just like real life.
We’re hoping to set up a meeting to resolve issues over the NYS tournament. In-person is probably the best way to do things. Maybe the last weekend of June. If one operates from the assumption that we all want to do what is best for our debaters, we might indeed solve most of our differences. Fingers crossed.
I’ve heard back from MB South about the coaches discussion site, and MB West promises to respond during the down time at NatNats. Given that NatNats has more down time than a goose factory, I should be hearing from him quite soon. [Aren’t you glad you didn’t have to put in your own metaphor there for a change. I’m feeling frisky today.] I’ve got a feeling that nothing but good is going to come out of this. (Parenthetically, I’ve passed my proposal along to CP, whose input can only make it better. His first reaction was to let in the speech coaches. MB West’s reaction to that was NSFW, but as CP says, a coach is a coach is a coach, or at least he said something like that, it was in AIM, which I’m obviously still attempting to get the hang of.) I did sort of promise not to argue all the issues here, but to stick with arguing them directly with 2MB, which is hard, but I’ll do my best.
We’re in the season of coach moves, and good news around here is that the Edgemont program, which Ben Wittwer has been leading strongly, will pass into the hands of former Lakelander Matt Mallia when Ben moves on to law school. And Brian Manuel, a familiar polician face, will be assisting a bit at that very Lakeland venue. Waiting to hear what happens up in the land of the Albino Bagel, et (a few) alia. One always bites one’s nails worrying that a program might go orphaned, but then again there’s glimmers of new life in places like Harrison, where He Who Fills in Every Inch of the Ballot is putting together a new team. We’ve got a new deal where any new team gets a free ride for the year in the MHL. Not bad. Thinking of putting together a new team of your own? Heh, heh, kiddo, the first one is free…
I’m thinking that I should turn on AIM for one hour a day. Like the hour I’ll be at home and receiving visitors. Otherwise just leave your card in the silver tray. Speaking of AIM, I noticed that O’C appears, IMs, then wanders off. Just like real life.
We’re hoping to set up a meeting to resolve issues over the NYS tournament. In-person is probably the best way to do things. Maybe the last weekend of June. If one operates from the assumption that we all want to do what is best for our debaters, we might indeed solve most of our differences. Fingers crossed.
I’ve heard back from MB South about the coaches discussion site, and MB West promises to respond during the down time at NatNats. Given that NatNats has more down time than a goose factory, I should be hearing from him quite soon. [Aren’t you glad you didn’t have to put in your own metaphor there for a change. I’m feeling frisky today.] I’ve got a feeling that nothing but good is going to come out of this. (Parenthetically, I’ve passed my proposal along to CP, whose input can only make it better. His first reaction was to let in the speech coaches. MB West’s reaction to that was NSFW, but as CP says, a coach is a coach is a coach, or at least he said something like that, it was in AIM, which I’m obviously still attempting to get the hang of.) I did sort of promise not to argue all the issues here, but to stick with arguing them directly with 2MB, which is hard, but I’ll do my best.
We’re in the season of coach moves, and good news around here is that the Edgemont program, which Ben Wittwer has been leading strongly, will pass into the hands of former Lakelander Matt Mallia when Ben moves on to law school. And Brian Manuel, a familiar polician face, will be assisting a bit at that very Lakeland venue. Waiting to hear what happens up in the land of the Albino Bagel, et (a few) alia. One always bites one’s nails worrying that a program might go orphaned, but then again there’s glimmers of new life in places like Harrison, where He Who Fills in Every Inch of the Ballot is putting together a new team. We’ve got a new deal where any new team gets a free ride for the year in the MHL. Not bad. Thinking of putting together a new team of your own? Heh, heh, kiddo, the first one is free…
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Tournaments galore!
Busy days here at the O.K. Corral. I thought debate was supposed to let up after the season was over.
Of course, nothing much has to do with debaters per se, although I have a couple of big projects I need to address, to wit, updating my Pfffft materials and working on a theory project. (Stop snorting at that last item. Theory in debate is meaningful; often it is unarticulated, and/or intuitive. There’s nothing wrong in pinning some of it down. What I’m against is arguing dueling “theories” within a round, i.e., setting the rules of the game during the game. That’s a different business altogether.) I mention these things here because, by noting them, I attach to myself some accountability for achieving them. I don’t do everything I say I’m going to do, but I do a lot of it, which I think is pretty good, considering.
By the way, O’C has an AIM screen name that, he says, is an obscure Star Wars reference. I was shocked, shocked to hear it.
Anyhow, the non-debaters-per-se business that is absorbing the time is mostly backend stuff on upcoming tournaments. The Quaker Oatfest seems to be leading the charge. They have put together an invite, which is about to go live. It’s Kaz and I running debate tab (a fine team, if I do say so myself), good schedule, community judge ranking (which I love), an eager and competent staff of Quakers—this one is seems to be well on target, under CP’s usual collegiate oversight. There’s been the sad issue of the competing tournaments on the weekend pre-Oatfest, and not much to be done about it. There’s been the setting up of the MHL venues (I just put a school in and then taken it out for the December event, the weekend I’m down with the Tiggers). What remains are the culmination events at the end of the season, to wit, TNC and whatever happens vis-a-vis NYSFL. Coming up with what could be called an agreeable solution to these may not be easy, but an agreeable solution is what everyone wants. We’ll see if that’s where we end up. I certainly hope so.
And I have to wrestle CP to the ground on Twitter, so to speak. I’ve got @tabroom, which is, in my opinion, pure gold. Apparently he’s got all sorts of pyrite subsets like @tiggertabroom and @bullpupstabroom and @lumberjacksexchangetabroom (okay, that last one used to be real, and yes, there’s a trick in it), but if you ask me, one ring to rule them all makes more sense. The thing is, for all his techiness, CP is not twittery. Not that Twitter is necessarily technical, but it has complexities that I’m beginning to think I understand (a sure sign that I’m about to get lost completely). Maybe I’ll use that newfangled instant messaging stuff to hash it out with him, goldarn it! I mean, I’ve learned how to tell IM people I’m not around even when I am, so I’m definitely a true master of the medium already. Maybe I should actually start using it.
Of course, nothing much has to do with debaters per se, although I have a couple of big projects I need to address, to wit, updating my Pfffft materials and working on a theory project. (Stop snorting at that last item. Theory in debate is meaningful; often it is unarticulated, and/or intuitive. There’s nothing wrong in pinning some of it down. What I’m against is arguing dueling “theories” within a round, i.e., setting the rules of the game during the game. That’s a different business altogether.) I mention these things here because, by noting them, I attach to myself some accountability for achieving them. I don’t do everything I say I’m going to do, but I do a lot of it, which I think is pretty good, considering.
By the way, O’C has an AIM screen name that, he says, is an obscure Star Wars reference. I was shocked, shocked to hear it.
Anyhow, the non-debaters-per-se business that is absorbing the time is mostly backend stuff on upcoming tournaments. The Quaker Oatfest seems to be leading the charge. They have put together an invite, which is about to go live. It’s Kaz and I running debate tab (a fine team, if I do say so myself), good schedule, community judge ranking (which I love), an eager and competent staff of Quakers—this one is seems to be well on target, under CP’s usual collegiate oversight. There’s been the sad issue of the competing tournaments on the weekend pre-Oatfest, and not much to be done about it. There’s been the setting up of the MHL venues (I just put a school in and then taken it out for the December event, the weekend I’m down with the Tiggers). What remains are the culmination events at the end of the season, to wit, TNC and whatever happens vis-a-vis NYSFL. Coming up with what could be called an agreeable solution to these may not be easy, but an agreeable solution is what everyone wants. We’ll see if that’s where we end up. I certainly hope so.
And I have to wrestle CP to the ground on Twitter, so to speak. I’ve got @tabroom, which is, in my opinion, pure gold. Apparently he’s got all sorts of pyrite subsets like @tiggertabroom and @bullpupstabroom and @lumberjacksexchangetabroom (okay, that last one used to be real, and yes, there’s a trick in it), but if you ask me, one ring to rule them all makes more sense. The thing is, for all his techiness, CP is not twittery. Not that Twitter is necessarily technical, but it has complexities that I’m beginning to think I understand (a sure sign that I’m about to get lost completely). Maybe I’ll use that newfangled instant messaging stuff to hash it out with him, goldarn it! I mean, I’ve learned how to tell IM people I’m not around even when I am, so I’m definitely a true master of the medium already. Maybe I should actually start using it.
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