There are just so many days off from the DJ, so I was unable to accept the invitation to go to the Newark RR and tab it. But I did volunteer to set it up for them.
The thing about RRs is that there’s never enough judges to simply run them straight. You always have to have people judge the same people twice, but on the other side. This means that you dig into some pieces of TRPC that you don’t ordinarily look at much. For instance, you print up the judge cards, to make sure that you haven’t repeated same-side judgings, because when you enter a judge, even on the other side, all TRPC tells you is that they’ve judged the person before, not telling you which side it was. Normally, that’s all you need to know, but not here. The judge cards become your bible. Because of the complexity of the RR animal, even with a small number of participants (8 at Newark), you plan the entire tournament out in advance because sometimes when you get to later rounds it just doesn’t work, but if you go back and switch a judge earlier, you can adjust things. Obviously, if the round has already happened, you can’t go back and have someone else judge it, so advance planning is the name of the game.
I like RR tabbing, because of this complexity. It’s rather satisfying to come up with schematics that represent truly magical back-end analysis. One is proud of oneself for pulling it off with minimal resources.
Which means that rule number one is that all the judges have to be there, as planned, and that the idea of a pushed ballot is comparable to the idea of a pet cobra at a daycare center. In a way, it was probably best that I wasn’t at the RR. It seemed to go off plan somewhere in the neighborhood of round 2…
So I solved it, and forwarded fixes. Grumble grumble grumble.
And solved it again later, and forwarded more fixes. Grumble grumble grumble again, but this time more profanely.
More fixes were still being made the crack of dawn this morning.
As a normally peaceful soul—in some circles I am referred to as Mr. Congeniality—I seldom explode in tabular rage, but as I say, it was probably best that I wasn’t phycially present at the RR…
Something tells me the first thing people will do when I arrive there this afternoon is run for cover.
This will be a wise move on their part.
Showing posts with label Round Robins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Round Robins. Show all posts
Friday, February 03, 2012
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
In which some tournaments are dragged and dropped on the calendar
One nice unexpected benefit of the State tournament was getting a chance to talk to Monticello’s RJT. Since her retirement from the field of forensics (but not from her teaching job) I’ve really only seen her on her home turf. This was a good opportunity to look at next year’s schedule and sort out a few things, namely, the positioning of the Monti MHL where it’s always been, followed by our taking a look at the Monti invitational. This has, since the beginning of time and perhaps even before, always occurred on Columbus Day weekend. But this year that weekend is right in the middle of the Jewish holidays, so an executive decision was made to move the invitational to the previous weekend, which is of course the earlier Jewish holiday, but the impact seemed less, and the day off on Friday would allow us to get an early start, so there you are. The best of a bad situation, simply put. As I’ve discussed with O’C in the past when the Vassar RR could have potentially fallen on the holidays, there is always the prospect of a special “Goyim Only” event, but no one has ever taken me up on that for some reason. Go figure.
Speaking of the VassaRR, I think O’C also declared what weekend that would fall on. (All of this is posted on my various schedules.) He’s been talking about holding it in NYC, but still under the Vassar auspices, to make it easier for people to get there from far afield. Makes sense to me. I have to admit, though, that I’m a little RRed out. I mean, there seems to be a round robin nowadays with almost every tournament. I can understand why it’s done, as an attempt to attract stronger competition, but that does tend to be the usual suspects week after week, and it does turn weekend tournaments into endless affairs and one wonders about regular old school after a while. The good news for me is that next year I’ll not be in the thrall of any usual suspect, so at least my calendar will be clear. I’ll miss Bean Trivia at Lexington, though.
Speaking of the VassaRR, I think O’C also declared what weekend that would fall on. (All of this is posted on my various schedules.) He’s been talking about holding it in NYC, but still under the Vassar auspices, to make it easier for people to get there from far afield. Makes sense to me. I have to admit, though, that I’m a little RRed out. I mean, there seems to be a round robin nowadays with almost every tournament. I can understand why it’s done, as an attempt to attract stronger competition, but that does tend to be the usual suspects week after week, and it does turn weekend tournaments into endless affairs and one wonders about regular old school after a while. The good news for me is that next year I’ll not be in the thrall of any usual suspect, so at least my calendar will be clear. I’ll miss Bean Trivia at Lexington, though.
Monday, February 07, 2011
Your judge paradigm is WHAT?
Now that was a long weekend.
It started Thursday with the first day of the Round Robin. For once, I wasn’t tabbing, although I had helped set up the pairings, something at which I am now rather proficient. Newark had a ton o’ judges, so that part of it went quite well. I showed Carlos how to look for judges who had judged on one side to judge folks on the other side, and he was golden. Then, I judged a few rounds.
It’s funny, judging after you haven’t judged for a while. Needless to say, people have their ideas of what I’ll like or not like, and they do slow down, I think (inability to handle speed is a factor of practice, not preference), but all of that adaptation stuff is a good thing in a public speaking activity. A good debater has to pick up all ballots, not just the ones he or she would prefer to pick up. Anyhow, you fall back into the flow of judging pretty quick (and the flow of flowing, for that matter). One of the big reasons I don’t like to judge nowadays is, admittedly, that it poops me out. Back-to-back double flights requires a level of attention that I find elusive during those mid-afternoons when normally I’d be at the DJ doing my best to keep my eyes open. You can’t close your eyes when you’re judging. You need to be alert to everything, or at least as alert as possible. And as I say, that much alertness poops me out, and I’m lucky that I’m pretty good at tabbing so people will let me do that instead. To tell you the truth, from what I hear I’m not the only person in the universe whose alertness is curtailed after judging a hundred and twenty rounds in the last 72 hours. Human beings get tired. Debaters who put a lot of pressure on judges late in the day should think twice about that.
Needless to say, or maybe needed to say to some people, LD hasn’t changed all that much lately, at least from what I saw. But there are some things that I don’t like that have gotten worse. First, there’s the non-existent negative. A value, three independent reasons for some standard that epitomizes the concept of cockamamie, followed by a once sentence blip, does not constitute an advocacy. I’ve been decrying this one way or the other for eons now. Negatives with a strong offense have the opportunity to debate on their own ground. Negatives with virtually no in-case offense have no choice but to debate on the affirmative ground. That negatives win from this strategic weak start demonstrates to me—if everything we’ve said on TVFT about neg bias is true—that there’s a lot of judges out there who need to move away from the flow pad and think for a minute. If it turns out that it’s fashionable to demand nothing of a negative but a demurral from the affirmative, then no wonder negs win a lot. If you don’t have a position, and all you’re held to is how well you attacked the other guy’s position, then we are absolutely hogtying the poor affs. Neg presumption in LD went out with white disco suits, but a lot of judges apparently haven’t gotten the memo yet.
I also wonder why people want the most complex standard possible rather than the simplest standard possible. If the standard is simple to understand, it is simple to use as a weighing mechanism. If it’s complex, then weighing becomes more complex, if it’s possible at all. You can run very complex cases that are, nonetheless, simple for the judge to understand. KISS as one of the top tools of good case-writing seems to me to still hold true. The best debaters run very complex stuff that nevertheless is easy to understand. I have nothing against complexity. But I shudder at obfuscatory complexity: it’s like novices always coming up with the most bizarre, complex ways of looking at simple things rather than trying to find the bright line that informs complex things and drawing from that simple conclusions. It’s a novice way of thinking.
I did have some discussion with assorted Scientologists over the weekend about dumb-ass stuff. Most judges, when they hear dumb-ass stuff, which is rather often, are just wishing the other debater would say, “You know, that is one powerful bunch of dumb-ass stuff.” But debaters hardly ever do call out dumb-ass stuff, even when the dumb-assedness is so manifest it stands in the room with a torch and a top hat. Calling out dumb-assedness would probably win people a lot of rounds, if they could just summon up the nerve to try it.
It started Thursday with the first day of the Round Robin. For once, I wasn’t tabbing, although I had helped set up the pairings, something at which I am now rather proficient. Newark had a ton o’ judges, so that part of it went quite well. I showed Carlos how to look for judges who had judged on one side to judge folks on the other side, and he was golden. Then, I judged a few rounds.
It’s funny, judging after you haven’t judged for a while. Needless to say, people have their ideas of what I’ll like or not like, and they do slow down, I think (inability to handle speed is a factor of practice, not preference), but all of that adaptation stuff is a good thing in a public speaking activity. A good debater has to pick up all ballots, not just the ones he or she would prefer to pick up. Anyhow, you fall back into the flow of judging pretty quick (and the flow of flowing, for that matter). One of the big reasons I don’t like to judge nowadays is, admittedly, that it poops me out. Back-to-back double flights requires a level of attention that I find elusive during those mid-afternoons when normally I’d be at the DJ doing my best to keep my eyes open. You can’t close your eyes when you’re judging. You need to be alert to everything, or at least as alert as possible. And as I say, that much alertness poops me out, and I’m lucky that I’m pretty good at tabbing so people will let me do that instead. To tell you the truth, from what I hear I’m not the only person in the universe whose alertness is curtailed after judging a hundred and twenty rounds in the last 72 hours. Human beings get tired. Debaters who put a lot of pressure on judges late in the day should think twice about that.
Needless to say, or maybe needed to say to some people, LD hasn’t changed all that much lately, at least from what I saw. But there are some things that I don’t like that have gotten worse. First, there’s the non-existent negative. A value, three independent reasons for some standard that epitomizes the concept of cockamamie, followed by a once sentence blip, does not constitute an advocacy. I’ve been decrying this one way or the other for eons now. Negatives with a strong offense have the opportunity to debate on their own ground. Negatives with virtually no in-case offense have no choice but to debate on the affirmative ground. That negatives win from this strategic weak start demonstrates to me—if everything we’ve said on TVFT about neg bias is true—that there’s a lot of judges out there who need to move away from the flow pad and think for a minute. If it turns out that it’s fashionable to demand nothing of a negative but a demurral from the affirmative, then no wonder negs win a lot. If you don’t have a position, and all you’re held to is how well you attacked the other guy’s position, then we are absolutely hogtying the poor affs. Neg presumption in LD went out with white disco suits, but a lot of judges apparently haven’t gotten the memo yet.
I also wonder why people want the most complex standard possible rather than the simplest standard possible. If the standard is simple to understand, it is simple to use as a weighing mechanism. If it’s complex, then weighing becomes more complex, if it’s possible at all. You can run very complex cases that are, nonetheless, simple for the judge to understand. KISS as one of the top tools of good case-writing seems to me to still hold true. The best debaters run very complex stuff that nevertheless is easy to understand. I have nothing against complexity. But I shudder at obfuscatory complexity: it’s like novices always coming up with the most bizarre, complex ways of looking at simple things rather than trying to find the bright line that informs complex things and drawing from that simple conclusions. It’s a novice way of thinking.
I did have some discussion with assorted Scientologists over the weekend about dumb-ass stuff. Most judges, when they hear dumb-ass stuff, which is rather often, are just wishing the other debater would say, “You know, that is one powerful bunch of dumb-ass stuff.” But debaters hardly ever do call out dumb-ass stuff, even when the dumb-assedness is so manifest it stands in the room with a torch and a top hat. Calling out dumb-assedness would probably win people a lot of rounds, if they could just summon up the nerve to try it.
Wednesday, February 02, 2011
That dinosaur is starting to look familiar...
Newark is this weekend, preceded by another Round Robin. They have varsity judges up the wazoo, and haven’t solicited any at all for novice, which they’ll mostly handle themselves (although I’ve got a ringer or two for the field, because, well, why not?). There’s lots of single-flighting, which might come in handy when the next blizzard arrives on Saturday. I have to admit, this weather has gotten out of hand. There’s been no school here for a couple of days, on top of all the previous days off, which means, of course, that the Sailors are doing anything but working on their cases busily editing their cases, taking advantage of all that free time.
[Snort.]
Last night I signed up for the NDCA tournament in April, although I haven’t looked too closely at the hotel and the like. I’ve already agreed to tab it. (I guess they wanted some bedrock in the machinery. That’s what Newark called me: Bedrock. Like Fred Flintstone.) I’ll probably have to work toward some hotel-room-splitting with O’C. That’s the down side of having one girl and one boy at an event. Everyone tells me that the physical plant will be great for the tournament, and Scranton doesn’t look terribly far away on the map, so it should be fun. And, as I say, it’s in April. I can already feel the warm, balmy breezes.
Anyhow, back to the RR. They have me judging, which is fine for me, if not necessarily for the poor suckers in the front of the room. (Reason for decision? Yabba dabba doo!). I’ll need time Friday morning to set up the tournament, though, with the strikes and whatnot. Five per person is nice, and quite manageable, but there’s a lot of inputting necessary to make it happen. And, of course, there will be those people who come in and say that they didn’t get their strikes because they’re being judged by someone they thought they struck but didn’t. And the folks whose coaches forgot and then they blame me, or whose coaches didn’t forget and struck someone they didn’t want them to strike, and then they blame me, and then there’s various people with whom everything is copacetic but they still come in and blame me anyhow on general principle. I can handle this. I always just blame O’C. Still, it amazes me how some people, tournament after tournament, don’t get their strikes straight. It’s not that hard. Really.
Of course, there are those who are solidly against strikes. Some coaches look on strikes the way music critics look at Justin Bieber. This is fine, but only when that coach’s team does not avail itself of said distasteful strikes. I mean, if you’re going to rant and rave about the state of LD in the world today (good luck with that), the least you can do is bypass the hypocrisy of having your own team do all the things you are ranting and raving about. Don’t eat your cake with your mouth full, or words to that effect.
So I’ll be away from home for a few nights, again. But at least with the promise of good Portuguese food tomorrow. There’s a silver lining to every cloud, I guess. Or at least a nice cataplana.
[Snort.]
Last night I signed up for the NDCA tournament in April, although I haven’t looked too closely at the hotel and the like. I’ve already agreed to tab it. (I guess they wanted some bedrock in the machinery. That’s what Newark called me: Bedrock. Like Fred Flintstone.) I’ll probably have to work toward some hotel-room-splitting with O’C. That’s the down side of having one girl and one boy at an event. Everyone tells me that the physical plant will be great for the tournament, and Scranton doesn’t look terribly far away on the map, so it should be fun. And, as I say, it’s in April. I can already feel the warm, balmy breezes.
Anyhow, back to the RR. They have me judging, which is fine for me, if not necessarily for the poor suckers in the front of the room. (Reason for decision? Yabba dabba doo!). I’ll need time Friday morning to set up the tournament, though, with the strikes and whatnot. Five per person is nice, and quite manageable, but there’s a lot of inputting necessary to make it happen. And, of course, there will be those people who come in and say that they didn’t get their strikes because they’re being judged by someone they thought they struck but didn’t. And the folks whose coaches forgot and then they blame me, or whose coaches didn’t forget and struck someone they didn’t want them to strike, and then they blame me, and then there’s various people with whom everything is copacetic but they still come in and blame me anyhow on general principle. I can handle this. I always just blame O’C. Still, it amazes me how some people, tournament after tournament, don’t get their strikes straight. It’s not that hard. Really.
Of course, there are those who are solidly against strikes. Some coaches look on strikes the way music critics look at Justin Bieber. This is fine, but only when that coach’s team does not avail itself of said distasteful strikes. I mean, if you’re going to rant and rave about the state of LD in the world today (good luck with that), the least you can do is bypass the hypocrisy of having your own team do all the things you are ranting and raving about. Don’t eat your cake with your mouth full, or words to that effect.
So I’ll be away from home for a few nights, again. But at least with the promise of good Portuguese food tomorrow. There’s a silver lining to every cloud, I guess. Or at least a nice cataplana.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Tidbits
Listening to Disney music is not a bad way to overcome the umpty-umpth drive to work in the snow. “Pretty good sure as you’re born…”
*
In my new office at the DJ we have The Two Guys Who Look Alike Who Don’t Look Alike, and The Guy Who Looks Just Like Them. When I mention that to anybody, they know exactly who I’m talking about.
*
The Sword in the Stone is quite the oddest book. I read it about a hundred years ago, and just finished listening to the audio version on my way home last night. It has the narrative drive of pinball machine, and what, exactly, is the intended age of the audience? Not that I didn’t enjoy it. It’s just…unique. Next up on the audiobook queue: The Eyre Affair. I absolutely love the Jack Sprat mysteries by the same author, and have never heard anything but praise for the Thursday Next novels. Hopes are high.
*
These are interesting times. I have achieved, simultaneously, loathing and loving as a result of the exact same actions. There are people who want my head on a platter, and there are people offering me the world as my oyster. I prefer a more even keel, with neither platter nor pearl, and I don’t understand why things are so nutty at the moment. Maybe the moon is in Pisces. Or the swallows are coming back to Capistrano. Or maybe it’s sunspots.
*
There’s an MHL this weekend, which for me is like a weekend off. I need that. O’C had last weekend off, and he probably needed that. He showed up at the Gem, let a few people genuflect and kiss his ring, and then went back to his atelier to watch Howard the Duck again. I should have gone with him.
*
You really need to read this, about the Constitution. It reminded me about this, which I just downloaded. Her American Scripture is in my Top Ten. (Any wonder I like people to argue about resolutions?)
*
There seems to be a round robin every day of the week all of a sudden. Why don’t we just eliminate tournaments? Get the top ten or twenty debaters, lock them in a room for a month, and go back at the end and see who’s still standing. It will get them out of everyone else’s hair, and I’m sure they’ll be happy as clams hobnobbing exclusively with one another. (I’ve got five independent arguments to support this, plus a reverse framework, a theory shell, two spikes and enough acronyms to take over the U.S. Army, so don’t try to argue with me.)
*
What happens to football players who make a practice of missing practice? Something tells me they do not remain football players.
*
Why am I at fault for your ineptitude?
*
I am no doubt among the last people among whom you should demonstrate an attitude. I am notoriously patient with many things—stirring risotto, braising the shanks of various random beasts, starting up Windows on my old Dell—but not that. If we are two people on an equal footing trying to solve a problem, we will get together fine. If you perceive me as your problem, we probably will not get together quite so well, even if I am your problem, because by your treatment you have forced me to perceive you as my problem. Which, of course, does not solve any problems.
*
I am not perfect. Why do you expect that I should be? Do I exude such perfection from every pore? Have all my previous moves indicated to you that anything less than perfection on my part is incomprehensible? My claims of infallibility are mythical; my fallibility is legendary. You should know that by now.
*
Tonight I’ll get all of this out of my system on TVFT. And then we’ll return to normalcy, whatever that is.
*
In my new office at the DJ we have The Two Guys Who Look Alike Who Don’t Look Alike, and The Guy Who Looks Just Like Them. When I mention that to anybody, they know exactly who I’m talking about.
*
The Sword in the Stone is quite the oddest book. I read it about a hundred years ago, and just finished listening to the audio version on my way home last night. It has the narrative drive of pinball machine, and what, exactly, is the intended age of the audience? Not that I didn’t enjoy it. It’s just…unique. Next up on the audiobook queue: The Eyre Affair. I absolutely love the Jack Sprat mysteries by the same author, and have never heard anything but praise for the Thursday Next novels. Hopes are high.
*
These are interesting times. I have achieved, simultaneously, loathing and loving as a result of the exact same actions. There are people who want my head on a platter, and there are people offering me the world as my oyster. I prefer a more even keel, with neither platter nor pearl, and I don’t understand why things are so nutty at the moment. Maybe the moon is in Pisces. Or the swallows are coming back to Capistrano. Or maybe it’s sunspots.
*
There’s an MHL this weekend, which for me is like a weekend off. I need that. O’C had last weekend off, and he probably needed that. He showed up at the Gem, let a few people genuflect and kiss his ring, and then went back to his atelier to watch Howard the Duck again. I should have gone with him.
*
You really need to read this, about the Constitution. It reminded me about this, which I just downloaded. Her American Scripture is in my Top Ten. (Any wonder I like people to argue about resolutions?)
*
There seems to be a round robin every day of the week all of a sudden. Why don’t we just eliminate tournaments? Get the top ten or twenty debaters, lock them in a room for a month, and go back at the end and see who’s still standing. It will get them out of everyone else’s hair, and I’m sure they’ll be happy as clams hobnobbing exclusively with one another. (I’ve got five independent arguments to support this, plus a reverse framework, a theory shell, two spikes and enough acronyms to take over the U.S. Army, so don’t try to argue with me.)
*
What happens to football players who make a practice of missing practice? Something tells me they do not remain football players.
*
Why am I at fault for your ineptitude?
*
I am no doubt among the last people among whom you should demonstrate an attitude. I am notoriously patient with many things—stirring risotto, braising the shanks of various random beasts, starting up Windows on my old Dell—but not that. If we are two people on an equal footing trying to solve a problem, we will get together fine. If you perceive me as your problem, we probably will not get together quite so well, even if I am your problem, because by your treatment you have forced me to perceive you as my problem. Which, of course, does not solve any problems.
*
I am not perfect. Why do you expect that I should be? Do I exude such perfection from every pore? Have all my previous moves indicated to you that anything less than perfection on my part is incomprehensible? My claims of infallibility are mythical; my fallibility is legendary. You should know that by now.
*
Tonight I’ll get all of this out of my system on TVFT. And then we’ll return to normalcy, whatever that is.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Called the doctor, woke him up
What was most remarkable about the whole 4 days of Lexwegia was the lack of a single Disney tune. How could that happen? Is a puzzlement. Anyhow, when you’ve finished listening to the Keith Richards autobiography, listen to the 3-disk set of the London Decca singles. This was our soundtrack on the way home from the RR; very illuminating. And if you can keep yourself from skipping the Satanic Majesty tunes, you’re a better man than I.
I realize that the whole publish-the-results movement that we’ve been pushing is the best solution to tab errors. At the Lex RR we were sort of namby-pamby about whether there was disclosure, hence we didn’t post (and didn’t get a chance to catch my error in a timely fashion). I have no idea why some RRs insist on non-disclosure, but I gather this is some sort of prophylaxis against the whole business turning into a grim blood competition. Of course, I hate the idea of grim blood competitions, which is why I inevitably blast out Harry Nilsson’s “Coconut” in all my tab rooms. So, screw that. Henceforth, if I’m in tab, the results are on the wall, period. Don’t like it, don’t ask me to tab. Put the lime in the coconut and drink a bowl up, I always say.
We had a repeat winner of Bean Trivia, btw. Jeff Merrill repeated because he knew Dudley Do-Right’s day job. I think it’s more interesting that there’s someone out there who doesn’t know Dudley Do-Right’s day job. What do they teach kids these days, anyhow? Nothing useful, apparently.
We were going to TVFT last night, but everybody pooped out. Buncha wimps!
So now we are at the edge of our seats wondering how the Gem of Harlem will play out. Predictions are for up to five inches of snow, which means that suburban schools are almost inevitably going to close down and not provide buses if that holds true. Various means of scrambling are possible, including starting on Saturday instead of Friday. As I write this, the call has not been made and everything is up in the air. #(*&$%# winter! So far, this has been one of the worst, and it’s barely started. My driveway is already covered with ice and I’ll be lucky if I don’t break my butt one of these mornings as I climb out to get the Times and put out the trash. Anyhow, I’ll be going into the city tomorrow come hell or high water, so there you are. That miserable figure hunched into the blizzard, pulling his printer behind him—that’s me. But at least I’ll have my iPod. I’ll be listening to “Coconut.”
I say, Doctor, ain’t there nothin’ I can take?
I realize that the whole publish-the-results movement that we’ve been pushing is the best solution to tab errors. At the Lex RR we were sort of namby-pamby about whether there was disclosure, hence we didn’t post (and didn’t get a chance to catch my error in a timely fashion). I have no idea why some RRs insist on non-disclosure, but I gather this is some sort of prophylaxis against the whole business turning into a grim blood competition. Of course, I hate the idea of grim blood competitions, which is why I inevitably blast out Harry Nilsson’s “Coconut” in all my tab rooms. So, screw that. Henceforth, if I’m in tab, the results are on the wall, period. Don’t like it, don’t ask me to tab. Put the lime in the coconut and drink a bowl up, I always say.
We had a repeat winner of Bean Trivia, btw. Jeff Merrill repeated because he knew Dudley Do-Right’s day job. I think it’s more interesting that there’s someone out there who doesn’t know Dudley Do-Right’s day job. What do they teach kids these days, anyhow? Nothing useful, apparently.
We were going to TVFT last night, but everybody pooped out. Buncha wimps!
So now we are at the edge of our seats wondering how the Gem of Harlem will play out. Predictions are for up to five inches of snow, which means that suburban schools are almost inevitably going to close down and not provide buses if that holds true. Various means of scrambling are possible, including starting on Saturday instead of Friday. As I write this, the call has not been made and everything is up in the air. #(*&$%# winter! So far, this has been one of the worst, and it’s barely started. My driveway is already covered with ice and I’ll be lucky if I don’t break my butt one of these mornings as I climb out to get the Times and put out the trash. Anyhow, I’ll be going into the city tomorrow come hell or high water, so there you are. That miserable figure hunched into the blizzard, pulling his printer behind him—that’s me. But at least I’ll have my iPod. I’ll be listening to “Coconut.”
I say, Doctor, ain’t there nothin’ I can take?
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Adventures in the Frigid North, continued
Since there was no final round on Saturday, things ended relatively early. JV was already gone, and Kaz was tied into her Policians, so CP and I headed down to Waltham alone for a late dinner. Let me tell you: Lexwegians handle snow the way some really good handler handles things really well, while Waltham simply doesn’t have a clue. You could drive a MacMansion down the streets of Lexington, but you’d have trouble getting an outhouse down Waltham’s roads. Which didn’t deter us from having good food though; nothing does. It was a tapas place, and for some reason CP thought he’d get the livers all to himself. Yeah, right.
No tournament worth its salt is without a visit from the po-lice. At about three in the morning, as I was busily dreaming away about whatever it is I dream away about busily, there came a pounding at my door that jarred me awake, and I mean a pounding. KA-CLACK! KA-CLACK! That will pull you out of bed pretty quickly. When I looked out through the peephole, there were all these people in uniforms. Normally this might surprise me, but half-asleep, I barely registered it. When I opened the door they asked me if anyone was in the room with me because someone they had caught rampaging in the woods had claimed my room as theirs. There was also something about this person wearing a cast on their arm. This made about as much sense to me as you would expect, and we quickly determined that I was a mere innocent bysleeper in this whole event. I would say that about two minutes later I was back asleep, busily dreaming away about whatever it is that I dream away about busily. It wasn’t until the next morning that it occurred to me to thank my lucky stars that I didn’t have any kids staying at the hotel. Can you imagine my response if we had all been housing there, and the cops came to my door about somebody rampaging in the woods? No going back to sleep after that. Visions of the People’s Champion tearing through the woods like a berserker, trees coming down in his wake, or the Panivore tearing the heads off of dear and sucking their blood, making up for all that lost nutritional time… Lexington is an interesting town, I guess, with all its rampaging woodsfolk. Not my cup of tea, exactly, but what can I say?
The Round Robin went off relatively well, although I learned yesterday that I did screw up one ballot and got the speakers wrong. No one to blame but myself, but I do have myself trained fairly well, and I double-checked everything and still missed it, so what can I say but that nobody’s perfect, and my apologies to Diana, whose placement was affected from first to second place. If I had screwed up any other ballot, of course, this wouldn’t have mattered. I guess I could blame her for being such a good speaker: if she had been at the bottom of the placements, nobody would have noticed. Or I could blame Ari for giving bizarre points that didn’t register well enough in my brain, all those 10s and 15s and 8s and the like. Oh, well. Since the top three speaker awards all said Top Speaker, at least they didn’t have to switch around the trophies. I’d like to say that next time I’ll get it right, but I’ve always found that RRs are the toughest things to keep straight, for reasons that elude me, and I always seem to screw them up at least a little bit. Go figure.
And, of course, there was Bean Trivia. We introduced a very popular lifeline, which was CP having 15 seconds to Google a “feeling lucky” answer. But some people wasted this on history questions, quite silly when PJ was in the room. We had PJ handwriting the answers to questions, but those answers were always things like “KKK,” so that wasn’t as baffling as I had hoped. O’C has been hanging his head in shame ever since he was unable to identify Seven Seas Lagoon at WDW. But the best of all was the following exchange, in the animals, real and fictional, category:
“What kind of animal is Rikki Tikki Tavi?”
Private discussion between student and judge. Judge says that the answer is parrot. Student foolishly agrees with judge and says, “Parrot.”
“No, the answer is mongoose.”
“Mongoose?” says the judge. “Well, at least I knew it was some kind of bird.”
No tournament worth its salt is without a visit from the po-lice. At about three in the morning, as I was busily dreaming away about whatever it is I dream away about busily, there came a pounding at my door that jarred me awake, and I mean a pounding. KA-CLACK! KA-CLACK! That will pull you out of bed pretty quickly. When I looked out through the peephole, there were all these people in uniforms. Normally this might surprise me, but half-asleep, I barely registered it. When I opened the door they asked me if anyone was in the room with me because someone they had caught rampaging in the woods had claimed my room as theirs. There was also something about this person wearing a cast on their arm. This made about as much sense to me as you would expect, and we quickly determined that I was a mere innocent bysleeper in this whole event. I would say that about two minutes later I was back asleep, busily dreaming away about whatever it is that I dream away about busily. It wasn’t until the next morning that it occurred to me to thank my lucky stars that I didn’t have any kids staying at the hotel. Can you imagine my response if we had all been housing there, and the cops came to my door about somebody rampaging in the woods? No going back to sleep after that. Visions of the People’s Champion tearing through the woods like a berserker, trees coming down in his wake, or the Panivore tearing the heads off of dear and sucking their blood, making up for all that lost nutritional time… Lexington is an interesting town, I guess, with all its rampaging woodsfolk. Not my cup of tea, exactly, but what can I say?
The Round Robin went off relatively well, although I learned yesterday that I did screw up one ballot and got the speakers wrong. No one to blame but myself, but I do have myself trained fairly well, and I double-checked everything and still missed it, so what can I say but that nobody’s perfect, and my apologies to Diana, whose placement was affected from first to second place. If I had screwed up any other ballot, of course, this wouldn’t have mattered. I guess I could blame her for being such a good speaker: if she had been at the bottom of the placements, nobody would have noticed. Or I could blame Ari for giving bizarre points that didn’t register well enough in my brain, all those 10s and 15s and 8s and the like. Oh, well. Since the top three speaker awards all said Top Speaker, at least they didn’t have to switch around the trophies. I’d like to say that next time I’ll get it right, but I’ve always found that RRs are the toughest things to keep straight, for reasons that elude me, and I always seem to screw them up at least a little bit. Go figure.
And, of course, there was Bean Trivia. We introduced a very popular lifeline, which was CP having 15 seconds to Google a “feeling lucky” answer. But some people wasted this on history questions, quite silly when PJ was in the room. We had PJ handwriting the answers to questions, but those answers were always things like “KKK,” so that wasn’t as baffling as I had hoped. O’C has been hanging his head in shame ever since he was unable to identify Seven Seas Lagoon at WDW. But the best of all was the following exchange, in the animals, real and fictional, category:
“What kind of animal is Rikki Tikki Tavi?”
Private discussion between student and judge. Judge says that the answer is parrot. Student foolishly agrees with judge and says, “Parrot.”
“No, the answer is mongoose.”
“Mongoose?” says the judge. “Well, at least I knew it was some kind of bird.”
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Pack the shovel, Ma, we're a' headin' north!
I managed to record a Nostrum last night. This whole thing is getting way too weird if you ask me.
A blizzard seems to be barking at our heels starting tonight, but the weather looks clear for Bigle X this weekend. A Bigle X without at least six inches of new snow at some point is hard to imagine, but I, for one, would be able to find a way to live with it.
MJP will open tonight. Of course, at Lex, JV and Kaz do the Varsity honors while CP and I will handle novice and PF. Still, we’ll be there to help them out. At Jake, need of three people in the crunch of MJP was pretty clearly demonstrated if you really wanted to give everybody the best rounds possible. And there’s no point to it otherwise, so expect a busy, preoccupied tab room this weekend. If you must interrupt us, please go directly to JV and start your question with the word “When.” I love when people do that.
For dessert this weekend we have the RR. What makes this one special is that Day One ends with a bout of Bean Trivia. The rules are slightly different than the Sailor edition, or more to the point, the lifelines are different. First of all, there’s Ask Cruz with O’C right on the premises. This time out there are no bizarre debate trivia questions, but on the other hand, I think he can handle most of the Disney questions. Then there’s a new lifeline called Are You Feeling Lucky, Punk? You get CP to enter a Google query to bring up exactly one site to find the answer to the question. Can he do it first time out? Are you feeling lucky, punk? Should prove interesting. And last night I bagged up a load of crappy prizes, so all is ready.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything debaterly, so I’m looking forward to this weekend. Immediately following is the Gem of Harlem, to which we opened a lot of slots yesterday after some schedule jiggling, and to which I am also looking forward (especially now that we have that nice bistro across the street). Then a nice peaceful MHL while the rest of the world is shoveling the Georgia snow, then Newark and Scarsdale and UPenn, bing, bang boom. Bring ‘em on. I love winter!
A blizzard seems to be barking at our heels starting tonight, but the weather looks clear for Bigle X this weekend. A Bigle X without at least six inches of new snow at some point is hard to imagine, but I, for one, would be able to find a way to live with it.
MJP will open tonight. Of course, at Lex, JV and Kaz do the Varsity honors while CP and I will handle novice and PF. Still, we’ll be there to help them out. At Jake, need of three people in the crunch of MJP was pretty clearly demonstrated if you really wanted to give everybody the best rounds possible. And there’s no point to it otherwise, so expect a busy, preoccupied tab room this weekend. If you must interrupt us, please go directly to JV and start your question with the word “When.” I love when people do that.
For dessert this weekend we have the RR. What makes this one special is that Day One ends with a bout of Bean Trivia. The rules are slightly different than the Sailor edition, or more to the point, the lifelines are different. First of all, there’s Ask Cruz with O’C right on the premises. This time out there are no bizarre debate trivia questions, but on the other hand, I think he can handle most of the Disney questions. Then there’s a new lifeline called Are You Feeling Lucky, Punk? You get CP to enter a Google query to bring up exactly one site to find the answer to the question. Can he do it first time out? Are you feeling lucky, punk? Should prove interesting. And last night I bagged up a load of crappy prizes, so all is ready.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything debaterly, so I’m looking forward to this weekend. Immediately following is the Gem of Harlem, to which we opened a lot of slots yesterday after some schedule jiggling, and to which I am also looking forward (especially now that we have that nice bistro across the street). Then a nice peaceful MHL while the rest of the world is shoveling the Georgia snow, then Newark and Scarsdale and UPenn, bing, bang boom. Bring ‘em on. I love winter!
Friday, January 07, 2011
Here comes the weekend (not)
We had another speech workshop last night. This is where we go in-depth with people, commenting on just about everything. It was a mixed bag. A plebe introduced a new DI piece that is, well, too good for this year. Better she should work at it long and hard to have it as a winner for the next full season. It’s great material, but it needs a very special voice to put it across, and it’s going to take a while to find that character. That’s exciting. Then we had an old salt breaking in a new DI for the rest of this season for his double entries. The issue here is bringing to life unique surroundings, to make the audience see what he sees. And finally Panivore Junior (yes, the whole family lives on bread alone) worked on some fine tuning of his DI, which I first saw I think over the summer. It’s great fun to watch someone develop a piece from scratch up through solid competitiveness.
I like this speech stuff. In another life…
Anyhow, they’re all heading down to Long Island tomorrow to Chaminade, and I’ve heard from our bus folk that the wheels will roll, so at least somebody will get some forensics in this weekend.
So what else is new? I think I mentioned that the Mark Twain autobiography weighs about two hundred pounds, while the type is so small I have to use binoculars. I haven’t read enough to offer any criticism, other than that I can pretty much read any Mark Twain any time, and that earlier (and according to this volume, scurrilous) versions of the autobio were always on my top MT list. As is Life on the Mississippi, for what it’s worth. If you’re looking for something to do because you too didn’t go to Byram, you could do worse.
My brain is fried a little from creating the new questions for Lexwegian RR Bean Trivia. Some categories are easier than others. I may have to retire a couple, like Distorted Disney and Movie Quotes, but I’ve put in a couple of new ones (e.g. the revived B&W movies category) to cover. I still need to populate science/tech, war and wizards, but they shouldn’t be too hard. Favorite category these days? Royalty, because lots of the answers are of the chicken a la king persuasion. Anyhow, I do a handful a day, and I still have another week. We’re getting there. Of course, with both CP and O’C on hand, the rules will need to change, but who wants to play a game where the rules are static. Maybe I won’t even tell people what the rules are! And then we can change the name of the game to Lincoln-Douglas…
Speaking of which, I think I now understand the removal-of-punishment idea. I think it’s inane, but there’s a certain logic to it. Whatever. You’d think by now that I’d be used to not debating the resolution. The last time a debater debated the resolution was at NatNats in 1953, and he had to get an executive order from Eisenhower to be able to proceed unchallenged. Those were the days.
I like this speech stuff. In another life…
Anyhow, they’re all heading down to Long Island tomorrow to Chaminade, and I’ve heard from our bus folk that the wheels will roll, so at least somebody will get some forensics in this weekend.
So what else is new? I think I mentioned that the Mark Twain autobiography weighs about two hundred pounds, while the type is so small I have to use binoculars. I haven’t read enough to offer any criticism, other than that I can pretty much read any Mark Twain any time, and that earlier (and according to this volume, scurrilous) versions of the autobio were always on my top MT list. As is Life on the Mississippi, for what it’s worth. If you’re looking for something to do because you too didn’t go to Byram, you could do worse.
My brain is fried a little from creating the new questions for Lexwegian RR Bean Trivia. Some categories are easier than others. I may have to retire a couple, like Distorted Disney and Movie Quotes, but I’ve put in a couple of new ones (e.g. the revived B&W movies category) to cover. I still need to populate science/tech, war and wizards, but they shouldn’t be too hard. Favorite category these days? Royalty, because lots of the answers are of the chicken a la king persuasion. Anyhow, I do a handful a day, and I still have another week. We’re getting there. Of course, with both CP and O’C on hand, the rules will need to change, but who wants to play a game where the rules are static. Maybe I won’t even tell people what the rules are! And then we can change the name of the game to Lincoln-Douglas…
Speaking of which, I think I now understand the removal-of-punishment idea. I think it’s inane, but there’s a certain logic to it. Whatever. You’d think by now that I’d be used to not debating the resolution. The last time a debater debated the resolution was at NatNats in 1953, and he had to get an executive order from Eisenhower to be able to proceed unchallenged. Those were the days.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
It is time to start our engines
I’m sort of happy to be gearing up again for a new season. Unlike a lot of people, I don’t do institutes or anything else even remotely connected to forensics during the summer, aside from endlessly blogging about it—which for me doesn’t count—so after a couple of months I really start to miss it. For all practical purposes I was done before CatNats this year, since I couldn’t attend with my couple of entries due to a previous engagement, and as usual I didn’t spend a week at NatNats since I don’t have a week at my disposal to even consider doing such a thing. (The DJ, which pays the bills, would not appreciate my gallivanting off to whatever godforsaken wilderness NatNats happens to be at when I should be bearing down on today’s most popular fiction back at the office. Not that I think everywhere in the country aside from New York is a godforsaken wilderness. Just some of it. I have fond memories of the Pacific Northwest and the rugged but beautiful Southwest, for example, not to mention a hankering for the broad expanses of Texas and the big shoulders of Chicago, but none of these memories or hankerings have anything to do with forensics.) So I haven’t been in the same room with a debater—aside from looking askance at the Panivore discussing some theory case or other before she shipped off to the aforementioned albeit parenthetical godforsaken wilderness of NatNats—since the first robins of spring were appearing on my doorstep. And I’m ready for it now. As soon as I clean up all the robin poop from my doorstep, that is.
So we’ll meet next week, a couple of lone, lorn Sailors who are available, to discuss the new topic. I love seeing people again at the end of summer, seeing what they’ve been up to, finding out what they learned (if anything) at institutes, etc. My two poor captains have a lot on their shoulders this year, needing as we do to replenish our supply of debaters big time, otherwise the team will fit on the head of a pin. I mean, I like running tab rooms and everything, but I also like the marginal coaching that I do. I’d like to be able to continue doing it.
Then, of course, before we get into too full a swing, there’s the Disney Debate Adventure. Although this will have little if any debate, it sure has debate people. I’ve noted this before, but there’s a small group of us who see each other at tournaments all the time, and enjoy one another’s company but don’t get much time to socialize, and this will give us a chance to do nothing but socialize. Provided we don’t murder one another, it ought to be a real hoot. When it comes to Disney, I may be a bigger nerd than O’C, who holds serious credentials in pretty much every other nerdity in which I partake. I mean, I like Star Wars a lot, but I haven’t proposed marriage to it. And I have found it surprisingly easy to continue to resist watching Howard the Duck. But when it comes to the Carousel of Progress, I think we’re in serious cahoots.
After that, we ease into the life with something small and manageable, the Pup. There is the Babycakes RR, which I’d like to drop in on, but it’s starting on what is for me a DJ workday, followed the next day by my aged mother’s birthday. (Yes, I am not so old that my mother being alive is somehow newsworthy. I just look that way.) I went to the Babycakes last year for the first time, and enjoyed it quite a bit. I also enjoyed those actual Babycakes babycakes which, if I remember correctly, were allegedly off-limits to coaches, but since the Panivore took one look at them and pronounced them “too interesting” and thus not part of her diet plan, I did not feel the least bit guilty grabbing one of them for her.
So, over the next few weeks, a little preplanning with the team, a little WDW, then it’s orientation of new plebes and immediately thereafter the Pup.
Life is good.
So we’ll meet next week, a couple of lone, lorn Sailors who are available, to discuss the new topic. I love seeing people again at the end of summer, seeing what they’ve been up to, finding out what they learned (if anything) at institutes, etc. My two poor captains have a lot on their shoulders this year, needing as we do to replenish our supply of debaters big time, otherwise the team will fit on the head of a pin. I mean, I like running tab rooms and everything, but I also like the marginal coaching that I do. I’d like to be able to continue doing it.
Then, of course, before we get into too full a swing, there’s the Disney Debate Adventure. Although this will have little if any debate, it sure has debate people. I’ve noted this before, but there’s a small group of us who see each other at tournaments all the time, and enjoy one another’s company but don’t get much time to socialize, and this will give us a chance to do nothing but socialize. Provided we don’t murder one another, it ought to be a real hoot. When it comes to Disney, I may be a bigger nerd than O’C, who holds serious credentials in pretty much every other nerdity in which I partake. I mean, I like Star Wars a lot, but I haven’t proposed marriage to it. And I have found it surprisingly easy to continue to resist watching Howard the Duck. But when it comes to the Carousel of Progress, I think we’re in serious cahoots.
After that, we ease into the life with something small and manageable, the Pup. There is the Babycakes RR, which I’d like to drop in on, but it’s starting on what is for me a DJ workday, followed the next day by my aged mother’s birthday. (Yes, I am not so old that my mother being alive is somehow newsworthy. I just look that way.) I went to the Babycakes last year for the first time, and enjoyed it quite a bit. I also enjoyed those actual Babycakes babycakes which, if I remember correctly, were allegedly off-limits to coaches, but since the Panivore took one look at them and pronounced them “too interesting” and thus not part of her diet plan, I did not feel the least bit guilty grabbing one of them for her.
So, over the next few weeks, a little preplanning with the team, a little WDW, then it’s orientation of new plebes and immediately thereafter the Pup.
Life is good.
Monday, April 19, 2010
And so we bid a fond farewell to 2009-10
It’s nice to see that NDCA honored O’C with a Educator of the Year award. Unfortunately, I gather that when the award was announced, O’C had wandered off somewhere, and was never made aware of it. Let this be a lesson to you, young padawan: Do not wander off. Wandering off never led to any good, but has often led to much bad. Being a wanderer off (or wander offer, as some linguists would have it) is a dangerous business. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
I put paid to my official year this last Saturday with my regular judging stint (this is my third year in a row at the 6-rds RR, which means I can practically set my calendar by it). Six whole flights: what a burden! It was fun, of course, some of the time. One guy played a rap song as his 1AC. I penalized him for not citing his source, and gave him low speaks because, uh, he didn’t speak. I also suggested (for the bazillionth time) that if your judge announces a paradigm of traditional resolution-based bias, ignoring it is worse than just not asking in the first place. I found myself aggravated by the idea that “the Joe Blow evidence takes that out” is an argument. “The Joe Blow evidence takes that out” is a commentary on the argument, which must still be made to convince my antediluvian little mind. Why do we bother to argue at all? Half the debaters are running the same evidence. Let’s number it all, and the AC can say #23, #28, and #3, and then the neg can just refute by saying #7 takes out #23 and I can say Aha, how convincing, and we’ll move on from there. It’s called Lincoln-Douglas Debate, not Lincoln-Douglas Inventory. And I was irritated that I had to drop someone on the basis of a definition, but if you concede a definition and then you run content counter to the definition and get called out on it, if there is any sense of rule-based order, there’s not much I can do, even if I think you otherwise won everything because if your case doesn’t stand, it falls, end of story. Worst of all, I was forced to vote in favor of a case that led to nuclear annihilation. As I said in the oral, it felt so 90s policy to me, and I hated myself for it. But in fact, that was my favorite round of them all. What can I say?
In typical Sailor fashion, we managed to leave behind at least one computer at the school. How does one forget one’s computer? It’s not like a coat, where you go outside and it’s cold and we never forget—Oh, wait a minute. We’ve left a string of coats up and down the eastern seaboard. Oh, well. At least the Panivore was impressed that I used the word fiat on a ballot. I think she imagines that all I understand is the social contract and Danish pop music. Talk about your young padawans!
I have announced to the Tars that we will be having a wrap-up Bean Trivia game next week, which will give me enough time to rustle up some new questions. I think I’m running out of categories: I looking at the Hittites, the unpublished song lyrics of Cole Porter and shoe sizes of the Americas as possibilities. There’s going to be a lot of losing of beans if I don’t fix that up a little bit…
I put paid to my official year this last Saturday with my regular judging stint (this is my third year in a row at the 6-rds RR, which means I can practically set my calendar by it). Six whole flights: what a burden! It was fun, of course, some of the time. One guy played a rap song as his 1AC. I penalized him for not citing his source, and gave him low speaks because, uh, he didn’t speak. I also suggested (for the bazillionth time) that if your judge announces a paradigm of traditional resolution-based bias, ignoring it is worse than just not asking in the first place. I found myself aggravated by the idea that “the Joe Blow evidence takes that out” is an argument. “The Joe Blow evidence takes that out” is a commentary on the argument, which must still be made to convince my antediluvian little mind. Why do we bother to argue at all? Half the debaters are running the same evidence. Let’s number it all, and the AC can say #23, #28, and #3, and then the neg can just refute by saying #7 takes out #23 and I can say Aha, how convincing, and we’ll move on from there. It’s called Lincoln-Douglas Debate, not Lincoln-Douglas Inventory. And I was irritated that I had to drop someone on the basis of a definition, but if you concede a definition and then you run content counter to the definition and get called out on it, if there is any sense of rule-based order, there’s not much I can do, even if I think you otherwise won everything because if your case doesn’t stand, it falls, end of story. Worst of all, I was forced to vote in favor of a case that led to nuclear annihilation. As I said in the oral, it felt so 90s policy to me, and I hated myself for it. But in fact, that was my favorite round of them all. What can I say?
In typical Sailor fashion, we managed to leave behind at least one computer at the school. How does one forget one’s computer? It’s not like a coat, where you go outside and it’s cold and we never forget—Oh, wait a minute. We’ve left a string of coats up and down the eastern seaboard. Oh, well. At least the Panivore was impressed that I used the word fiat on a ballot. I think she imagines that all I understand is the social contract and Danish pop music. Talk about your young padawans!
I have announced to the Tars that we will be having a wrap-up Bean Trivia game next week, which will give me enough time to rustle up some new questions. I think I’m running out of categories: I looking at the Hittites, the unpublished song lyrics of Cole Porter and shoe sizes of the Americas as possibilities. There’s going to be a lot of losing of beans if I don’t fix that up a little bit…
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Chetan-a-Go-Go; judge ettiquette; the Sailors' Official Team Song; Charmed, I'm sure
Chetan Hertzig has been running his Six Rounds of Spring RR for years now. First it was up in Massachusetts, then in NYC, and now it’s just down the road at Harrison High School. Last year was the second time I went, but I’ve been sending students since forever. Of course, from my point of view, it’s one of my few annual judging events. I can imagine that the students at the other side of the room are just thrilled to see me. My speed abilities get pretty rusty from underuse, for one thing. I’m not terribly against speed, as members of the VCA know, but speed needs to be calibrated correctly for the judges. If they can blaze, blaze away. If they can’t, slow down. Simple enough, and it has ever been so. LD speed wasn’t invented last year, you know. But to flow speed you need to do it often, and I don’t. I’m still poking away on a legal pad because the few times I’ve tried to flow on a computer I’ve not done well with it; again, more experience would probably solve that, but more experience is not forthcoming. I’ve long ago disappeared into the tab room, where my speed and accuracy is fairly decent. I’ll continue doing what I do. Considering the number of coaches who’ve been around as long as I have who neither judge nor tab and who spend entire weekends contemplating their team’s navels, I’m not exactly totally ready for the dustbin. When I am, I’m sure the Sailors will toss me there.
By the way, if you’re supposed to be judging at a tournament and I give you a ballot, the correct response is, “Thank you for giving me something to do for the next hour and a half,” not, “You’re going to make me judge again, you illegitimate offspring of a one-legged goat?” How would you like it if I took a round off? “I’m not going to pair round four,” says I. “I’m too tired from pairing round three.”
Jeesh.
As I was driving around last week something called The Sailor Song by a group called Toy-Box came up on my iPod. I’d never heard it before (I’ve got a lot of music on my iPod that I’ve never heard before, and even more that the Sailors hope they’ll never hear again). It turns out that somewhere in my travels I had ripped an album of Danish pop songs. Whatever. Anyhow, in my mind this has now become our team song. I recommend you watch the video on YouTube, and you will see why. Keep in mind that I am not saying that I think this song is good, although I cannot get it out of my head. It is more…unforgettable. So is the video. You won’t thank me for this, but henceforth, whenever the Sailors appear in force, we will be singing this song. Look on my debaters, ye mighty, and despair.
I’ve also managed to get JV addicted to Charmed, an app from hell that is, in a word, hard to put down. It’s of the old match-three variety, but you can turn the Touch in any direction and gravity kicks in… I recommend it to you, too. You can load your own background music, so you can play it while listening to The Sailor Song. Do I have your best interests in mind or what?
By the way, if you’re supposed to be judging at a tournament and I give you a ballot, the correct response is, “Thank you for giving me something to do for the next hour and a half,” not, “You’re going to make me judge again, you illegitimate offspring of a one-legged goat?” How would you like it if I took a round off? “I’m not going to pair round four,” says I. “I’m too tired from pairing round three.”
Jeesh.
As I was driving around last week something called The Sailor Song by a group called Toy-Box came up on my iPod. I’d never heard it before (I’ve got a lot of music on my iPod that I’ve never heard before, and even more that the Sailors hope they’ll never hear again). It turns out that somewhere in my travels I had ripped an album of Danish pop songs. Whatever. Anyhow, in my mind this has now become our team song. I recommend you watch the video on YouTube, and you will see why. Keep in mind that I am not saying that I think this song is good, although I cannot get it out of my head. It is more…unforgettable. So is the video. You won’t thank me for this, but henceforth, whenever the Sailors appear in force, we will be singing this song. Look on my debaters, ye mighty, and despair.
I’ve also managed to get JV addicted to Charmed, an app from hell that is, in a word, hard to put down. It’s of the old match-three variety, but you can turn the Touch in any direction and gravity kicks in… I recommend it to you, too. You can load your own background music, so you can play it while listening to The Sailor Song. Do I have your best interests in mind or what?
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
From the department of irreproducible results (I hope)
I remain befuddled by Round Robins.
I thought I was sooooo clever. An RR needs two judges per debate. 16 debaters = 8 rounds = 16 judges. We had 16 and 14. First reaction? Go with one judge. The problem with that is that it makes the RR look mostly like a very small batch of set prelims. Given the frequency with which judges split rounds at most RRs, 2 judges makes a big difference. Ballot count is a lot different from wins. Anyhow, in my remarkable cleverness, I figured, how about 1.5 judges per round? That is, sometimes you’d get one judge and sometimes you’d get two. It wasn’t perfectly fair in some respects, but given that I did it at random, it had the inherent fairness of being decided by pure chance. I simply set the computer to 2 judges, and put in 1 or 2, depending on the round. Worked like a charm.
I will point out that much of the RR tabbing process is by hand. I did all the pairings by hand, matching them against my spreadsheets, then I did all the judging by hand, because with this small number, often people are judged by the same judges but on the opposite side. That requires total override of TRPC. But what I count on TRPC for is managing the data once its entered, i.e., ballot count, speaker points and the like.
And then it snowed. While back in NY, people were strolling the boulevards in their bathing suits, up in Massachusetts the preferred means of strolling was behind a team of huskies. As a matter of fact, when we drove home, there was a very clear demarcation on the Massachusetts border where the snow ended and the sunbathing began. I blame Sarah Palin for this, but I’m not sure why. So one of the Round Robinskis was snowed in for a while. Which meant giving a bye. An easy ballot for one person, needless to say. But life is what it is.
But here’s what happened. Since TRPC was set for two judges, the bye meant two ballots, not one. Which never occurred to me, since there were already plenty of missing ballots because of the 1.5. Nor did the inherent disruption of speaker points occur to me. Maybe I was in a daze, but mostly it was so off the radar that it wasn’t until someone looked closely at the printouts that it made a difference. The good news was that the debater had won not by the one phantom bye ballot but by two ballots, including the phantom ballot. Which meant that it actually was a legitimate win. As far as speaker points were concerned, if one were to spend the next six years trying to solve it, there is a possibility that the skew was enough to change the top 3 results slightly. However, since the tournament mistakenly ordered 3 “Top Speaker” awards instead of first, second and third, each of the top 3 was, indeed, a top speaker. The announced order may be questionable, but not the underlying status of topness.
Another fine mess, in other words. In the past I’ve managed to make mistakes, which these days makes me incredibly scrupulous before and during and occasionally after, but seriously now, how many of us have ever given a bye in a 1.5 judge RR? All of this is, of course, O’C’s fault. While we were digging our vans out from the ice and snow with nothing but our fingernails and our true grit, he was lounging about in Las Vegas drinking champagne cocktails with Bette Midler. Next year, I’m going out to Vegas for the champagne cocktails, and we’ll let him cope with the never ending series of mishaps that plague the average winter debate tournament.
I thought I was sooooo clever. An RR needs two judges per debate. 16 debaters = 8 rounds = 16 judges. We had 16 and 14. First reaction? Go with one judge. The problem with that is that it makes the RR look mostly like a very small batch of set prelims. Given the frequency with which judges split rounds at most RRs, 2 judges makes a big difference. Ballot count is a lot different from wins. Anyhow, in my remarkable cleverness, I figured, how about 1.5 judges per round? That is, sometimes you’d get one judge and sometimes you’d get two. It wasn’t perfectly fair in some respects, but given that I did it at random, it had the inherent fairness of being decided by pure chance. I simply set the computer to 2 judges, and put in 1 or 2, depending on the round. Worked like a charm.
I will point out that much of the RR tabbing process is by hand. I did all the pairings by hand, matching them against my spreadsheets, then I did all the judging by hand, because with this small number, often people are judged by the same judges but on the opposite side. That requires total override of TRPC. But what I count on TRPC for is managing the data once its entered, i.e., ballot count, speaker points and the like.
And then it snowed. While back in NY, people were strolling the boulevards in their bathing suits, up in Massachusetts the preferred means of strolling was behind a team of huskies. As a matter of fact, when we drove home, there was a very clear demarcation on the Massachusetts border where the snow ended and the sunbathing began. I blame Sarah Palin for this, but I’m not sure why. So one of the Round Robinskis was snowed in for a while. Which meant giving a bye. An easy ballot for one person, needless to say. But life is what it is.
But here’s what happened. Since TRPC was set for two judges, the bye meant two ballots, not one. Which never occurred to me, since there were already plenty of missing ballots because of the 1.5. Nor did the inherent disruption of speaker points occur to me. Maybe I was in a daze, but mostly it was so off the radar that it wasn’t until someone looked closely at the printouts that it made a difference. The good news was that the debater had won not by the one phantom bye ballot but by two ballots, including the phantom ballot. Which meant that it actually was a legitimate win. As far as speaker points were concerned, if one were to spend the next six years trying to solve it, there is a possibility that the skew was enough to change the top 3 results slightly. However, since the tournament mistakenly ordered 3 “Top Speaker” awards instead of first, second and third, each of the top 3 was, indeed, a top speaker. The announced order may be questionable, but not the underlying status of topness.
Another fine mess, in other words. In the past I’ve managed to make mistakes, which these days makes me incredibly scrupulous before and during and occasionally after, but seriously now, how many of us have ever given a bye in a 1.5 judge RR? All of this is, of course, O’C’s fault. While we were digging our vans out from the ice and snow with nothing but our fingernails and our true grit, he was lounging about in Las Vegas drinking champagne cocktails with Bette Midler. Next year, I’m going out to Vegas for the champagne cocktails, and we’ll let him cope with the never ending series of mishaps that plague the average winter debate tournament.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Greener CatNat grass; 6 Rounds of Spring RR lead to all the news that isn't fit to print
CP finds the CatNat Pffft topic sadly wanting, while when I first saw it I was envious, at least in light of its LD cousin. I guess it is a bit one-sided, but then again, at least it’s not a statement of obvious fact, so there’s some leeway. Given that the LD topic is a statement of oblivious fact, I’m still inclined to prefer his over mine. Of course, at this point I’m only helping “Good Old Alli” prep, and don’t have to actually listen to any rounds, so the harm to myself will be minimal at worst.
Saturday was the Columbia Spring RR under the auspices of They Who Fill Up Every Inch of the Ballot, and it was a nicely run little event on a beautiful spring Saturday. Given that I haven’t judged anything except the odd round hither and yon lately, I was a little apprehensive, but I remembered what I was doing quickly enough. That the first person I heard was running Derrida (I kid you not) and almost had me screaming for the door, but things settled down quickly after that. Lots of good debaters doing a good job, essentially. You can’t complain about having to judge something like that.
The high point of the event was schmoozing with O’C, who updated me on all the latest gossip. Although I’ve been sworn to secrecy, that probably doesn’t include writing it up here, so let me share it now with you. So-and-so, of all people, is randier than some really random thing, which amazes me no end because I can’t imagine how So-and-so even gets standing room at the back of the bleachers, much less batting cleanup and hitting a home run. Whoda thunkit. Meanwhile, You-know-who has a history of naughtiness that would make even Hillary Clinton blanch, and I had thought You-know-who was a pillar of the community; shows you how observant I am. O’C refused to go into too much detail on Whatshername or Thingamabob in front of [Insert Varying First Name Here] Chernick, or maybe it was the other way around and the truth of the matter was that he refused to go into too much detail in front of me, but what I heard was enough to get me through the rest of the day with my ears having turned bright red. We did establish that, at least so far, not a hint of shame has ever been connected with the Menick name in the forensics community, however. I’m thinking of changing my slogan to “Scandal-free since 1996.” That should appeal to the parents, at least.
We did have to leave the RR early, since at some point Robbie realized that he was Jewish and that there was a seder to attend. Craig had popped up and rode back with us, so we shared opinions on every movie ever made, all of which Craig has seen in the last six months. Aside from having to deal with the runoff traffic from the Pope’s visit (he was on the highway that intersected with ours for a while), a pleasant time was had by all. Follow this up with a nice dinner and an episode of ST:TNG (in honor of spending time with O’C that day), and you have pretty much the perfect way to spend a spring day (especially if you throw in that ice cream cone dipped in chocolate at lunch time, the quintessential sushi dessert).
And so, aside from another bit of brain power on CatNats, the debate year is a done deal.
Saturday was the Columbia Spring RR under the auspices of They Who Fill Up Every Inch of the Ballot, and it was a nicely run little event on a beautiful spring Saturday. Given that I haven’t judged anything except the odd round hither and yon lately, I was a little apprehensive, but I remembered what I was doing quickly enough. That the first person I heard was running Derrida (I kid you not) and almost had me screaming for the door, but things settled down quickly after that. Lots of good debaters doing a good job, essentially. You can’t complain about having to judge something like that.
The high point of the event was schmoozing with O’C, who updated me on all the latest gossip. Although I’ve been sworn to secrecy, that probably doesn’t include writing it up here, so let me share it now with you. So-and-so, of all people, is randier than some really random thing, which amazes me no end because I can’t imagine how So-and-so even gets standing room at the back of the bleachers, much less batting cleanup and hitting a home run. Whoda thunkit. Meanwhile, You-know-who has a history of naughtiness that would make even Hillary Clinton blanch, and I had thought You-know-who was a pillar of the community; shows you how observant I am. O’C refused to go into too much detail on Whatshername or Thingamabob in front of [Insert Varying First Name Here] Chernick, or maybe it was the other way around and the truth of the matter was that he refused to go into too much detail in front of me, but what I heard was enough to get me through the rest of the day with my ears having turned bright red. We did establish that, at least so far, not a hint of shame has ever been connected with the Menick name in the forensics community, however. I’m thinking of changing my slogan to “Scandal-free since 1996.” That should appeal to the parents, at least.
We did have to leave the RR early, since at some point Robbie realized that he was Jewish and that there was a seder to attend. Craig had popped up and rode back with us, so we shared opinions on every movie ever made, all of which Craig has seen in the last six months. Aside from having to deal with the runoff traffic from the Pope’s visit (he was on the highway that intersected with ours for a while), a pleasant time was had by all. Follow this up with a nice dinner and an episode of ST:TNG (in honor of spending time with O’C that day), and you have pretty much the perfect way to spend a spring day (especially if you throw in that ice cream cone dipped in chocolate at lunch time, the quintessential sushi dessert).
And so, aside from another bit of brain power on CatNats, the debate year is a done deal.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Sunday, sweet Sunday, with nothing to do: a pot pourri
Forgive me an uncharacteristic weekend post, but:
Pinker wrote about the moral instinct in today's Times.
O'C is wearing an apron in his new Facebook picture, thus sanctioning my apron picture as the beginning of a craze that will only end when Hillary Clinton starts baking cookies again. Gentlemen, start your ovens!
Coachean Life is no longer a part of the under-construction Debaternation, which is like consternation, in that neither and/or both are cured by Ex-Lax. I hope that the WTF crew will keep that hard hat handy when they go live. Something tells me they're going to need it.
I tab-errored two people on my own team at Regis Saturday. Of course, I blame Vaughan. Still, anyone who skips a round check (as we did, due to time pressures), deserves what they get. No man is a hero to his valet, as they say. I understand the Sailors are planning a coup for this week's meeting. I hate when that happens. If you see some bald guy looking for work coaching Declaimers Wednesday, now you'll know why.
The two best words in Scrabble for the week are megahits and boner. Explaining the meaning of the latter to a nine-year-old was the high point of Regis. FYI, per Web 11: 1) one who bones; 2) a howler. End of story, you spalpeen.
O'C wants to challenge me to a new game of Scrabulous. I don't blame him The game we are playing now, for him, will not go down in history as a megahit. As for boners, however...
The Lex RR wants to know if my judges are willing to eat meat. Presumably this is in aid of keeping them interested in the rounds. Give a judge a vegetable, and who knows what will happen.
We talked about experimenting with 4 rounds at next year's CFL events. Positive response. But Newark this year looks like a traditional three-be, due to restraints on the real estate. I know that problem well.
Wedro, winner of more tournaments than I can remember, is heading to San Francisco for a new job. Bon voyage! Thank God debate was there when he was a high school freshman thinking that there had to be something more to life than football.
I have dived into the Goy for the greater honor and glory of NatNats. I should be competent in it by the end of the week. We'll see.
I gave judge training at Regis for the PF parents and only forgot one little thing, to wit, the coin toss. This is like training people to sky dive and forgetting the parachutes. [Sigh.]
There are 257 teams in Harvard PF. Rumor is that the TOC bid is at registration. What is this, every Pfffft team in the country? If you really think PF isn't getting off the ground, mosey up to Cambridge in a couple of weeks.
Pinker wrote about the moral instinct in today's Times.
O'C is wearing an apron in his new Facebook picture, thus sanctioning my apron picture as the beginning of a craze that will only end when Hillary Clinton starts baking cookies again. Gentlemen, start your ovens!
Coachean Life is no longer a part of the under-construction Debaternation, which is like consternation, in that neither and/or both are cured by Ex-Lax. I hope that the WTF crew will keep that hard hat handy when they go live. Something tells me they're going to need it.
I tab-errored two people on my own team at Regis Saturday. Of course, I blame Vaughan. Still, anyone who skips a round check (as we did, due to time pressures), deserves what they get. No man is a hero to his valet, as they say. I understand the Sailors are planning a coup for this week's meeting. I hate when that happens. If you see some bald guy looking for work coaching Declaimers Wednesday, now you'll know why.
The two best words in Scrabble for the week are megahits and boner. Explaining the meaning of the latter to a nine-year-old was the high point of Regis. FYI, per Web 11: 1) one who bones; 2) a howler. End of story, you spalpeen.
O'C wants to challenge me to a new game of Scrabulous. I don't blame him The game we are playing now, for him, will not go down in history as a megahit. As for boners, however...
The Lex RR wants to know if my judges are willing to eat meat. Presumably this is in aid of keeping them interested in the rounds. Give a judge a vegetable, and who knows what will happen.
We talked about experimenting with 4 rounds at next year's CFL events. Positive response. But Newark this year looks like a traditional three-be, due to restraints on the real estate. I know that problem well.
Wedro, winner of more tournaments than I can remember, is heading to San Francisco for a new job. Bon voyage! Thank God debate was there when he was a high school freshman thinking that there had to be something more to life than football.
I have dived into the Goy for the greater honor and glory of NatNats. I should be competent in it by the end of the week. We'll see.
I gave judge training at Regis for the PF parents and only forgot one little thing, to wit, the coin toss. This is like training people to sky dive and forgetting the parachutes. [Sigh.]
There are 257 teams in Harvard PF. Rumor is that the TOC bid is at registration. What is this, every Pfffft team in the country? If you really think PF isn't getting off the ground, mosey up to Cambridge in a couple of weeks.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Fodder for your nightmares: maybe that is what French tournaments look like!
I was off my feed yesterday, thanks apparently to a minor bout with a virus which did not agree with my opinion of the best way to handle the digestive processes. Thankfully, like all such viruses, this one quickly lost the war after some initial success in some minor skirmishes, and I am back in business. Meanwhile, the world has completely gone to hell in a handbasket. You know what I’m talking about. But I will reserve judgment on WTF for the time being, aside from reminding the VCA of the axiom, idle hands are the devil’s workshop. The thing is clearly claiming to be under construction, and it is bad form to think that work in progress equals the final product. My main complaint with them in their previous reconstructions was the moving of the organization’s blog material to less and less prominence. I’m hoping that this is not repeated in the future. My WTF correspondent, Herman Melville, has emailed me to say that I have nothing to worry about except worry itself, and that he will be providing me with a complete guided tour of the site as soon as he recovers from his work as a runner at the WTF tournament. “It’s not easy being in charge of everything,” was how he put it. Ah, the runner’s lament…
One benefit—nay, the only benefit—of not working yesterday was the opportunity to prep the upcoming Regis tournament that’s taking place tomorrow. I’m very pleased with the way the data pulls out of tabroom.com and into Evil TRPC. There are some quirks, though. All judges are listed for 9 rounds, so if you manually add further judges, they need to go in for 9 rounds as well, which really makes people freak when they show up at the registration table and see what their judging requirement looks like. For that alone, to tell you the truth, I enjoy the process: I love the smell of freaked-out judges in the morning. Then there’s the LDers, who appear as part of a three-person team with the second person missing. That is, there’s spaces in each team entry for three names; for no known reason, tabroom gets each LDer’s name into Evil in the first slot and in the third slot. Same name, no effect on tabulation. That is, no debaters are harmed in this process, but it is curious. For all practical purposes it doubles the number of LDers and then makes half of the new number mere simulacra. This is also what happens when they tab tournaments in France, with or without TRPC.
I’ve also begun to take stock of Bigle X. CP gave me access to the data just to poke around for my own selfish purposes (I wanted a looksee at how housing is handled by the application, since I intend to use it for Bump next year), and not to put too fine a point on it, but this tournament has more schools entered than most tournaments have teams. LD and Pfffft start Friday, then Policy starts Saturday after the other two spin down into elimination rounds, thus freeing up classrooms. Policy ends Monday, while LD simply goes off on Sunday starting the RR, and the whole thing is reminiscent of one of those computer railroad simulations where the whole point is to make sure that Topeka gets its wheat on time and the sidings are clear on the Reading. Jeesh. One big issue is four single-flighted rounds on Friday for Varsity LD. One needs to import judges with a Topekan wheat-market mentality. I’ve usually been off on the Novice side of things, which was meaningful when we had separate buildings, but now that we’re all together, and it’s me and JV and Kaz (and maybe The Enforcer), we’re all just one happy family, and I’ll get a nice close-up view. And CP will be in there too, running Pfffft. (Ah, the Scrabble games I see in my future!) My other issue is remembering how to screw up a Round Robin, since I’ll tab that too. It wasn’t too hard last year, and actually I didn’t screw anything up, but it was time-consuming. If it weren’t for side and judge constraints, it would tab itself. Oh, well…
And I finally heard from the Goys about the District tabbing software. I didn’t read the message too closely, but I gather I now have what I need. I intend to inspect the vehicle and kick a few tires on Sunday. I’ll keep you posted.
One benefit—nay, the only benefit—of not working yesterday was the opportunity to prep the upcoming Regis tournament that’s taking place tomorrow. I’m very pleased with the way the data pulls out of tabroom.com and into Evil TRPC. There are some quirks, though. All judges are listed for 9 rounds, so if you manually add further judges, they need to go in for 9 rounds as well, which really makes people freak when they show up at the registration table and see what their judging requirement looks like. For that alone, to tell you the truth, I enjoy the process: I love the smell of freaked-out judges in the morning. Then there’s the LDers, who appear as part of a three-person team with the second person missing. That is, there’s spaces in each team entry for three names; for no known reason, tabroom gets each LDer’s name into Evil in the first slot and in the third slot. Same name, no effect on tabulation. That is, no debaters are harmed in this process, but it is curious. For all practical purposes it doubles the number of LDers and then makes half of the new number mere simulacra. This is also what happens when they tab tournaments in France, with or without TRPC.
I’ve also begun to take stock of Bigle X. CP gave me access to the data just to poke around for my own selfish purposes (I wanted a looksee at how housing is handled by the application, since I intend to use it for Bump next year), and not to put too fine a point on it, but this tournament has more schools entered than most tournaments have teams. LD and Pfffft start Friday, then Policy starts Saturday after the other two spin down into elimination rounds, thus freeing up classrooms. Policy ends Monday, while LD simply goes off on Sunday starting the RR, and the whole thing is reminiscent of one of those computer railroad simulations where the whole point is to make sure that Topeka gets its wheat on time and the sidings are clear on the Reading. Jeesh. One big issue is four single-flighted rounds on Friday for Varsity LD. One needs to import judges with a Topekan wheat-market mentality. I’ve usually been off on the Novice side of things, which was meaningful when we had separate buildings, but now that we’re all together, and it’s me and JV and Kaz (and maybe The Enforcer), we’re all just one happy family, and I’ll get a nice close-up view. And CP will be in there too, running Pfffft. (Ah, the Scrabble games I see in my future!) My other issue is remembering how to screw up a Round Robin, since I’ll tab that too. It wasn’t too hard last year, and actually I didn’t screw anything up, but it was time-consuming. If it weren’t for side and judge constraints, it would tab itself. Oh, well…
And I finally heard from the Goys about the District tabbing software. I didn’t read the message too closely, but I gather I now have what I need. I intend to inspect the vehicle and kick a few tires on Sunday. I’ll keep you posted.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
"Rising stars"
I love rising stars. We now seem to have round robins just for them, or at least pods of round robins just for them. What a concept. First of all, presumably these rising stars are, at the moment, dark unseen spots filling up the sky, gray faceless contenders in a sea of forensiciana. They are the kids that come from the sticks, from Allentown, Pennsylvania… “Sawyer, you listen to me, and you listen hard. Two hundred people, two hundred jobs, two hundred thousand dollars, five weeks of grind and blood and sweat depend upon you. It's the lives of all these people who've worked with you. You've got to go on, and you've got to give and give and give. They've got to like you. Got to. Do you understand? You can't fall down. You can't because your future's in it, my future and everything all of us have is staked on you. All right, now I'm through, but you keep your feet on the ground and your head on those shoulders of yours and go out, and Sawyer, you're going out a youngster but you've got to come back a star!”
(Odd advice to give a tap dancer, to keep you feet on the ground, but anyone who has ever seen Ruby Keeler tap dance pretty much realizes that for all practical purposes she is keeping her feet on the ground.)
So we celebrity up these unknown kids from Allentown, and we send them out on the stage, and maybe they become real stars, their names in lights on that Great White Way of debate that is the National $ircuit. Broadway rhythm’s got me—everybody dance!!! There’s flowers sent to the divas by the stage door johnnies, blazing marquees, bold-faced names in Winchell’s column, caricatures at Sardi’s. Ah, stardom. Of course, the next thing you know Eve Harrington (also known as Hockaday EH) comes along, and you fasten your seat belt because it’s going to be a bumpy night, and you're yesterday’s news, a has-been, a nobody. Show biz is tough, baby. And you’ve got to be tough to survive in it.
And what about those rising stars who don’t make it. “I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it.” They start out burning oh so brightly, they are peas in the rising star pods of all the round robins, and then they’re never heard of again. What happens to these bums, anyhow? I see them out on the street, a couple of dozen pencils in their tin cups, begging for spikes off the third criterion turn. Oh, the humanity!
I probably maintain something of a minority opinion on the RR situation, that they’re coming a little too fast and a little too furiously, and that they might be concentrating on the wrong side of the debate universe. They are, after all, debate competition distilled down from everything that usually goes with a tournament. For one thing, even the poor schlimazel who comes in last is probably pretty good, unlike the poor schlimazel at an invitational who comes in last who probably doesn’t know his aff from his elbow but who is nonetheless being exposed to ideas he might otherwise never even know exist. I’m all for that invitational schlimazel. I guess that every tournament can’t and shouldn’t exist for that poor schlub, but all those that do are the reason I show up week after week. As for the others: as Homer Simpson says (in The Day of the Locust—now there’s a trivia question for you), Oh, Lord, forgive me for harboring such unworthy thoughts, but sometimes I wish I could tear it all down!
Thus ends today’s sermon. Please join me for tea and popcorn at the local revival house. We need to catch up on some classics.
(Odd advice to give a tap dancer, to keep you feet on the ground, but anyone who has ever seen Ruby Keeler tap dance pretty much realizes that for all practical purposes she is keeping her feet on the ground.)
So we celebrity up these unknown kids from Allentown, and we send them out on the stage, and maybe they become real stars, their names in lights on that Great White Way of debate that is the National $ircuit. Broadway rhythm’s got me—everybody dance!!! There’s flowers sent to the divas by the stage door johnnies, blazing marquees, bold-faced names in Winchell’s column, caricatures at Sardi’s. Ah, stardom. Of course, the next thing you know Eve Harrington (also known as Hockaday EH) comes along, and you fasten your seat belt because it’s going to be a bumpy night, and you're yesterday’s news, a has-been, a nobody. Show biz is tough, baby. And you’ve got to be tough to survive in it.
And what about those rising stars who don’t make it. “I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it.” They start out burning oh so brightly, they are peas in the rising star pods of all the round robins, and then they’re never heard of again. What happens to these bums, anyhow? I see them out on the street, a couple of dozen pencils in their tin cups, begging for spikes off the third criterion turn. Oh, the humanity!
I probably maintain something of a minority opinion on the RR situation, that they’re coming a little too fast and a little too furiously, and that they might be concentrating on the wrong side of the debate universe. They are, after all, debate competition distilled down from everything that usually goes with a tournament. For one thing, even the poor schlimazel who comes in last is probably pretty good, unlike the poor schlimazel at an invitational who comes in last who probably doesn’t know his aff from his elbow but who is nonetheless being exposed to ideas he might otherwise never even know exist. I’m all for that invitational schlimazel. I guess that every tournament can’t and shouldn’t exist for that poor schlub, but all those that do are the reason I show up week after week. As for the others: as Homer Simpson says (in The Day of the Locust—now there’s a trivia question for you), Oh, Lord, forgive me for harboring such unworthy thoughts, but sometimes I wish I could tear it all down!
Thus ends today’s sermon. Please join me for tea and popcorn at the local revival house. We need to catch up on some classics.
Friday, April 13, 2007
Let's see what's skakin' over at you-know-where
I have little to report of my own today, which means it’s time to visit WTF and see what’s up with them.
Hmmm. Ryan Hamilton has celebrated his 21st birthday. I’m not surprised that the event has taken place, but I am rather concerned about what year it occurred in. I thought Ryan was at least about 35, give or take a few weeks for spa treatments. According to this report, he’s a mere sprat. No wonder he’s always complaining when Legionnaires and their ilk besmirch college students. If I can do the math correctly, RH is still one himself. (Note to the VCA: whenever I am being vituperative against college students, do not include Hamilton in that number. On the other hand, when I am being vituperative about 35-year-olds, that is obviously the code for Ryan Hamilton. Just so we’re clear on that.)
The TOC has published it’s list ofpeople no longer likely to be possible fathers of Anna Nicole’s baby judges for final round at TOC. Unlike previous years this hasn’t drawn too many attacks, despite the fact that I’ve seen just about all these people’s bones on display at the Jurassic exhibit at the Museum of Natural History. The issue is not digressive vs traditional so much as people who are still around late on Monday who have ever heard of Lincoln-Douglas vs the kitchen staff at the Ramada dining room. People do tend to leave for home during the last day, except for those who feel they may have horses in the race, or who simply traditionally stay the extra day, and a couple of years ago JW was apparently literally in the kitchen offering $20 a head to anyone who’d sit through finals, so that explains this list more than anything else. Of course, if this group of people were not to be considered about as good as it gets, then we really are in some sort of serious trouble in LD Land. It will be fun to see them split 7-6 or whatever.
I also see that O’C is putting together next year’s calendar, an admirable venture. (Hint: everything is the same as this year only a day earlier, in the way of all calendars and fixed events like high school tournaments, except after February, because of Tik-pronounced-teek’s birthday.) Apparently Easter is way early next year (sometime during Christmas vacation) which will throw all the March qualifiers into a tizzy, but the norm should remain, uh, the norm. Which is, in most respects, normal. I do understand, however, the Big Jake is moving to Cleveland on the day after Thanksgiving, but everything else should be status quo antebellum. (Will he comment on that out of fear that someone might actually believe it? Place your bets quickly on jimmenick.com/parimutuel/whatwillocdo.html.)
There is also now a new website, Forensics Online (http://forensicsonline.net/index.php), now operated by the NFL. Not really new, actually, but under new management. If you can’t join ‘em, beat ‘em? The site is about as volatile as [insert your own comedic image here for some really non-volatile thing]. I’m rather taken by this Jason character’s final farewell, which has been front and center for a couple of weeks now, mostly because I never heard of this guy, and there’s an early eulogy plus a photo. I like this guy’s looks. I might put him on my next run of WWMD tee shirts.
Back on PCB, meanwhile, there have also various lists ofmilk carton runaways round robin participants for the upcoming weeks. Round robins are an interesting animal. Like the all-girl RR down in Texas, they exist for complex purposes. Most tournaments exist, let’s face it, as fund-raisers. RRs tend to exist to some extent as more-fund-raisers, but also as promotional vehicles for the fund-raiser tournaments. Also they are quality boosters. If you have an RR and invite people or schools you perceive as top drawer, they will stay for your regular tournament and their presence elevates the level of your normal event. In Iowa’s case, I think the RR is as much a vehicle for their institute as anything else. There’s nothing wrong with any of this, of course, and it makes sense, but there does seem to be a proliferation of these things lately. If there were a handful throughout the year, they would be sort of special (although, no doubt, they’d draw on mostly the same group of $ircuiteers). But if there’s one in every Middlesex village and town, they lose a little of their currency. On the bright side, as I’ve said recently, ESL’s promotion of all debate lately, and not just pure $ircuitry, means that all of these venues are getting their moment in the sun, and the glow of any one venue, including TOC, is dimmed by having to share the light. This is a good thing. At the point where more people (other than the high school students) are reminded that we are talking about high school debate and can see its appropriate position in the universe, we are better off than if we submit to endless hagiographies and the like.
But then again, when it comes to hagiography, in this very entry I’ve sent to the Vatican the names of Ryan Hamilton, the TOC finals panel, the goombah who used to run FOL, and everyone who’s running a round robin. If any of these people start performing miracles, poor Benny the P is going to be a very, very busy man.
Hmmm. Ryan Hamilton has celebrated his 21st birthday. I’m not surprised that the event has taken place, but I am rather concerned about what year it occurred in. I thought Ryan was at least about 35, give or take a few weeks for spa treatments. According to this report, he’s a mere sprat. No wonder he’s always complaining when Legionnaires and their ilk besmirch college students. If I can do the math correctly, RH is still one himself. (Note to the VCA: whenever I am being vituperative against college students, do not include Hamilton in that number. On the other hand, when I am being vituperative about 35-year-olds, that is obviously the code for Ryan Hamilton. Just so we’re clear on that.)
The TOC has published it’s list of
I also see that O’C is putting together next year’s calendar, an admirable venture. (Hint: everything is the same as this year only a day earlier, in the way of all calendars and fixed events like high school tournaments, except after February, because of Tik-pronounced-teek’s birthday.) Apparently Easter is way early next year (sometime during Christmas vacation) which will throw all the March qualifiers into a tizzy, but the norm should remain, uh, the norm. Which is, in most respects, normal. I do understand, however, the Big Jake is moving to Cleveland on the day after Thanksgiving, but everything else should be status quo antebellum. (Will he comment on that out of fear that someone might actually believe it? Place your bets quickly on jimmenick.com/parimutuel/whatwillocdo.html.)
There is also now a new website, Forensics Online (http://forensicsonline.net/index.php), now operated by the NFL. Not really new, actually, but under new management. If you can’t join ‘em, beat ‘em? The site is about as volatile as [insert your own comedic image here for some really non-volatile thing]. I’m rather taken by this Jason character’s final farewell, which has been front and center for a couple of weeks now, mostly because I never heard of this guy, and there’s an early eulogy plus a photo. I like this guy’s looks. I might put him on my next run of WWMD tee shirts.
Back on PCB, meanwhile, there have also various lists of
But then again, when it comes to hagiography, in this very entry I’ve sent to the Vatican the names of Ryan Hamilton, the TOC finals panel, the goombah who used to run FOL, and everyone who’s running a round robin. If any of these people start performing miracles, poor Benny the P is going to be a very, very busy man.
Friday, April 06, 2007
Feminism Part 3
I just happened to look over at VBD, and apparently the female RR had inspired them to bloviate too. I quickly tire of endless comments on a thread, but I did find this from Stacy Thomas, which is part of their invitation:
“Over its first two years, this round robin generated a lot of discussion, which is one of its goals. I have come to decide that pinning it down to a particular mission is difficult. This tournament means different things for different people. Some have told me that they think it is important because girls aren’t invited in equal numbers to other competitive round robins or that they don’t receive equal recognition for their successes. Some people have told me that it is important to them because they think that within the debate community we have constructed our own gender norms in terms of stylistic and behavioral expectations both inside and outside rounds that impact the experiences of those involved. Some people have told me that this event is important because for whatever reason many of the top young women in the activity choose to quit after high school while many of the young men stay well into college to help educate the next generation of debaters. This tends to result in seeing fewer female judges in late elimination rounds, at least on the TOC circuit, and can become a self-fulfilling cycle since it is hard to stay in an activity in which one feels a sense of isolation. Some coaches, especially, have expressed concerns to me about their talented female debaters, even when experiencing early success, giving up on the activity over time, leaving all together or losing their love for the game as they progress through high school.
“All of these statements are debatable in their own right and should be discussed in our community. I still am evolving in terms of my own opinions. Personally, this year, I’ve decided to continue this tournament because many people I care about in debate have asked me to hold it again, from students to coaches to judges. And, the letters I received from girls who attended last year made me feel the importance of this event even if I can’t always articulate those feelings. I know this tournament meant something special to many of the girls who came last year, that it generated new friendships, and that it helped motivate some debaters, coaches, and judges in their passion for an activity that I truly believe is life-changing. For me, that is enough. I guess it is unavoidable that this tournament make some kind of political statement. It is near impossible to avoid flame wars online these days on the debate boards. Last year, I was told simultaneously that this tournament didn’t allow for enough discussion about gender in debate and that it focused too much on the issue. What I hope isn’t to create some kind of revolution in debate or even really to make some grand statement to the community at large. What I hope is to create an important personal experience for those who attend. It is about the participants for me. It is a weekend for them. It is their space. So, I hope you will choose to join us for a unique competitive experience that is both intellectually and socially stimulating, supportive, memorable, and fun.”
Girls hanging out with girls, in other words. At that level, it’s hard to argue with. Sometimes I like to hang out with the guys, some times I don’t. No difference, really. Take it on the face value. That’s pretty much what CLG’s comment is speaking to. At the point where it’s just people of like hanging with people of like, it is not only unobjectionable but pleasant. (BTW, in the recent Sailors trivia quiz, no one was able to locate the Islands of Langerhans, so I feel CLG’s pain. So does Pip, the Diabetic Wondercat.) Stacy’s articulate explanation of what she’s doing, as well as her summary of the general issues that may or may not surround the activity as a whole should answer any questions about the purpose, need or goals of the RR per se. As she says, however, those issues raised, remain.
The WTF thread, which as I say I didn’t read all of, covers all sorts of territory. There’s a belief that Digressive debate is inherently male, which is pretty silly, unless it’s a veiled insult (i.e., only guys would be so dumb as to run this bloody nonsense). I mean, all the classic ethical philosophers lived in much less enlightened times than these pomo/CT authors, and we don’t claim that as a result girls are inherently hampered when they run Kant or Locke (or that they are inherently aided when the run the proto-feminist Mill). There’s claims that the Digressive judges are blatantly anti-female, and I might be willing to accept that at some level, if only insofar as I can’t figure out why all these college guys aren’t hanging out with college girls, if you get my drift. In other words, do I detect a sort of loser-ism in the college kid who spends every available moment of free time back in the high school environment? Graduate, for pete’s sake. Move along, there! Could these judges harbor some true anti-female feeling based simply on their social maladroitness? Do cod salt well? Come on, now. But this isn’t sexism, it’s just sort of sad. Give back to the activity, yes, but get a life, too. If you’re not planning on being a secondary school educator, your presence is suspect, even if your actions are pure. Unless someone is paying you an awful lot of money, and even then… But I’ve been down that road before.
The question remains, as Pajamas (AKA Pyjamas) brings up and CLG echoes, whether we lose all but the top of the female population after the first blush. Someone on the WTF thread tried to offer statistics to support this theory, but the sample was too small and too politically weighted (TOC attendance) to be meaningful. But the perception is there, and it may reflect reality. I just wonder if it’s endemic to debate, or if it pervades other high school activities as well. While it’s self-satisfying to look at debate in a vacuum, it is
part of a very active, very complex system known as high school, peopled by very active, very complex individuals known as adolescents. I would wonder if there are not factors aside from those intrinsic to debate that cause this drift, but that could only be proven if the drift exists in the first place, and then if it exists in other activities as well. Given the former, I’d be surprised if not the latter. But I have neither statistical nor anecdotal data to offer one way or the other. I believe it, nonetheless; just don’t ask me for a card on it. The point being, why should debate be any different from anything else? No relevant difference having been shown, I go with the lack thereof.
As I read Stacy in her later posts (on the “moved” thread in WTF’s forums, and again I apologize for not reading everything too closely but, you think I’m long-winded?), she too seems to believe that the problem of sophomore drift does exist, and is not limited to debate. More to the point, she calls to task the sexism in the culture as a whole, which is as it should be. I mean, as a feminist I would expect her to be knowledgeably attacking the status quo if it were worth attacking. What I see from my personal-history perspective is what I can only call backpedaling by the movement itself, or at least by women themselves, whereas from her perspective she just sees not that much gain. But we’re seeing the same things, and only theorizing upon them differently. Equal pay for women, for instance, may still be an issue, but when I was in knee pants, unequal pay for women was expected. Women in power positions may be far from reflective of the number of women in the population, but again, when I was in knee pants, powerless women were the expectation. We’re talking poor representation today, but we’re no longer talking flukes. But again from my perspective, as my pants have gotten longer, why haven’t we moved further along than we have? In other words, I’m not pointing out the difference between now and then to say I’m satisfied with the numbers we have now; I’m only showing that they’re better than they were. But they are not good enough. Where did the momentum go? What happened?
There are some possible answers. First is that women are not suited to power and have failed at it. This is laughable on face, but think about it. The single biggest factor that mitigates against an individual woman’s momentum in the world is child-bearing. It’s not that having children turns a woman into a lesser person, but that having children sidetracks a woman from her career. Sometimes it’s a matter of weeks or months, sometimes it’s a matter of years, and if you factor in economic status, sometimes it’s forever. This is a hard issue to overcome, and until we provide at the very least a measure of universal childcare that does overcome it, it’s not going to go away. Further, we need systems in place to allow women the freedom to control the early years of child-raising however they see fit: this needs to include not going back to work at the earliest possible moment, but giving a few years to formative childrearing. This may be simply too utopian, but until we reach a point where a woman can be away from the job for a considerable amount of time without penalty either to herself or her children, the problem will persist. The richest, most competent, most powerful women going into childbirth with those advantages of money and and competence and power will probably do okay, but the rest are going to be set back. Until the setback is culturally erased, it is going to have its effect. Either we accept that this is the way it is, or we find ways to fix it. It’s as simple as that.
Second, we can blame the slowness of feminism on the fact that incorporating civil rights is just by its nature a slow process. Well, yes and no. It is a slow process to change the way people think, but if people are thinking wrongly, how much time do we give them? One only need look at blacks in America for an answer to that. It took a hundred years post Civil War to seriously institute rights protections, and fifty years after that we still live in a racially divided country. What part of that is the way it should be? What part of that is permissible because that’s just its nature? If anything, the way people think about women is even more entrenched than thinking about race, if such could be imagined. We prioritize sex higher than we prioritize race in virtually all aspects of culture. Does that mean 150 years from now we’ll be marginally better off than we are today, but we will not have solved the problem?
Third is that the culture that feminism is fighting against it is almost too powerful to break. As I said, beliefs about gender are about as entrenched as any beliefs we have, prioritized in culture above almost all others. Among the reasons for this is the simple biological aspect of male and female, all that chemical stuff that goes on in the nether regions of our brain that connects us to the amoeba. Didn’t Sagan refer to that as the lizard brain? The instinctive, animal, innate, unthinking us? Okay, then, that may all be true. My brain reacts to gender on a totally instinctive level. Fine. I’m instinctively afraid of the dark as well, being a diurnal mammal, but ever since we’ve invented light bulbs, I stay up sometimes until 9:00 or even 10:00 at night and hardly ever trip over anything. The point is, if we are philosophers, working to understand ourselves, with that growing understanding of our natures ought to come a purpose of directing those natures however we can to acting in an ethically sound and just manner (which sounds vaguely like LD to me, so you may be just the right audience for this). We ought to seek to know ourselves in order to build a better world, not simply to accept the world we’re in with shrugging resignation. I didn’t buy on for that particular interpretation of the animal. (And part of my brief against pomo/CT is its shrugging resignation, plus its self-satisfaction at its cleverness at finding something to shruggingly resign itself to.)
But of course I’m not talking about feminism anymore, and I want to get back to that. I want to look a little more closely at girls and how they are raised. If everything above is true, than how we raise our children may be the most important test of our beliefs, and the best way we have to change the world. And as educators, we get an extra shot or two at it because of all the other people’s children who come our way. Interesting…
“Over its first two years, this round robin generated a lot of discussion, which is one of its goals. I have come to decide that pinning it down to a particular mission is difficult. This tournament means different things for different people. Some have told me that they think it is important because girls aren’t invited in equal numbers to other competitive round robins or that they don’t receive equal recognition for their successes. Some people have told me that it is important to them because they think that within the debate community we have constructed our own gender norms in terms of stylistic and behavioral expectations both inside and outside rounds that impact the experiences of those involved. Some people have told me that this event is important because for whatever reason many of the top young women in the activity choose to quit after high school while many of the young men stay well into college to help educate the next generation of debaters. This tends to result in seeing fewer female judges in late elimination rounds, at least on the TOC circuit, and can become a self-fulfilling cycle since it is hard to stay in an activity in which one feels a sense of isolation. Some coaches, especially, have expressed concerns to me about their talented female debaters, even when experiencing early success, giving up on the activity over time, leaving all together or losing their love for the game as they progress through high school.
“All of these statements are debatable in their own right and should be discussed in our community. I still am evolving in terms of my own opinions. Personally, this year, I’ve decided to continue this tournament because many people I care about in debate have asked me to hold it again, from students to coaches to judges. And, the letters I received from girls who attended last year made me feel the importance of this event even if I can’t always articulate those feelings. I know this tournament meant something special to many of the girls who came last year, that it generated new friendships, and that it helped motivate some debaters, coaches, and judges in their passion for an activity that I truly believe is life-changing. For me, that is enough. I guess it is unavoidable that this tournament make some kind of political statement. It is near impossible to avoid flame wars online these days on the debate boards. Last year, I was told simultaneously that this tournament didn’t allow for enough discussion about gender in debate and that it focused too much on the issue. What I hope isn’t to create some kind of revolution in debate or even really to make some grand statement to the community at large. What I hope is to create an important personal experience for those who attend. It is about the participants for me. It is a weekend for them. It is their space. So, I hope you will choose to join us for a unique competitive experience that is both intellectually and socially stimulating, supportive, memorable, and fun.”
Girls hanging out with girls, in other words. At that level, it’s hard to argue with. Sometimes I like to hang out with the guys, some times I don’t. No difference, really. Take it on the face value. That’s pretty much what CLG’s comment is speaking to. At the point where it’s just people of like hanging with people of like, it is not only unobjectionable but pleasant. (BTW, in the recent Sailors trivia quiz, no one was able to locate the Islands of Langerhans, so I feel CLG’s pain. So does Pip, the Diabetic Wondercat.) Stacy’s articulate explanation of what she’s doing, as well as her summary of the general issues that may or may not surround the activity as a whole should answer any questions about the purpose, need or goals of the RR per se. As she says, however, those issues raised, remain.
The WTF thread, which as I say I didn’t read all of, covers all sorts of territory. There’s a belief that Digressive debate is inherently male, which is pretty silly, unless it’s a veiled insult (i.e., only guys would be so dumb as to run this bloody nonsense). I mean, all the classic ethical philosophers lived in much less enlightened times than these pomo/CT authors, and we don’t claim that as a result girls are inherently hampered when they run Kant or Locke (or that they are inherently aided when the run the proto-feminist Mill). There’s claims that the Digressive judges are blatantly anti-female, and I might be willing to accept that at some level, if only insofar as I can’t figure out why all these college guys aren’t hanging out with college girls, if you get my drift. In other words, do I detect a sort of loser-ism in the college kid who spends every available moment of free time back in the high school environment? Graduate, for pete’s sake. Move along, there! Could these judges harbor some true anti-female feeling based simply on their social maladroitness? Do cod salt well? Come on, now. But this isn’t sexism, it’s just sort of sad. Give back to the activity, yes, but get a life, too. If you’re not planning on being a secondary school educator, your presence is suspect, even if your actions are pure. Unless someone is paying you an awful lot of money, and even then… But I’ve been down that road before.
The question remains, as Pajamas (AKA Pyjamas) brings up and CLG echoes, whether we lose all but the top of the female population after the first blush. Someone on the WTF thread tried to offer statistics to support this theory, but the sample was too small and too politically weighted (TOC attendance) to be meaningful. But the perception is there, and it may reflect reality. I just wonder if it’s endemic to debate, or if it pervades other high school activities as well. While it’s self-satisfying to look at debate in a vacuum, it is
part of a very active, very complex system known as high school, peopled by very active, very complex individuals known as adolescents. I would wonder if there are not factors aside from those intrinsic to debate that cause this drift, but that could only be proven if the drift exists in the first place, and then if it exists in other activities as well. Given the former, I’d be surprised if not the latter. But I have neither statistical nor anecdotal data to offer one way or the other. I believe it, nonetheless; just don’t ask me for a card on it. The point being, why should debate be any different from anything else? No relevant difference having been shown, I go with the lack thereof.
As I read Stacy in her later posts (on the “moved” thread in WTF’s forums, and again I apologize for not reading everything too closely but, you think I’m long-winded?), she too seems to believe that the problem of sophomore drift does exist, and is not limited to debate. More to the point, she calls to task the sexism in the culture as a whole, which is as it should be. I mean, as a feminist I would expect her to be knowledgeably attacking the status quo if it were worth attacking. What I see from my personal-history perspective is what I can only call backpedaling by the movement itself, or at least by women themselves, whereas from her perspective she just sees not that much gain. But we’re seeing the same things, and only theorizing upon them differently. Equal pay for women, for instance, may still be an issue, but when I was in knee pants, unequal pay for women was expected. Women in power positions may be far from reflective of the number of women in the population, but again, when I was in knee pants, powerless women were the expectation. We’re talking poor representation today, but we’re no longer talking flukes. But again from my perspective, as my pants have gotten longer, why haven’t we moved further along than we have? In other words, I’m not pointing out the difference between now and then to say I’m satisfied with the numbers we have now; I’m only showing that they’re better than they were. But they are not good enough. Where did the momentum go? What happened?
There are some possible answers. First is that women are not suited to power and have failed at it. This is laughable on face, but think about it. The single biggest factor that mitigates against an individual woman’s momentum in the world is child-bearing. It’s not that having children turns a woman into a lesser person, but that having children sidetracks a woman from her career. Sometimes it’s a matter of weeks or months, sometimes it’s a matter of years, and if you factor in economic status, sometimes it’s forever. This is a hard issue to overcome, and until we provide at the very least a measure of universal childcare that does overcome it, it’s not going to go away. Further, we need systems in place to allow women the freedom to control the early years of child-raising however they see fit: this needs to include not going back to work at the earliest possible moment, but giving a few years to formative childrearing. This may be simply too utopian, but until we reach a point where a woman can be away from the job for a considerable amount of time without penalty either to herself or her children, the problem will persist. The richest, most competent, most powerful women going into childbirth with those advantages of money and and competence and power will probably do okay, but the rest are going to be set back. Until the setback is culturally erased, it is going to have its effect. Either we accept that this is the way it is, or we find ways to fix it. It’s as simple as that.
Second, we can blame the slowness of feminism on the fact that incorporating civil rights is just by its nature a slow process. Well, yes and no. It is a slow process to change the way people think, but if people are thinking wrongly, how much time do we give them? One only need look at blacks in America for an answer to that. It took a hundred years post Civil War to seriously institute rights protections, and fifty years after that we still live in a racially divided country. What part of that is the way it should be? What part of that is permissible because that’s just its nature? If anything, the way people think about women is even more entrenched than thinking about race, if such could be imagined. We prioritize sex higher than we prioritize race in virtually all aspects of culture. Does that mean 150 years from now we’ll be marginally better off than we are today, but we will not have solved the problem?
Third is that the culture that feminism is fighting against it is almost too powerful to break. As I said, beliefs about gender are about as entrenched as any beliefs we have, prioritized in culture above almost all others. Among the reasons for this is the simple biological aspect of male and female, all that chemical stuff that goes on in the nether regions of our brain that connects us to the amoeba. Didn’t Sagan refer to that as the lizard brain? The instinctive, animal, innate, unthinking us? Okay, then, that may all be true. My brain reacts to gender on a totally instinctive level. Fine. I’m instinctively afraid of the dark as well, being a diurnal mammal, but ever since we’ve invented light bulbs, I stay up sometimes until 9:00 or even 10:00 at night and hardly ever trip over anything. The point is, if we are philosophers, working to understand ourselves, with that growing understanding of our natures ought to come a purpose of directing those natures however we can to acting in an ethically sound and just manner (which sounds vaguely like LD to me, so you may be just the right audience for this). We ought to seek to know ourselves in order to build a better world, not simply to accept the world we’re in with shrugging resignation. I didn’t buy on for that particular interpretation of the animal. (And part of my brief against pomo/CT is its shrugging resignation, plus its self-satisfaction at its cleverness at finding something to shruggingly resign itself to.)
But of course I’m not talking about feminism anymore, and I want to get back to that. I want to look a little more closely at girls and how they are raised. If everything above is true, than how we raise our children may be the most important test of our beliefs, and the best way we have to change the world. And as educators, we get an extra shot or two at it because of all the other people’s children who come our way. Interesting…
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