Well, you’re out there planning your cab ride from the airport to Glenbrooks, but some of us have other fish to fry. I’m continuing to plan the family trip to Disney World.
The week is set (in May), leaving on a Thursday, returning on a Sunday, so it’s 9 days of fun in the mousey sun. 5 for WDW, 1 for IOA, 1 for Univ, 1 for Blizzard Beach and 1 for SeaWorld. It is an art to adjust the days for the best flow. Kt and I have, I think, finally settled on the plan. The guiding principle is that one wishes to rub elbows with the least amount of hoi and polloi, and The Unofficial Guide, TUG, is good at helping you there. Then there’s your own busy days vs. busier days. You need to rest a bit here and there to keep up your strength. And then there’s the classic, what do you start with, what do you end with. As I’ve already mentioned, we’ve always started with MK in the past, but this year we’re ending with it. There was never any question about the inaugural dinner at California Grill, with view of the fireworks, but V&A has been in play since the beginning. You need all the time in the world to enjoy the best dinner of the vacation, so it’s moved position on the calendar about 5 times. And one needed to address (and as it turns out, dispense with) Aloha, rejected on the basis of less than sterling reviews. I’ll just listen to my Iz albums at home and imagine the grass skirts. Anyhow, barring changes in corporate policy, viz., changing the days of early/late openings, the general course of the vacation is now finalized in the gmail calendar, and approved by the daughter. Next there’s the selection of the second-tier restaurants, which is coming along. The biggest question will be the EPCOT dinners. Repeats or new places?
A DVD planner from the Mouse arrived yesterday, and I’ll look at it shortly, and I was also going over the planner on the TUG website. TUG makes my vacation planning look about as punk as G. W. Bush going to war in Iraq; these people plan EVERYTHING, including which toothbrush to pack and which day to pack it. And the Mouse will expect me to reserve through them, no doubt (one of the 2 disks is actually a CD-ROM planner, which I’m sure is connected to Rat Central). Mostly, I think, one simple calendar like Kt already made will do the job. Then again, it’s nice to know that it is now precisely 180 days in advance and you can start making your coffee break reservations: we’ll have two bagels, one cinnamon doughnut and a pineapple nasty, please, and hold the mayo. Of course, the interesting thing is that I’ve made numerous trips to Europe, to entire countries about which I’ve known virtually nothing, with absolutely nothing resembling this level of planning. One does this for its own sake: vacation planning can be every bit as interesting as vacationing. For that matter, most of us in the debate industry are very much into the advance-planning mode. We know where we’ll be every weekend of the year, and which motel we’ll be staying at, and which restaurants we’ll be eating in. The people at WTF also know who’s going to be debating whom in which rounds, who’s breaking, and who’s going to win, but that’s a little TMI for my blood.
Last night I entered the Monti LD data. 118 of the northeast’s finest! Quite a turnout, I’d say. Even allowing for the inevitable fall-off of forensicians who inexplicably get the yips on tournament morning, they’ll still have three digits. It will be fun to tab, although honestly, the most fun tabbing is the smallest tournaments where you have to do half of it by hand. That’s where the skill, if any, comes in, when the software fails you and you’ve actually got to know what you’re doing. I’m long enough in the game to have done MHLs on index cards, but not long enough to have done major invitationals. The mind boggles.
Tonight is parent judge training. This has been an evolving business. At the start, I used to include a demo by my slowest speaking varsity, but I dropped this after Ma ‘n Pa inevitably complained that they were talking too fast. Jeesh! For that matter, the whole thing was too much input for one night. Now I breeze along talking mostly about what happens and what underlies the business rather than the specifics of 1AR and 2AR and all that. The details are in the handouts, which are about the length of Anna Karenina but without the railroad station. The key thing is to motivate them to do it, and to do it early, so that they can learn their chops at MHLs and CFLs so that they’ll be competent when they eventually hit the invitationals. By competent I mean able to sit in a round, take notes, and generally understand the specifics because the debaters have adjusted to the parent factor. In rounds that are very fast and extremely technical, the incompetents in the room will not be the parents, as I will tell them tonight. Any decent debater knows how to adapt, and the debater who doesn’t adapt deserves to lose. Debaters who have spent their careers adapting to college judges who study critical theory whine at great length about having to adapt to parent judges who think pomo is a joke. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, Bucky. The art of adaptation is about the only public speaking factor left in the activity; take that away, and we might as well just do the whole thing as IMs.
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