Let’s continue the balkanization discussion. See Ryan’s comment to the last post, which I’ll address here.
First of all, I’ll point out that his position is very reflective of Sara S’s, when we discussed MJP with her in general for Bigle X. She was solidly in favor of using it at her tournament, and one reason derived from her own experience as a debater. Simply put, a serious debater puts an awful lot of work hours into the activity to prepare for tournaments. While those work hours have intrinsic educational value, they are clearly pointed toward the direct result of doing well at competitions. At the point where we have hard-working students prepared up the wazoo, and judges who haven’t prepared at all and haven’t got a clue, we have a terrific disconnect at the tournament level. This also hearkens back tangentially to Bietz’s comment about spending a lot of money to send kids to tournaments that don’t have a reasonable break point. Debate is not all about the competition, which educationally is a means to an end aside from acquiring lots of trophies, but it does include the necessary evil of competition, and all that competing entails. It includes travel and hotels and judges and opponents, all of which need to be sorted in the most favorable mix possible. I’m not going to spend a lot of money and effort to meet unchallenging opponents, for instance, which is why I don’t send my novices to local one-day tournaments in Wyoming. All we have to do here is extend that logic to judges to see where this ends up. The point is, debaters (and their coaches) have a reasonable desire for good judging at tournaments. LD is not an activity people can walk in off the streets and perform well, with no training whatsoever, despite what some diehards might wish to believe. Hell, I love parent judges, but I train them thoroughly and start them in novice divisions (and have worked with the MHL and CFL to make adult and coach training an ongoing process). As the VCA well knows, I have often encountered judges in varsity divisions who don’t even know how to spell LD, much less judge it, and I have not been happy about it.
The idea of posting the paradigm at the ranking point is a good one, and I think can be done on tabroom.com, with one issue, which is that only registered coaches at the moment can access their team’s data. This can probably be addressed one way or the other. I would like the idea of limiting a paradigm to a hundred words or so, because, frankly, all I want to know is if you’re experienced and if you have some particular peccadillo (“I shoot debaters running theory” or “I shoot debaters who don’t run theory,” for example). I don’t need your life story or care about your grand theory of argumentation and why Socrates had this whole Q&A thing all wrong. You’re a damned college kid, for Pete’s sake. All I want is your ballot, not your brain on a silver platter. Anyhow, I’ll pursue this.
I am obviously onboard with the training aspect of new judges, but I’m a little dicey about throwing them into doubles. Then again, I do it at Bump, buffering them with As, so I can’t condemn the idea out of hand. As for throwing them into guaranteed-to-break rounds, my issue with that is that speaker points can be dicey with noobs, and your 5-0s are definitely looking to take home a gavel. I would be interested in allowing coaches an opportunity to buy their judges out of adjudication if they were willing to observe and learn. This would have to be a case-by-case situation, but I’d like to at least see it on the table. I mean, there is no better way to learn what happens in rounds than to watch rounds.
2 comments:
I did not give much thought to the ramifications of MJP until finding myself off round 2 after being off round 1. Then the light went on and I put two and two together.
So I found myself in the underclass, so to speak. I judged the 1-X's in rounds 4-6. I would have been off round 3 as well, but I was the first judge to walk into JV's peripheral vision when the assigned judge did not show for a 1-1 match-up (that one was pretty good).
From a judge's standpoint I did not mind a bit. I always bring plenty of work and a good book to keep me busy. I'm there to support the students and tournament as needed, and if that means sitting around in the judge's lounge or being relegated to the lower rounds, that's OK. Those folks deserve competent judging as well. I doubt everyone feels this way.
[I'll note in a tournament with an open tab (e.g. Princeton, Lex), the later rounds with debaters who know they are out of it take on a significantly different tone. I don't think this is healthy for the activity, but that's another discussion.]
My bigger concern is what MJP does for the activity. Of course there are the two points JM brought up: burnout of the A judges and disappointment, or maybe misaligned expectations of the others. I have two other concerns. First is the potential of a judge group/debater group feedback loop that keeps producing the same winners, both within tournaments and between tournaments that use MJP. OK, stop, I understand the logic that the best should repeat their successes over again, especially with the best consistent judging. Nice in theory but human nature plays a role here. I know one of the most difficult things I have to do when judging contestants I've seen before is to put away all my prior knowledge of their skills, personalities, my prior decisions, etc.
My second concern is the closely related concept of having "clean" judges. There is something to be said for the notion that, within a tournament, preferably judges should not have judged a debater before, and most preferably have not judged them on the same side. Again, human nature here. Clearly one's judgement is influenced by a previous decision and certainly if they have heard the case before. In one out round a judge was happy to announce he could re-use his flow from an earlier round - my gut feel is this is not the best way to adjudicate.
I understand that the point of MJP may be to advocate that it's better to have a judge(s) that both competitors agree on rather than to worry about the above issues. And I fully understand the over-arching desire to have a competent judge -- I've been there so many times! These are just comments to think about. I'm more than happy to defer to the judgment of those who have been involved in LD long before me and will be long after.
One more comment. I observed all the out rounds, and quite frankly I would have been at less than 100% judging them. I've judged varsity at Harvard, Princeton, Villiger and others and have never felt I could not keep up with the speed or comprehension. I would have missed some stuff at the out rounds of Lex. Or maybe not. Discussing this observation with my debater and the runner-up on the ride home, it's clear that these kids are quite adept at adjusting to the judges. So more likely the speed was faster and the theory was flying because of the (younger) A judges in the room. Had I been among the judge group and delivered my traditionalist oral paradigm, perhaps the speed would have been a tad slower and the theory shells left behind in favor of a gripping narrative attack on abuse. And if so, provided you have a competent judge(s) that can parse an argument, is it a bad thing to have the competitors adapt now and then?
And since you bring up the speaker point issue in response to Ryan's 5-0 idea, I've got a rant about those too. But that will have to wait until I'm not so tired ...
While relayed second-hand, I seem to recall that on argument for MJP was that it rewarded the agency of hard-working debaters. While sympathetic, I think that concern is somewhat misplaced.
A major part of education is learning to make good decisions. Debaters should be able to run almost any argument they want or deploy any strategy they wish, but I feel it is educationally undesirable for them to so in an arena where such choices are consequence free.
Deciding what arguments to run in front of a critic is part of learning how to make good decisions, because of the rewards and consequences that follow from making good or bad decisions. Same with strategies. In the case of debate, the student may not wake up the next day with a tattoo or a police record as a memoir of last night, but rather a less successful tournament than she or he would have liked. Which is probably a better arena to learn about poor decisions than others.
MJP short-circuits that. This is not merely a case of 'in real life people can't pick their audience'- though I do agree with that. MJP shields students from the consequences of their own poor decisions.
And sure, sometimes students may lose in heart-breaking fashion in front of a clueless person. And that is heart-breaking. I just think the cure is worse than the disease. And by raising training standards and trying to adopt some of the policies mentioned elsewhere in the comments, we can raise the overall standard.
Besides, given the demographics of the typical debater, the sooner they learn that decision-making, even more than hard work and expenditure of resources, is crucial to success the better. And who knows, might even teach some empathy. As Karon Bowers one-time director at U. Texas, said many years ago in the keynote speech kicking off the local Massachusetts season, we shouldn't expect others to reward our talent and hard work.
I just feel MJP feeds that expectation.
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