The old LD curriculum, after the initial meetings where everyone tried on the sorting hat and headed off either to Debateland or Speecho-Americana, began with rights, the social contract and morality. Occasionally, just for a change of pace, I’d kick off with morality. One could, I guess, tie right and wrong into the protection of rights, but traditionally we look at deontological and consequential analyses, which are a different business altogether than weighing conflicting rights claims. So we would mostly talk about these concepts, rights and morality, independently. I tended to talk about justice a little later in the game, primarily because the mind has so much vacant space available at any given time, and it seemed to make sense to let a few other basics sink in first. But before long we would have covered those three key ethical concepts in some depth, i.e., rights, justice and morality.
Next up we would talk about the structure of an LD round. Then the nature of arguments. Then the writing of cases. And of course the topic at hand (in our case, Modest Novice). Figure that now we’re at about the middle of October.
I can live with that. The elders on the team can contribute, and we can switch over to them regularly enough to discuss their PF topics of the month.
When November 1 rolls around, we’ll have a new topic (for December). We can all start talking about that together, which finally puts us on the same track resolution-wise, although I would expect participation from all on any topic discussion. What also needs to come up at this point, after the newbies have debated those 3 opportunities from the first-timers to the first MHL, is the beginning of training for PF.
What seems to me that is most different about PF and LD, and what I’m putting as my number one in the top ten rules for PFers, is that facts/evidence dominate. The rule, to my recollection, is that you should never open your mouth in a PF round unless there’s a piece of evidence in it. There’s other rules as well in the top ten, but I haven’t sorted them out yet completely. When I do, I’ll share them. Meanwhile, this indicates to me that the first PFish thing that we train on is research.
Having no debate over the weekend (and watching the calendar count down until the end of the season on—yikes!—April Fools), I did more work on the cur, but so far I’ve only tackled the easy stuff, moving things around and putting in “debate” where it says “LD.” When it came to research in LD, I never pushed much, on the assumption that research was the idea that cut out the ribbon clerks. I demanded little or nothing; if they didn’t do it, they would eventually drop by the wayside. But in PF, research is the heart and soul, and some other means of cutting out the ribbon clerks needs to be determined.
A paradigm shift if there ever was one.
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