I think—and this is a major Deanna Troi/Counselor Obvious revelation—that the biggest reason that TOC gets the attention that it does is its unwavering focus on just one thing: putting the (theoretically) best teams against one another in front of the (theoretically) best judging for a big national blowout. Putting aside whatever silliness might take place in the advisory committees (and there are other words I could use other than silliness, at least to describe my own experiences on the LD committee), with occasional exceptions, whatever tournaments are designated as qualifiers will attract competitive people and qualify quality debaters. Each tournament is unique, of course, but there are generalities that can be presumed. Octos bid tournaments will draw from the whole country, while semis and finals bids will draw more locally. Finals bids may be the hardest to get—stiffer odds, that is, because there’s only two of them and usually ten or so likely contenders, as compared to octos bid events, where there’s 16 of them and maybe 30 or 40 likely contenders. And as often as not at finals bidders, one schmegeggie will show up who already has 10 other bids and who just wants to get an extra dessert that weekend. Honestly, I would guess that most finals bids are won by debaters who already have other bids, though, no matter how you slice it. Semis are obviously more open, and they’re probably how most regional debaters make their initial moves. Quarters bids, as a general rule, are tough, leaning toward octos caliber. And octos can be bloodbaths, but as I say, proportionately maybe not so much.
As an aside, some schools will pour big money into travel for teams that haven’t a prayer of doing well at a big octos tournament and everyone on the team knows it; the logic of that escapes me, especially when there are more appropriate tournaments that same weekend for that team at a local venue. Go figure. And then there’s some folks who go after bids with virtually no likelihood of achieving them and they have no idea how outclassed they are, regardless of how often they get byes in round 6. While it’s nice to dream, at some point one needs to face reality.
Anyhow, the point is that there are few if any people at TOC who shouldn’t be at TOC, and who aren’t of the same competitive mindset that weekend (if not the entire year). Achieving TOC caliber debate is a marathon, as compared to the sprints for CatNats and NatNats which have, for the most part (some dioceses do things a little more parochially, shall we say), a single event at which a limited number might qualify. It’s hard to think that winning within a system that goes all year, with no artificial limits, is not a better determinant than winning one weekend.
So far, you could say that I’m all in favor of it, and mostly I am. Don’t get me wrong. Although there is a side issue of the growing NDCA and a coach-sourced approach versus the Kentucky fiat approach, the next time I qualify teams for the TOC I will take them to Kentucky and more power to them. Still, as I’ve always said, if the TOC didn’t exist, I wouldn’t invent it. We in the activity seem to have created what one might call a professional debate league among high schoolers, with the goal of winning (or at least attending) TOC. In so doing, we have created very specialized versions of the activities involved (at least LD and Policy) that are limited mostly to this league because few outside of it understand it. A lot of money is poured into it, and a lot of students are laser-beam focused on it for a couple of years of their high school lives. I wonder about all of this. It’s not as if I think that the money spent on the elite $ircuit would otherwise somehow trickle down to the masses; I’m not a Pollyanna. It’s not as if I think the students involved would opt instead for a less narrow focus for their adolescent years; given the nature of those students, if they didn’t have debate, they would probably just spend more time on the Xbox. I don’t know if at least LD would be any, for lack of a more precise word, better, without the influence of the $ircuit; we could argue till the cows come home about whether any particular content in a debate is good or bad, and as a whole, there are so many possible high school forensic activities available that, if you happen not to like this one, go do that one.
We are stuck, in the end, with one hard reality about what we do: we do it competitively. And while most of the values I hope for my students to derive from the activity are not directly competition-related, some of them are. And when we do set up competitions, certain competitive behaviors will inevitably follow. If we set up a competition that is intended to be the most elite of competitions, then certain elite behaviors will develop. Again, I don’t want to offer a lot of value judgments because I honestly fall on so many different sides I have no idea what I really believe. But this I think is important to remember: when all is said and done, it really is not about winning or losing, it is about playing the game. (Uh-oh; Deanna Troi alert!) No one outside of our universe, if you tell them you once won TOC, will be terribly impressed. But if everything you learned in your years of debate made you a better person somehow, then they will take notice. Coaches who spend their careers training new coaches, who open their world to others who may do nothing more than schlep novices around week after week, who work hardest with the members of their own teams who don’t take all the tin, should be the valued the highest, not the ones who were the most ferocious competitively (although they can be all of those things; few are).
I find it amazing how important this activity is to me. I’m not even really sure why, to tell you the truth. It’s not rational. Oh, well…
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