We’ve got most of the room information for the Tiggers. Next I sort it out and put people hither and yon and schedule it up and so forth. The thing is, there’s a million rooms in half a million places, and it all has to be sorted out. The good news is that, in tabroom, it will be a one-time process, but this is the time. Fortunately the needs of speech are already in there, since JV has used tabroom in the past for the IEs. It’s just working around him, and getting congress and PF in there, that takes a wee bit o’ work. But I’m on it.
The plebes put on a practice round last night, an always instructive event. For two of them, it was their first PF try, and for one of those, first try for anything period. They’re cutting their teeth at Wee Sma Saturday, which seems a good place to do it. Lots of rounds, not a lot of downside since they’ll be pretty much outranked by everyone so their only expectation is survival without their pants falling down. Plus they get away from the local dominating teams and see that there’s a world beyond our little corner of it.
It seems to me that the hardest thing for people to learn is how to focus on what’s important and what isn’t. I mean, in a debate round; this is obviously true for everything else in life! During the round, if you hear an argument, you need to capture it and distill it in your mind. What does it say? Then the next thing you have to do is know your own case well enough to know how that argument relates, and if you already have the refutation in your case, then you know where to go when it comes time for you to respond. Or is it something for which you have a block, if you don’t have it in your case? Then you have to dig it up for your rebuttal. This is probably intuitive to many debaters, but not all, which is why coaches earn the big bucks, trying to help students make it become intuitive. My guess is that if it isn’t intuitive in a round, it also isn’t intuitive in their other schoolwork. I don’t know whether or not I can help them knock it, but it’s worth a try. It’s also evident in case-writing. Some folks write clear stuff from start to finish from the first day they arrive on the team, and some write a jumble that represents maybe half of what they’re thinking, but that’s the only half they’re able to get on paper, and the gap between brain and text is precipitous. Of course, they've never really been taught to write. I always go back to the same thing, a sort of pre-distillation. Before you write a case, have something to say. What is your case about? Write that down in one sentence, and until you do, don’t do anything else. I figure that if they can get to that one clear sentence, the rest is just grunt work.
We also went over all the tournaments that are coming up until the end of the preliminary season. There’s only 3 months’ worth. If you don’t have your oar in the water by now, you’re in serious trouble. I’m still having problems getting the plebes to sign up on the signup pages, which makes my teeth grind, but what can you do aside from hitting them over the head with a frying pan, my usual fallback procedure. Unfortunately, when the heads are harder than the pans, it doesn't work all that well.
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