In which we use the phrase "old titular fart"

At some point last week, before I went to the Pups (which did nothing to change my mind), I decided that I would no longer start Sailor debaters in LD, but would instead go directly to PF. I’ve already explained at length why I prefer PF to LD. I was only using LD as a vestigial tool to train kids on arguments, and to avoid having to create team pairs right away, which ranges from dicey to inevitable when dealing with a small team. This year, I realized that if we had the first-timers’ event on the last week of October use the Nov PF topic, we could then get a whole lot of bang out of the novice PF buck. I guess I could have alternately extended the Sept-Oct topic into November, but I don’t like it much and don’t see it as a great starting place for newbies, given its con bias. Did I mention, by the way, that our local CFL and the MHL will now no longer use coin flips? As for the former, it’s in line with their finals tournament, and most of our local rules are in aid of following the rules there, while for the MHL, if we really want to educate new students, it makes sense to put them on both sides of a topic (which is really the motivation for our local CFL as well). Anyhow, for me dumping LD entirely means revising my curriculum a wee bit off the top, but I still think that students who understand rights and morality and justice are better off than students who don’t, so it’s not terribly difficult for me to make the switch.

Of course, the Pups confirmed this decision. As I’ve said a million times, if TOC didn’t exist, I wouldn’t invent it. The idea of a national circuit strikes me as progressively more bizarre as time goes by. What other high school activity sends students traveling around the country every other week or so? And let’s face it, it’s not that many students that do such traveling, although I suspect that the people on the $ircuit think the $ircuit is bigger than it is, and that everyone who isn’t a part of it wants to be, and that whatever it does is the way things should be done. I suspect that the reason the same schools repeat year after year at TOC is that it is pretty much just these schools that are in the running. LD is obviously going the way of policy in becoming a limited activity with a de facto no-entry policy for new programs. That is, former LDers train new LDers, and without former LDers, you don’t have LD. Everyone in the universe seems to have a coach or two (or eight) still in college, plus one old titular fart who’s been around forever who hasn’t judged since the Carter Administration who buys the plane tickets and checks in at the motel and that’s about it. Not to mention the fact that the trend has moved from debating often interesting resolutions to the dreadfully dull idea of evaluating debate per se. How many judges are deciding on the basis of violations, critiques, off-case analyses, etc., versus the idea that one debater defended a particular side of a resolution better than the other debater defended the opposite side? Certainly a lot of the tournaments I work at also have a traveling bunch of PFers, but so far they haven’t cut themselves off from the real world. Maybe they will at some point. I don’t know. I’ll be long gone by then. I’m sure a lot of people will be happy to see my back.