One has to wonder what the PF pool is doing with that extra
half hour or so each round. I do know that some teams are spending inordinate
amounts of time with coin flips and subsequent preflowing, which is ridiculous,
and they’re only getting away with it because the judges don’t know any better.
I used to regularly mark on my ballots that preflowing needed to be done pre,
and not to waste my time with it. My guess is that any given team will debate
either for or against a resolution at a tournament, and therefore needs to have
prep for A) debating for, and B) debating against. In fact, most teams can
probably figure this out on the bus, or even before they leave home. Hence
being ready to debate is the hallmark of the professional debater. Preflowing
after the coin flip is the hallmark of the schmegeggie.
Then there’s the critique. This isn’t limited to
inexperienced judges, of course. In fact, the worst oral critiques usually come
in policy, where the judges are the most experienced. Experience and bloviating
are not inherently linked, however. The most inexperienced judge on the planet
can also want to expose as much hot air as the room will allow, given the
opportunity. If we’re not literally pulling ballots out of people’s hands, or
if they’re not being electronically submitted before the critique (which has
been one of the great plusses of e-ballots in LD and policy), we’re all waiting
endlessly, unable to proceed, while some adjudicator explains life in all its glorious permutations to a captive audience of adjudicatees. Unless a judge is
providing useful analysis of evidence or strategy, which is possible but not
probable, most teams just want to hear that they won or lost, and why they won
or lost. Younger teams might also want performance tips, even though they
usually don’t pay attention to them. Given that an awful lot of PF judges
attempt to provide analysis of evidence and strategy while simultaneously not
revealing who won the round, you’ve got to wonder. And meanwhile, the tournament goes nowhere.
Then again, people do get lost, and when that happens,
inexperienced judges don’t know what to do about it. Neither do a lot of
debaters, for that matter. Kaz and I marveled throughout the Brotherly Loving
at judges and/or debaters who would sit alone in a room for seemingly eternity,
waiting patiently for something to happen. Usually what was happening was that
they were in the wrong place and everyone in the right place had given up on
them, although occasionally two teams would wait for a missing judge so long
that we had to send in an execution squad because none of these debaters should
be allowed to screw up that badly ever again. The idea that people would try to
do something proactive if something is askew is, apparently, rare in some
forensics circles. Raw novices get a pass on this. Varsity students get the
execution squad. Ditto varsity judges. Unfortunately, the idea of a Quaker
Executioner Squad is a tad oxymoronic. That’s a problem with mascots. They’re
all well and good when they’re some sort of vicious species of man-eater like
lions and tigers and bears, but when they’re the Tabby Cats or the Yellow
Labradors or the Cockerdoodles, well, you don’t put too much fear into the
hearts of anyone. At Menick University our mascots would be the Archdaemons,
and no mercy would ever be shown, period, the end, deal with it.
Menick University. I like the sound of that. I need to get that tee shirt. With the Archdaemons prominently displayed.
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