The Sun Shines Bright on my E-Kentucky Home

First of all, the Article of the Day: “And what’s on your desk?”

And now, on to business:

E-TOC

It doesn’t take a research genius to determine that historically the TOC has been populated by roughly the same schools over and over again. The key reason for this is money. The first essential bottom-line necessity of playing on the TOC circuit is a steady participation at a handful of tournaments scattered around the country. The programs that can afford this participation (transportation, lodging, meals, high registration fees) tend to be in the game for the duration. These programs additionally have the resources to afford the education (coaches, assistant coaches, camps) that results in winning teams. On top of that, these programs are supported by schools that accept that an aggressive forensics program can turn students into virtual part-timers as far as the rest of their curriculum, and that for the right students, this is not a bad thing.

I do not dispute that these circuit programs are good at what they do. Given those educational resources, one would expect nothing else. I also don’t maintain that these programs are all from fabled moneyed districts or elitist private schools, although the minute you get on an airplane you probably are talking maybe a thousand dollars a weekend per person per tournament. That money has to come from somewhere. So let’s face it. The TOC circuit is what it is. It’s an elite establishment of schools that can afford to do it. Occasionally a lone wolf can break into it, but that lone wolf—individual or team—comes privately funded both as far as attending the tournaments and personal coaching. 

I have nothing against any of this, as long as we recognize it for what it is. After all, I was a coach for 20 years with plenty of TOC success for my team and I’ve run endless numbers of tournaments in aid of this circuit. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with having money, and spending it on debate. I wish every school had the resources to take on a serious commitment to debate. And I don’t want to undervalue the educators who have built their careers on it. If we took some of the storied TOC coaches and put them into a school district without a penny to its name, they would still develop outstanding teams—I have no doubt about that—although those teams wouldn’t be able to do much more than local competing.

I’m not going to go into the impact of TOC, which I have done over the years ad nauseum. Over and over I have said that if TOC didn’t exist, I wouldn’t invent it. But it’s there, and it’s not going away any time soon, so there’s not much point in pretending otherwise. I have to admit though that I find the upcoming e-TOC…shall we say…interesting?

The idea of debate-by-internet has been with us for a while. The first minute there was connectivity there was the thought of e-rounds. I think there was some sort of dream that e-debating would tear down barriers, ushering in a new utopia of access for all. No longer would “high level” debate be limited to those with the funds to travel the country weekend after weekend. Every student everywhere would simply log on and start mouthing off. I don’t think we ever thought about it much (although I would imagine there are some people who have tried it and, for all I know, it might be quite popular on parts of the web I don’t visit). It would happen some day, but meanwhile, the bus is leaving at 8:00 a.m. so get moving. 

The first thing that struck me about e-TOC was that it costs as much as IRL-TOC, aside from not having to pay a surcharge per judge to eat the bagels in the judges’ lounge. (I don’t remember them ever having a judges’ lounge back in my day, not that anyone in their right mind would want a Kentucky bagel.) Aren’t they at least saving money on the Monday morning breakfast? It was suggested to me that, instead of room fees and custodial costs they now have software fees. To be honest, I really don’t believe this, but I have no evidence to dispute it, so I’ll let it go. 

When I read the instructions for the tournament, which are wildly elaborate, for a while I completely disbelieved that the enterprise was even possible. I’ve communicated with others remotely for decades: back in the DJ, not all that long ago, we had state of the art videoconferencing, and I’m on the horn one way or another with my daughter in London on a regular basis. Based on my own not always ideal experience, my mind was having trouble grokking how teammates and judges would all somehow sort this out. But looking at how Zoom works, I’ve come to see that it is, in fact, quite possible to conduct a fairly decent simulation of a round electronically. I’m willing to ignore the hoo-ha of the real world when in a lot of rounds teams spend more time ineptly flashing cases and evidence and looking for outlets and cursing the wifi than they do debating, and where flooding a tidal wave of evidence on all and sundry is taught as a winning strategy (as compared to, I don’t know, debating good cases well). Let’s, for argument’s sake, assume a perfect world where everyone is the Master of the Tech Universe. Even if that’s not true today, it’s not an unreasonable expectation in the not-so-distant future.

I begin to see that, given today’s tech, e-rounds may not be so farfetched after all, manageable on a fairly large tournament-sized basis. And this does begin to fulfill that utopian dream of ultimate resource parity. Unfortunately, the dream has a few holes in it, at least as far as e-TOC is concerned. First, it assumes equal bandwidth for all, which certainly isn’t true in every household in the US. Secondly, if I’m using a device for my communicating, complete with mic and headphones and cam, I probably need a second device for my materials like cases and research, and maybe even a third device for private communication with my partner. In the world of social distancing, that means all that hardware for each and every participant. And you thought flying to Lexington for the weekend was going to be expensive?

If you think about all of that, you quickly come to realize that, at the moment, the e-round idea does anything but democratize debate. But to be honest, I’m actually thinking that, in the long run, our preliminary steps on the road to e-debate might pay off. Covid-19 won’t be keeping us all locked up forever. And most if not all of the drawbacks to e-debating alone in our individual closets will be removed if we were back in school. Yes, I know that all schools do not have all the tech they need, but that’s more likely than all individual students having that tech. If my teams at Imaginary High School wanted to debate at a virtual tournament, even today, there’s probably enough tech for them to do it.  And the thing is, the present situation, however inadvertently, is showing that it might indeed be possible. We will all, before long, be competent Zoomers. We will all, eventually, be back in school (well, not me, but you know what I mean) where the resources for e-debating are probably even now readily available. Will we begin to take advantage of this? Will we learn the lessons of the pandemic to take a giant leap in communication in the one high school activity that is entirely about communication? Will the e-TOC actually be an unwitting catalyst in democratizing the activity in which it is the very paradigm of elitism?

It could happen. 

The rut of coachean existence (which Blogger always wants to change to coachman)

Over the weekend some of us got all het up about playing some online games. So far I will say that I sort of enjoy Carcassonne, but its recent change of ownership, literally as we were downloading it, meant a bit of confusion among the usual suspects, not to mention that its German origins kept resulting in error messages like Du bist gescreweden. But at least I now have a game going with a couple of people, including Kate, whose time zone delay makes it fairly slow going. But no matter how slow it gets, one still manages to make dumb mistakes. Meanwhile we also went through some contortions on Catan, but I think they’ve been ironed out. I played a practice game today that was both endless and, seemingly, pointless. I’ve tried this game before, and its charms continue to elude me. Anyhow, everyone else thinks it’s the cat’s pajamas, so I’ll give it another go.

Unlike most people, my retirement last year makes the lockdown not much different than non-lockdown. I work on writing off and on all day, with occasional drifting into photo editing and long walks to listen to audiobooks. I’ve been digitizing my old photos going back to the 70s, and am now up to 1994. I look forward to the purchase of my first digital camera in the Spring of 2003 (I think). The tedium of scanning a handful of pictures at a time on one computer, the one with the big hard drive that is slower than [your metaphor here for some really slow thing], then exporting and editing on the Macbook (docked into a decent monitor and keyboard), then uploading and sharing on the cloud—jeesh! Talk about busy work. Sometimes it’s entertaining to revisit some of the old vacations and whatnot, but other times I have to wonder what the hell I was taking a picture of, and worse, where the hell. Oh, well. It keeps one busy indoors, and it is all part of my family history project.

As for the writing, there’s fiction (there’s always fiction, nowadays all for the granddaughter), and there’s work on the good old jimmenick.com website, which I do like keeping up-to-date. (Needless to say, I’m not prepping for any tournaments at the moment, and probably won’t again until October.) I’m also going through this blog’s archives looking for stuff worth preserving. I’ll post some here when I come up with it. 

Anyone want to trade sheep for wheat?

'enery the eighth I am I am

Every now and then I upgrade my website, jimmenick.com. I don’t exactly change the design—life is short—but I do have at the content. Some of it is evergreen and stays as is, but some of it needs a kick in the pants because things ain’t what they used to be, e.g., handouts on how to judge PF, which regularly need to be reevaluated. Other things get weeded out altogether; I’m thinking that by now most of what I wrote during the Harding Administration about LD can go down the old drain. I’ve only just begun working on this, but it will hold me for a while, especially the Tournament Toolkit, which will need the most work. Anyhow, this morning I discovered that access to a few of the original Nostrum episodes was missing. Sacre effing bleu, as the Frenchies say. I fixed that, not only for the sake of the website but to get for myself a definitive set. After all, I do think of it as the Moby-Dick of forensics (by which I do not mean ponderously long and no one ever really reads it, but then again, I’m an M-D fan since college, when I hired out to write papers on it for hapless fraternity bros who had more money than brains, and I became even a bigger fan when I read it, about ten years after that). I couldn’t find the overall file for the first collection, the one that I used to upload it to Amazon. Sigh. It must be on one of the old computers that I scrapped last year. I do hold out some hope it’s on one of the numerous external drives on the table next to me that I have to do something with someday. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, I finished reading Wolf Hall yesterday. Literally reading, as compared to an audiobook (which I do consider reading, but I would imagine that Wolf, which is lots of little strings in all directions, wouldn’t work well by ear). I was inspired by, first, having watched the TV version (which I loved), and then seeing that the third volume had just hit the stands. The time seemed ripe. I probably confused the issue by starting to watch The Tudors at the same time. The show is enjoyable enough, but as The New Yorker put it, it is pretty much cast with underwear models. To wit, Holbein’s Henry:

Played, in The Tudors, by Jonathan Rhys Meyers:

Um, pumpkins and oranges, you might say. Anyhow, I really loved the book, which has inspired me to find out what the facts are, since they differ widely between Wolf and Tudors. For instance, the bastard Richmond melodramatically dies as a lad in the latter (not true), and is alive and kicking still at the end of the former (true). The real problem is that TV imprints things on the brain more sturdily than books, especially wispy books with circular narratives like Wolf. Also, one has to account for the fact that Wolf’s Anne Boleyn was The Crown’s first ER, while Queen Anne of The Favourite is The Crown’s second ER. Which is not to mention that Dr. Who was the first Crown’s Prince Consort, Dr. Who’s Clara is Victoria in that series (which I’m also watching), and Broadchurch, which I am also watching, fields not only two Whos but also Anne/Elizabeth, Rory and, for all I know, Strax and a couple of Daleks. Can’t these British actors find one job and stick to it?

The bottom line is, Wolf Hall, the book, highly recommended. Ditto WH the Masterpiece Theatre (or whatever it was). The Tudors? Think of it as the Shonda Rhimes version of the 16^th Century: entertaining, lots of lust, to be taken with a full cone of salt. 

Been There, Been Doin’ That

Given that I retired from the Day Job at the beginning of 2019, I’m not exactly new to being around the house all day. Of course, before Commander Cuomo forbade it for we 70+ folks, I did on occasion sally forth for one thing or another, most notably debate tournaments and the like, but I did have time on my hands that I had not had before, and the question was, how to fill it.

For me, this was easy. My granddaughter being born in 2017 helped me focus my mind on what, if anything, I had to bequeath to her. Family history was an obvious answer. First of all, I and I alone know my own story (I’m an only child), so there’s a touch of memoir to pass along, and additionally there’s all the family lore that I picked up over the years about my parents and their parents, real stuff, at least anecdotally, as compared to steamship passenger lists and birth certificate searches. Secondly, although related, there is a trove of photographs and the like that were collecting dust and discoloration in various albums, all of which needed modernization. With these things in mind, I settled down to the creation of a family history, now completed, and also committed to the seemingly endless task of digitizing old photographs, which I am now about halfway through. In other words, while I wasn’t working anymore at the DJ, I was still working. The big difference was that the alarm didn’t go off in the morning, and I didn’t have to spend endless hours reading a lot of crappy books to find a handful of good ones. (I did  take up some quality reading, though. All of my own choosing. We’ll get to that eventually.)

The point of all this is that, despite being under lockdown, it doesn’t really have that much effect on me personally, because I already have a fairly set routine for the day (and, thank goodness, my wife and I are healthy). My sympathies go out to those whose lives are obviously torn asunder by current events, or maybe even suffering from the virus. I mean, this is the real magilla.

For the moment all I can say is stay safe. And be good. This too shall pass. 

Oh, what the hell...

I originally created this blog as a sort of journal of my career as a debate coach. Although it often roved far afield of that intention, it always ultimately returned to its main business. I've been going through the old entries lately, and I find it interesting that a lot of what I was thinking about forensics over a decade ago was, A) incredibly prescient, and B) on occasion, ridiculously wrong. I changed my mind about many things over the years, but mostly I did stick to my guns. There is a plus ça change aspect to the whole thing, to tell you the truth. 

In any case, when I retired from coaching, the motivation of providing a coaching journal was obviously rendered moot. While I was still tabbing my little heart out, I was pulling away from the nitty-gritty of debate. I didn’t watch rounds, and I no longer studied the trends. I kept up with the rules insofar as issues might come to the tab room, but that was the extent of it. So, with little ado, I put blogging behind me.

When I retired from my Day Job in 2019, I started doing a whole bunch of writing of a personal nature, beginning with a family history. Having a grandchild will prod one in that direction. I also began creating stories for said grandchild. The thing is, writing—my own and that of others—has always been important to me. And while I’ve been beavering away at it with decent discipline for over a year now as my main retirement activity, one thing that has been missing from my work was this particular outlet, where I could play around with the odds and ends that fit nowhere else. So I've decided to come back.

I don’t know if anyone will care one way or the other, but then again, I never did. One exercises to keep one’s muscles working: this applies as much to mental as physical exercise. My writing here will be just that, i.e., mental exercise. It will entertain me, and maybe it just might entertain some others. Who knows? 

And so we begin.