I watched some of the workshops from the NDCA over the weekend. Mostly, of course, I stuck to the ones about tournaments; I don’t have a team, so at least that’s one thing I don’t have to worry about. As the speakers went through their paces, I was struck by one thing most of all: We don’t know anything yet about our covid forensic future.
What we are undergoing now is a paradigm shift in the classic sense of the phrase. We are finding out that everything we think we know is relatively worthless in the light of present phenomena. The past is no longer prologue. This applies to many, many things, from office work to grocery shopping and everything that underlies those things, be it supply chains or how we consume media. It applies as well to forensics tournaments, and everything that underlies those tournaments, like coaching and training and recruitment and team-building and judging. For decades we have built a paradigm of debate as, first, learning how to do it, and second, doing it competitively once we’ve learned how. All of that needs to be thrown out the window.
One thing remains true: debate ultimately makes smarter people. (Forgive me for isolating debate, because other forensic activities are also strongly, albeit differently, educational. Debate happens to be what I know best of all.) Debate training is a strong educational activity. The thinking skills that are learned through debate can be applied to innumerable other pursuits. The Newark Superintendent’s keynote address said exactly that, and explained why, budgets and pandemics notwithstanding, in the long run he will want more debate, for more age groups, in all his schools. It makes education better on all counts, in all branches of knowledge. That is core, and that is unshakably true.
What the pandemic has just begun to do, and will do more of for at least the coming school year, if not longer, is challenge how we will get to have debate in our schools. It may for some be an existential question. For others, I hope the majority, it is a survivable challenge. And, in a word, creating a digital analog to the pre-covid world is not the answer. You can’t simply take everything you were doing and now do it online. It is not that everything is going to change. It is more that EVERYTHING IS GOING TO CHANGE!!!! Every notion we already have about tournaments, which is my subject in particular, is probably wrong slash inapplicable. It just ain’t the same anymore.
All the processes need to change.
All of them.
This is where the expression “thinking out of the box” comes in. We’ve thrown away the box. Our thinking has to be new. You can’t run rounds the same way, in the same number, for the same people. Online has its own demands. Time and space are redefined. Given that Kant says that the only two a priori facts are, indeed, time and space, you’ve got some big issues here.
Maybe one-day tournaments take two or three days.
Maybe weekend tournaments start on Tuesday.
Maybe new divisions need to be created to satisfy possible increased demand once travel costs are eliminated.
Trophies?
Qualifications/bids?
Availability to economically challenged programs? (As Jonathan Alston stongly and correctly pointed out, online tournaments do not solve economic issues, it merely changes them.)
Socializing between teams, both students and coaches? I’ve always loved that tournaments bring different people together in a shared activity. How do virtual tournaments do that? Should they? Can they?
My point is, the sooner we stop thinking about how to do what we did, and start thinking about how we can do what we can, we’ll be better off. My standard advice to people in the past who wanted to create a new tournament was to ask themselves why, and then to go about creating a tournament that fulfills their goals. On top of that, given my history as a systems manager, I’ve always worked with the idea that we have to give people what they need, and not what they want. As Steve Jobs rightly pointed out, if Apple had dedicated itself to giving people what they wanted, they never would have created the iPhone. If, as tournament directors, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to do what we’ve always done, we will accomplish little, and run some pretty punk tournaments along the way. We have to think differently. Outside the box. In a word, we have to set our goals for the virtual tournament universe, and find the best way to achieve those goals. The main thing our goals should be is NOT to replicate what we’ve always done. That just won’t hack it.
As I’ve said before, I’m hoping that when we come out of this pandemic crisis we will have created a new paradigm of virtual debating that will endure beyond its origins. I’m not saying that we eliminate in-person debate, but that we find a way to add virtual debate to our overall menu in addition to in-person when in-person finally comes back in force. If we can do that successfully, we will, in a word, create more debate. And, as I said earlier, more debate = more and better education. No further reason needs to be given to aim for that particular goal. But in any case, the time has come to realize that the paradigm shift is here. Throw out the old paradigms. They won’t do you any good anymore. They’re based on a reality that doesn’t exist. We are in a new reality.
Deal with it.
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