First of all, Bro J has posted this—http://www.lifa.org/lifadocs.org/NSDACampus.mp4—which I think will be really helpful to new judges, or at least judges new to virtual tournaments, which is most of them. At the same time I’m working on a packet of info for the judges, and I’ll use this as my starting point. We need to deliver a lot of information in an easily digestible format.
The thing is, people don’t all necessarily learn the same way. If you’re a teacher, you already know that. Over the years I did a lot of training on technology, and underwent a lot of training on technology myself. Some people learn by watching. Some people learn by reading the manual. Some people learn by hitting all the buttons and seeing what happens. I tend to be of the latter persuasion. (After I bang around for a while, then I might look something up in the manual if I hit a wall, but most good software responds well to an intuitive approach, if you’re a person with good tech instincts.) I’ve also learned by trial and error that manual writing needs to be extremely straightforward. I like to liven things up a bit when I write, which may be fine here, but which a lot of people find distracting when all they want to do is learn that ctrl-C will copy and ctrl-V will paste. (Why a V? Why not a V? Why a duck?) You need the right written material at the right time for the right audience. Much of my instructional material for judges is written in a light vein because it’s not really technical, and is meant to be comforting and reassuring for new PF parents. Humor can help there. But we’ll be looking as well for the ctrl-C/ctrl-V sort of info for virtuality. It will be fun to put all this together over the next week or so. My first tournament is the MSDL on 9/26, so the clock is ticking.
The numbers at the Massachusetts Speech And Debate League Online #1 (or as I like to call it Maspandeleon La Partie Une) are slowly coming together. I know from experience with the NYCFL that local events tend to come together closer to the tournament date than big bid tournaments, for which people sign up at the first ding of the opening bell. The PF divisions are fine; we could use a little goosing in LD and CX. They’re also hosting Big Questions, which at the moment has the Littlest Field. Maybe they don’t like asking the big questions up in Massachusetts. Maybe they’ve never recovered from Mitt Romney.
The other open local event, if local is a word we can use to define an online region, is Byram Hills. LD and PF are hunky dory. Speech, less hunky and dory. Again, this is probably a factor of late local signups. But the thing is, one does need to get one's rooms in a row, and paid for, before the event. One can only wait for so long.
And we are putting the finishing touches on Little Big Bronx, their Sunday novice event. That opens on Friday. As I think I’ve said before, it seems awful early to me, based on my own experience with novices over the years. But some schools have been in session—and I use that term advisedly—longer than our local learning factories. I’d be happy to see a big turnout. The bigger the tournament, the easier it is to run. Until it gets too big, at which point all hell can break loose.
Ain’t 2020 fun?
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