Marginal valediction

The questions are finalized for Bean Trivia. The event is next Wednesday. The crappy prizes are ready.

The season is over…

Last night we TVFTed. It was me, O’C and CP, talking mostly about TOC. This may also be the end of the TVFT season. I mean, things are winding down, aside from CatNats and NatNats, both of which are the same as they’ve always been. (You will debate all day Saturday at CatNats and complain royally about it, you will have mixed feelings about Baltimore, you’ll think the award ceremony is never going to end, and you’ll be glad to get home. As for NatNats, never been, no longer a member, and got nothing more to say.)

It was good to hear that TOC is getting its act together a bit under its new leadership. People regard this tournament very highly, and it should measure up to that esteem. In slow, steady steps, it is getting there, and as we said in the podcast, only slow, steady steps will work. Witness what CP had to do with the various college tournaments, some of which made TOC, at its worst, look like the Emerald City. I still think the colleges walk a thin line, but we’re keeping an eye on them, or at least on the ones we’re affiliated with. We did pretty well this year. We did Yale without CP and were none the worse for wear. We kept Princeton spinning at its peak. We pared down Columbia and kind of pulled it out of the ashes. UPenn grew some more, as we had always hoped it would. Not bad, overall. Come to think of it, looking back at the year as a whole, I’m pretty satisfied, except for the Incredible Shrinking Boat of Sailors, over which I don’t have much control. Needless to say, we’re working on it. And it must be admitted that our Speecho-American side was thriving, so it’s not totally off the tracks.

What was learned this year? I think that the message of MJP needs to be clearer, but we’ve got it down pat as far as tabbing it. It needs to be recognized as a tool to protect different styles of debate rather than a tool for solely promoting circuit debate, which it de facto becomes if traditional schools don’t pref. PF continues to grow everywhere but in New York, but that won’t last long because the attraction of accessibility for students and judges will sooner or later be too strong to deny. New programs keep getting started, and around here, I don’t recall losing any old ones, so that’s good. On the negative side, O’C discovered Foursquare and has checked into hotels, motels, his subway stop, Bronx Science (multiple times), Japonica (enough times that they’re taking away his wasabi privileges), his podiatrist, Attica, Mos Eisley, Bette Midler’s dressing room and the locked gates of the Liberace Museum, to name a few. In other words, it’s been a pretty good year, mostly moving forward.

Excelsior! This would be the perfect time for me to announce my retirement, but once again I am going to disappoint those who are rooting for me to disappear and have done with it. Sorry, guys. You can't win 'em all.

How does your brain leak, then?

I’m hoping to TVFT tonight. I’m rather curious to hear about TOC. O’C said in a comment that it was an improvement in many ways, and that is good to hear, I guess. At the same time, I wonder how many people who broke in LD at TOC in 2002 would have been able to adjudicate the rounds among people who broke in 2012. Oh, well. The $ircuit is the $ircuit, and either you play the game or you don’t. I’ve discussed this ad nauseum.

The Sailor Speecho-Americans, I’m happy to say, acquitted themselves well at the NYSFL championships. Panivore Junior came in 3rd in his DI division, and one of our sophomores managed to break as well in Oy. (Actually, I think they call it OI, but Oy sounds so much better. “Did you break?” “Oy!”) That’s half the contingent that we sent, so proportionately, who else broke 50%? They’ll spend the rest of the year working toward pieces for next year. Except for next week, when they play Bean Trivia. Best (worst?) crappy first prize ever! But I don’t want to give it away here. I don’t want to frighten anyone away.

I’m working on editing a complex book at the DJ, and after an hour or so of bearing down, my brains start to leak, so I look for ways to take short breaks. Yesterday I was pricing hotels at WDW, doing a little early comparison shopping for the DisAd. The problem is, you can pay way over twice as much for a hotel as we did in the DiDeAd, but you probably won’t get more than twice as much out of it. Let’s face it; most WDW time is not spent in the room, or even in the hotel, for that matter. And if you want to take advantage of something at another hotel, it’s no big deal to truck over there and do so. (There’s a lot of trucking at WDW. Like the doo dah man… Speaking of which, or not, I finally found out why Jimi Hendrix speaks that line about never hearing surf music again, but I won’t explain it here. That’s what Grinwout’s is for.) I can’t believe I’m thinking about this more than a year early, but as I say, complex work requires short breaks for leaky brains. This is how my brain leaks. Could be worse, I guess.

I'll take Manhattan

Getting news of the TOC is like 1844 all over again. No Translatlantic cable laid down yet, so you sort of have to wait for the clipper ships to sail in. I have some interest in seeing who goes where, and I’d like to see my horse do well in the race. But at best you might pick up an odd tweet or something. Official news? Dream on. Maybe if they charged more they might have the resources!

Oh. Right. I forgot myself for a moment. It’s TOC. What was I thinking?

I planned on doing all sorts of debate work over the weekend, and went to NYC instead to see the Steins' collection at the Met. How come I’m not buying works of art for a hundred bucks that people turn around in a few years for the down payment for their house on the Riviera? Amazing stuff. They got in with Matisse and Picasso early on, although Hank was about a dozen years older than PP, who was in his early 20s at the time in question. PP fell out of the womb with a paintbrush in his hand. While plenty of artists demonstrate their talent at a young age, PP was the most prodigious (as in, child prodigy) I have ever seen; stuff he was doing in his teens would make most old masters quit. I don’t know if that’s true of Matisse. In any case, both of them were experimenting like mad, but then again, they experimented like mad from the beginnings of their careers until the end. I don’t think either of them is easy to like, much for the same reasons that historically they were not immediately taken up by the critics. They sort of make you do a little work, and it might take you some time to figure out what the fuss is all about. At the moment I tend to be a little more taken by Hank, but that may just be my personal passing fancy. It doesn’t matter. Both of their reputations are secure despite what I might think of them. Anyhow, the Steins got in on the old ground floor, so to speak. (As did the Cone Sisters, who had a similar exhibit last year or so at the Jewish Museum.) Makes you want to live in Paris and have a lot of money in the good old days. Then again, I wouldn’t mind living in Paris and having a lot of money today. Maybe I could buy some hundred dollar paintings.

Everybody in Manhattan was dressed to the nines for some reason. Granted it was coming on Saturday night, but it’s not as if I haven’t been in the city before on a weekend. When I say people were dressed I don’t just mean they had buffed their tats. They were really putting on the dog (and there’s an expression I haven’t heard in a while). Gowns, hats, little girls in fur, the works.

Also, people were shopping. These were the ones who hadn’t buffed their tats, the tourists on Fifth Avenue. What, exactly, is the appeal of these stores that are in every mall in America? The guy in Hollister’s without a shirt is that big an attraction? I mean, they were lined up for him. But people were carrying bags, too, from every store that, as I say, is everywhere else. Maybe these people were just foreigners, and they don’t have malls in Foreignlandia. I don’t know. Business was booming, though. There was no question about that.

I love roaming around the city. The perfect day is rolling in whenever, seeing some art, and then strolling about until overtaken by starvation, then having a really good meal you can’t get at home. Pure bliss.

I have to admit that I sort of rushed through that latest True Tale of Debate Adventure. I didn’t even put opening music on it; to be honest, I’d forgotten how I had done so previously. Needless to say, O’C complained about the veracity of part of it. He wrote me a note saying that he had gone to the desk clerk on that fateful night, rather than the desk clerk going to him. Curiously enough, he did not take me to task on this: “He ripped open his shirt to reveal the gold key hanging down his neck and, also, his rippling muscles and Situation-like abs.” I guess that part must have been true.

The world at large seems to be heading down to Kentucky today or tomorrow, at least according to Twitter and Facebook. The annual pilgrimage, I guess, but mostly by the same annual pilgrims. I’m certainly not the only person who has noticed this, that for all its hifalutin goals, it’s pretty much the same player schools year after year. This is not because they are deliberately exclusive, but because there aren’t that many high schools out there with the money to support a national team of any sort whatsoever. People complain all the time that sports teams get all the gravy, but how many high school football teams are in Texas this week, New York the next week, Minnesota the next week, and Chicago the week after that (more or less—maybe every two weeks)? There’s nothing wrong with this; more power to ‘em and all that. But it shouldn’t be ignored. TOC is an extremely parochial event, for all its ecumenicalism. Life tends to be like that. Life is not fair.

Of course, those same schools are, undeniably, good, mostly run by excellent, competitive coaches. That’s part of it too, don’t get me wrong. I have a feeling that if you put, say, Aaron T in a desert surrounded by literally no one under the age of twenty, in a couple of years he’d have somehow created a debate team out of the palm leaves that was qualified for TOC, NDCA, NFL and the Vatican. He’d still need a couple of bucks in his back pocket to help the cause, though. Just sayin’.

One has to wonder, what do these great coaches do that the rest of us aren’t doing? When O’C and I talked about the future of TVFT, interviews with AT and others were on our mind. If we can pick their brains a bit, maybe we can find something useful for the rest of us. Can’t hurt.

Culmination

The mononymous Dan posts in the comments: “So what would you push your LD'ers to attend as a culminating event? You've already expressed issues with the way the TOC is run, the NFL is too impractical for your school system, and the NCFL is something of a poorly run tournament. What becomes the championship the normal debater in your program strives for? NDCA? Though NDCA has it's own issues with size. It's kind of hard to see a tournament that only has about 40 kids and accepts anyone who applies until they get to 70 as a national championship either (though I really do like the way NDCA is run and it definitely has potential). But so what does the end of year culminating event become?”

That’s a good question.

I don’t categorically object to TOC. I simply question its relevance to more than just a small number of national debaters. The issue becomes, do I try to point my own Sailors toward that small number. I would say that this is more a question for them than for me; I have no particular resources to help them if that is their goal, and they will have to go beyond me to succeed. This was not necessarily true a decade ago, but I’ve changed in one direction and TOC has changed in another. I’m not in the back of the room much anymore, so I admittedly don’t have great skills at what is au courant. When I judge, people have to do a bit of adapting to me with speed, and that means some compromises. Anyhow, assuming that I don’t have anyone on the team willing to go beyond available resources, then what? As Dan says, NFL is impractical and CatNats, with its small number of rounds and random judges, is not a test of skill reflective of the events of the rest of the year.

Does that leave NDCA? I don’t know. I’m late to the game, and this was the first year I’ve attended. I had no particular expectations, and I admit to not knowing well the application process, which is something I want to learn more about. Obviously, if anyone can get in, it is far from a national championship. One question has to be, how can it distinguish itself from TOC (since it already distinguishes itself from NatNats and CatNats). I don’t know the answer to that, and maybe only time will tell. It will be on my mind though.

To answer the specific question of culminating event, as a general rule I like the idea of having a meaningful State finals. Meaningful here is defined as representative of the events of the rest of the year, but limited to the most successful debaters at that event. Staying within the state keeps expenses down, if nothing else. My school is strapped when it comes to money: if Sailors don’t have their own long green, they’re not on the $ircuit. At times I question the need for national events, or at least for 4 of them.

As I said in my original post, I’m torn on all of this. I don’t have great answers. The best I can do is what I have always tried to do, guide Sailors along on paths that make sense for them as individuals. Everyone doesn’t have to be trying to qualify for TOC. Everyone doesn’t have to go to expensive college tournaments. I can provide a very satisfactory, educational experience for a debater without ever going off our regional circuit. If they save a few shekels and can attend a college event during the year to enjoy the running around attendant to such an affair, better still. My biggest worry about TOC in that series of articles I wrote was how serious we all take it. I wonder if we’re forgetting that it’s just a high school extracurricular activity. I suggest that there’s all-consuming and then there’s mind-bogglingly all-consuming, and that we’ve jumped from the former to the latter, and that we may have had a shark under us when we did it.

So, no answers. Lots of questions, though. C’est la guerre.

More than one strip of bacon!

The Breakfast of Champions. That's what JW calls it. And I guess that's what it is. The final day of TOC is kicked off with an expensive gala where everyone sits down and eats for an hour, and then the festivities begin and there's various talks and whatnot, and finally awards, and then it's off to more rounds or home, depending on how one has spent the previous couple of days.

Maybe I’m just getting sour sourer in my old age, but I felt, as I explained when I started the TOC series, that the sentiments of the breakfast were out of whack with the reality of the place. Everyone celebrated the values of debate, but TOC is really not about those values. I think I’ve talked enough about how I feel about that. Not that the speakers weren’t genuine in their sentiments; in fact, the keynote speaker, a former debater, was one of the best I’ve ever heard. But one didn’t arrive at this particular TOC in LD and not know that the bad feeling surrounding it was deep and scarring. Dave Huston admirably tried to address this as preface to announcing the LD awards, but there wasn’t much that could be done in that venue. For a lot of us, it was the elephant in the room. It still is. Not that it was TOC’s fault, beyond the problem of the closed committee, which was merely a footnote to the issue. The fault lies not in our tournament but within ourselves.

The dais at the breakfast comprises the cream of the TOC crop. You can mix in a lot of the cream of the NFL crop in there too while you’re at it, because there’s a bunch of overlap. Like I said, Big Debate. But they’re all very nice people, I would imagine. I don’t know many of them all that well. I certainly don’t believe that they’re some sort of evil-doers presiding over an evil event. There’s nothing wrong with a debate competition for competition’s sake; that’s not what I’ve been contending. I’ve maintained that it’s gone off or going off the tracks because it’s been injected with too many metaphorical steroids. But, again, I’ve said all that. Enough is enough.

(Maybe I was just in a crappy mood that weekend. I had a terrible cold, my Aged P had been driving me crazy, and my cat died in the middle of it. Let's see how much you love TOC under the weight of all that. Then again, I'm not saying anything all that revolutionary here. TOC is too concerned about the competition. Big revelation.)

I spent most of the breakfast sort of taking in the sights. As our keynote speaker explained at one point, in debate nobody cares how you dress, they only care how you argue, but jeesh—could name deleted send that poor, battered t-shirt to the laundry just this once? I mean, when I start noticing that people are poorly dressed, you know we’re in trouble. As with any event like this, I spent my share of time texting snide comments. I should point out that over the weekend there were all sorts of people to be noted in the coming and going column, who were apparently working the gig in aid of a new job: lots of changes next year, some moving around of the schedule, that sort of thing. I never did see Bietz, but I’ll bet he was there somewhere, unless maybe there was a new Apple product being released that weekend that he had to buy two of in every color. I did manage to break bread with CP at one point over the weekend; when I had the Big Ho, I think he ordered the Cheap Ho, if I remember correctly. (The name of the restaurant is Tolley-Ho. I’m not totally making this stuff up.)

After the breakfast we tabbed the late elim PF rounds sitting in a corner of the mezzanine, where people came by to chat or to see if I was really as evil as I had been portrayed in the press or to tell us that if a certain judge were put into a given round it would be the end of life on the planet as we know it. Meanwhile I tracked the Panivore on her triumphant march to Quarters, the best the Sailors have ever done on my watch. O’C took a great picture of us at my demand, which is almost as shocking as my complaining about the couture, but it was a moment to memorialize. I wasn’t all that negative about the weekend not to celebrate her great success. In a tournament that is all about the competition, to actually succeed at the competition is pretty remarkable.

We’ll talk more about the whole shebang on the next TFVT. I would guess that some demurrals to my positions will be offered. But other than that, I think I’m done with the subject. You probably are too.

Time to move on.

The lighter side of TOC

You may have figured this out by now, but TOC was, as weekends go, all business. I prefer my debate weekends to include a little more fun.

Arriving late on Friday meant that I couldn’t hook up with anyone. The only advantage to sitting around LaGuardia for those extra years was that I threw all the PF pool into Excel and randomized the teams and then manually plugged in the random pairings back into TRPC. I’ve never believed that TRPC is all that random, which normally doesn’t matter, but at TOC, I figured I might was well be holier than the pope. This hearkens back to the old Bietz effect, which I’ve talked about before, where singletons hit singletons. TRPC also used to put big school with lots versus other big school with lots. I like best what we did at NDCA, breaking the field into 4 groups that you could only hit any two of (other than your own) in the presets. In any case, at the very least, my pairings were damned random, as random as I could possibly make them. My time had not gone to bad use.

Our hotel was about ten minutes away from downtown, and about half the cost of the downtown hotels. It was lacking in, shall we say, the amenities, but the soap entertained me no end because no matter how much you rubbed it against yourself, nothing happened. It was like washing with a brick. But if you let it sit overnight, in the morning it was a little pool of ick. It made you immediately want to wash your hands but, uh, that was the soap… Devin and CC complained about all manner of lack of housekeeping, although Kaz and the P didn’t seem put out. My room was marginally tidied up every day, which was good enough for me. As I say, at half the price, who complains? There were no varmints, and that was good enough for me.

Tabbing was pretty straightforward, especially with the three of us. I commanded the computer, and both Kaz and Aves are good readers, plus we doublechecked up the wazoo (again, because it was TOC, and there is a pretty high premium on accuracy). In the beginning we were shunted around a bit as there weren’t enough rooms for both us and the tournament. At one point we were tabbing in the main lobby, giving new meaning to the term open tab. Finally we had our spot for Sunday, which wasn’t so bad. We had a big jar of mixed nuts in among the tabroom supplies, plus some UK yabbo running the table who was quite smart, although he did wander off now and again on tournament business, and we kept thinking that we were tournament business and that wandering off was, shall we say, counterproductive. Mostly we worried about whether or not our cars would be towed, but they were always there where we left them. We harbored some thoughts about meeting up with the traveling tab folk on Saturday, but everyone was buried in a war room or something, so we just moseyed back to the hotel and ate at a local chain restaurant where Kaz kept throwing glasses of wine at CC for some reason. (Okay, only one glass, and she didn’t exactly throw it, but who am I to let a good line go by?) Sunday night we tried again, and this time we ended up at some local burger joint, the best we could come up with. I had something I think was called the Big Ho burger, which was not as hilarious as it sounds. While I ate it I watched Desperate Housewives on one TV and some sports thing on the other TV, thus getting my cultural allowance for the day. This was during the notorious eighth LD round which, when all was said and done, was absolutely pointless. By now the cold I had been attempting to fight off was winning, and I drove myself home, leaving Kaz to handle the chilluns who were all set to go to a Korean restaurant (the Panivore’s favorite cuisine) until it turned out there wasn’t an open restaurant within a hundred miles unless one wanted a big ho or something comparable. They settled for something comparable back near the hotel. They didn’t miss anything. I didn’t mind the Ho, but I wouldn’t go out of my way for one.

Sunday was the breakfast and the break rounds, and they deserve an entry of their own.

TOC 2011 Part 6

By the time we get to TOC, this is the situation. Big Debate, having established TOC as its ultimate goal, has invested many, many thousands of dollars in getting there. Students have virtually given up their lives to become what is uniquely a TOC debater. Any residual ideas that debate is about the content—that debate is about instilling ideals into students, that it is a special educational opportunity—are suspended as debate becomes about one thing and one thing only, the competition.

There is nothing inherently wrong with competition for competition’s sake, but it is rather hollow. Think of game playing. I love game playing, and when I play a game, I give it a lot of effort. I want to win, because that’s the point of most games. But of course games also have motivating factors like socialization or brain stretching or that sort of thing, and I think we would look askance at someone who did nothing but play games all day, or who had started to confuse games with reality. This is a reasonable analogy to what has happened to debate at TOC. Because of all the money and time invested, the TOC has been drained of its lifeblood. It is a debate zombie.

At TOC, when people are not debating they are in their war room working on debating. Teams regularly travel with entourages beyond the coach and the debaters, so much so that the TOC has rules about the entourages: to wit, you can’t keep them secret like Ahab’s unearthly special harpooners on the Pequod, although apparently some people tried to. All this applies to Policy and LD both, although I don’t think PF is there yet. Scouting is common, and (theoretical) grownups are doing research and establishing positions and writing cases for debaters. When I have my first meeting with parents of novices, I tell them that their kids will learn to research, write cases and speak in public. At TOC, they will have entourages to do their research for them and to write their cases for them. As for public speaking, well, they will learn to speak in public but how well is a matter of opinion. What do the Big Debate schools tell their novice parents the first year? That their kids will become…what? I do not doubt that the lead debaters of Big Debate are smart and clever and capable of manipulating all the data that is thrown their way, but I’m unsure of the value of this as compared to the value of, well, doing your own research and writing your own cases and adapting to a variety of audiences beyond the speed-capable and argument-adept preferred $ircuit judge.

You can take or leave all of what I’ve said, if you’re a firm believer that this level of debate is valuable on a personal level. But the underlying atmosphere—of distrust, of cutthroat competition, of a tournament that is absolutely no fun whatsoever, where some of the best coaches in the country are relegated to the boondocks because of prefs, where the cost of not simply getting there but competing on the level of everyone else as Big Debate unleashes its minions is prohibitive to most programs—is not so easy to dismiss. I spent the weekend tabbing PF, and Tim and Kaz and I had a perfectly fine time among ourselves, but even there, by the time brackets had sorted themselves out and then into the elimination rounds, we never simply placed the judges without someone coming in complaining that so-and-so had it in for whosits, or shouldn’t be allowed to judge whatshisname because their camp has declared war on the other camp, etc., etc., etc. My recommendation to TOC was that next year they put strikes into PF and divide the pool by geography to bypass some of the inherent bad feeling that seems to underlie much of the activity. This is PF, remember. It’s just starting to wear long pants. There is little question in my mind that five years from now it will have prefs, scouts and assistants and be indistinguishable from its cousins across the UK campus.

What can be done about all of this? I don’t really know. I mean, relieving the operation of its veil of secrecy is a step in the right direction, but that won’t make the fact that this is an unhappy and rather spirit-crushing event any less true. At the point where anyone puts this many eggs in a single basket, that basket becomes rather problematic. Let’s face it: as I said earlier, it’s the same schools there year after year for the most part, so Big Debate has already bought into this paradigm, and they’ve gotten what they’ve paid for. I doubt if they’re going to change that. I doubt that the Big Debate schools went into TOC thinking that it was antithetical to the goals of the activity, and maybe it really isn’t. But it certainly doesn’t celebrate those goals. It celebrates a certain brand of competitive success that is, quite honestly, not within the reach of most schools. Short of schools running kritiks that would demonstrate this fact, and having those kritiks win, and then gaining admittance to an event that they’ve spent their entire careers vilifying, it is a closed arena. And as such, it is not so much going to affect the Big Debate operations if the tournament remains closed as it will those of us not a part of Big Debate. In the past, I’ve looked on TOC as a nice goal for some of my students. After this year, I’m obviously having serious second thoughts about that. I am unlikely to encourage students to aim for TOC because, unless they’re a superstar like the Panivore who has the personal resources, both intellectual and financial, to become a private Big Debate concern all on her own, the result of pursuing a TOC path for a Sailor will result in, at best, admission to the TOC and a seriously disappointing, unenjoyable, resource-deficient weekend. While everyone else is in their war room, my Sailor will be hanging out with me trying to find a decent restaurant open on a Sunday night, which we will attend alone because everyone else is in their war rooms.

As usual, I’m not really looking to discuss this here beyond what I’ve already said. That is, I have neither the time nor the inclination to argue specific points in the comments or anything like that. You can agree with me, or not, as you like. The thing is, it’s not as if I’m particularly perturbed by any of this. The TOC is entirely an optional event in the debate universe, and one can ignore its existence completely and still do great things in the activity. Unlike the NFL which institutionally demands inclusion while inherently throwing up obstacles to participation to certain regions, there is no internal contradiction to TOC. Like it or lump it, it will happily go on without you. So be it. For all I know, I’ll be back there tabbing again next year because I like tabbing. Who knows? I’m neither part of the problem nor part of the solution. As for you, you’ll have to make up your mind for yourself. If you are going to consider TOC the goal of debate, then you will have to account for its problems, or overcome them. If you are not going to consider TOC the goal of debate, then you can ignore those problems completely and spend the first weekend of May at home planting your tomato seeds. The choice is up to you.

TOC 2011 Part 5

Don’t forget to add some costs to maintaining a debate school beyond just debaters and their coach traveling far and wide. There are also assistant coaches, or whatever you wish to call them. For the most part college students with high school debate roots, these folks do not participate in debate out of the goodness of their hearts. And they also have travel expenses in addition to their fees. Debate schools do not travel light.

It has been suggested that I don’t value so-called high level debate, and this is not true. I have no difficulties recognizing the sophistication of thinking that goes into the endeavor. But it is rather limited in scope. What is the number of serious participants in this sort of debate across the country? A few hundred? Not many, no matter what the number. Most students in high school simply don’t have the time for it, nor, as I’ve said, the resources. If I could take all the money that goes into high level debate and spread it around to provide debate to more people who have none, I would do it in an instant. I would also like to feed three square meals a day to everyone in developing nations and, while I’m at it, establish world peace. In other words, I would make a great beauty contest contestant, at least when it comes to the Q&A part of the event. (Not so good, maybe, in the swim suit event.) As I said earlier, if schools have the resources, there’s nothing wrong in them expending them. That is the way the world is.

Debate schools and their debate students point themselves toward the TOC. One curious aspect of the TOC is that admission is controlled by those very debate schools, or at the very least by an oligarchy comparable to the debate schools. I have in my day sat on the LD advisory committee, and I would love to report that it was a fine, altruistic experience, where knowledgeable coaches pooled their resources to determine what the best tests of debate were around the country in aid of setting up entry points to the TOC. But that would only be partially true. There was also brazen self-interest, mind-boggling politics and out-and-out mendacity. I don’t think I’ve ever said that before, but damn it, it was true. It wasn’t universal, but I saw people point blank defend the tournaments they had some reason to defend and attack the tournaments they had some reason to attack without the least bit of rationale other than self-interest and politics, and the main tool was mendacity. (If you don’t like hearing that, I can live with it. You wouldn’t be the first person/organization to consider me the devil incarnate. It hasn’t stopped me yet.)

My first-hand knowledge of the committee was a long time ago, and I would expect that the mendacity is not there anymore. In this day and age, with easy access to data, I doubt if anyone is able to pull off inflation of a tournament’s numbers (or deflation) by fifty percent, because anyone can simply call up the numbers from a results page. But the system, even if it’s been cleaned up, can’t claim neutrality because too many people who are cogs in the system have a vested interest in their own part of it. There is the simple idea that more bids should be in my region than in your region because yadda yadda yadda [I will cite ten reasons why your region doesn’t deserve bids but in reality I don’t know your region from a hole in the ground and I just want bids in my region so my kids will have easier access to them]. If bids are determined by committee, and that committee comprises the people with the greatest vested interest in bids, at best the distribution of bids will be to the advantage of those with the greatest vested interest in bids, neutralized by the regional representation of the committee; at worst, it will devolve into politics and self-interest. It is a system without checks and balances, except that perhaps some of the committee is more pure of heart than others. I don’t think they do a bad job, to tell you the truth, considering their position as debate schools. But they don’t do a great job. There is no set of criteria explaining why a school has a certain bid that I’m aware of; we spend a lot of time on TVFT arguing the meaning of bids, their usefulness and their distribution, and if criteria were set somewhere, that would be a discussion about changing things, but instead it’s a discussion about defining things, a different business altogether.

The recent brouhaha in LD brought out the worst in an awful lot of people, and one thing was clear: the LD debate community has little or no real understanding of the committee (or, in general, the operations of TOC), and given perceived provocation, immediately and thoroughly ascribed to the TOC and the committee the worst of intentions. A closed committee with no particular explanation of how one becomes a member, that meets without publishing its minutes, that determines its decisions according to unknown criteria—any wonder that the community is, at best, ill at ease with such a group?

I have some of my best friends sitting on that committee. Let me underline this: I do not believe that the committee is evil and mendacious (although it was undoubtedly the latter in my day). I don’t even know who most of the committee is these days, aside from my buddies and one or two others. That is not my point. My point is that a committee that is a virtual secret society of the powerful is almost inevitably going to be perceived as being up to no good. It’s human nature. And at the point where all those committee members do represent Big Debate, when every week of their lives is pointed in the direction set by Big Debate, when their very careers are measured by their success in the realm of Big Debate, it is not a great leap for me to assume that their decisions will, if nothing else, further the cause of Big Debate. TOC is the expressed goal of Big Debate. The committee stands as gatekeepers to that goal. They determine which schools get which bids, and they evaluate the at-large applications. They are the Captains of Big Debate, if you will.

And that phrase, Big Debate, does sum up the universe I’m talking about, maybe even better than the $ircuit. Big Debate. I like that. Anyhow, everything I’ve said about the committee here is fixable almost entirely by publicizing every single aspect of it. There’s no reason why it needs to be even semi-secret. This is a high school extracurricular activity. It should be open to the same scrutiny as every other high school extracurricular activity. Any argument that says otherwise is suspect. You could say that if I don’t like it, I shouldn’t bother with it, but that doesn’t warrant its secrecy, that just reevaluates the importance of Big Debate to people who are not a part of it.

This year’s TOC, in LD, was arrived at in a storm of bitterness, accusations, bad behavior, abuse of speech, abusive speech—you name it. An activity that ostensibly teaches justice and ethics and morality, that is informed by the principles of open discourse, proved that it knew no more of those things than your average bunch of dropout thugs on the local street corner. Why? I don’t really know. But I would suggest that the stress of Big Debate, the endless struggle for bids and victories, the money invested, the time students put in on debate that equals or even surpasses the time they put in on the entire rest of their lives, the pressure to succeed that is only measured by admittance to (and later, success at) the TOC, has created a world that is fragile and perhaps unhealthy. If I were writing this about high school football, you would probably agree that students spending half their entire lives on nothing but football is not a great thing. Why is it great if it’s debate? Because it’s their brains and not their bodies? I don’t think so.

I’ll try to wrap this up next time, but I don’t know if I can.

TOC 2011 Part 4

You may or may not agree with my opinions about TOC-style LD. I don’t claim that they are all that well-founded, insofar as I have, for all practical purposes, found myself having fallen out of the realm of that style. I admittedly can’t follow it, so I base my opinions on study of cases and what little I can glean from this and that. I have already conceded that speed doesn’t inherently bother me, provided it’s not directed at me. Go forth and do what you want, I say. If the Panivore had relied on me for her coaching, she’d have been very promising. By using the skills of CC, she fulfilled her promise. When the two of them talked in my presence they might as well have been conversing in Turkish. Still, I have my opinions. A few years ago X was very popular. Today Y is very popular. Tomorrow Z will be very popular. So be it. Honestly, I prefer today’s Y to yesterday’s (modernist/pomo) X. But keep in mind that I was raised in the early 90s. Some things have changed a lot; others haven’t. I consider it my job to recognize which is which, and not try to impose my opinions on my team where it is detrimental to them if I do so. Which is why I maintain that I am fine with debaters in their first year or two. After that, if they want to go to TOC, they’ll have to go beyond me for help. Doesn’t bother me in the least, and it’s not all that unusual, even with those debate schools I talked about last time. The coach becomes a manager; the business of winning rounds with its cutting of cards and scouting and laying out positions is not usually what they do because, if they’re any good at managing, they don’t really have the time for it on a regular basis.

Anyhow, as I said yesterday, we have what I call the $ircuit, where money is literally the price of admission. And, yes, some teams do not get their money directly from their schools, but most do, and the ones that don’t nonetheless have a good machine behind them or well-to-do parents who can easily afford it. Mostly it’s a class system based not on wealth per se but on access to wealth for this purpose. For instance, I would suggest that Newark is not a wealthy school district, but the commitment of the New Jersey government to debate and the Jersey UDL (and now the contributions of Mark Zuckerberg) raises them up into players on the $ircuit. So it doesn’t matter where the money comes from, but it does have to come. Without it, as I said, you’re not going to fly to Emory this year, or any year. And if you don’t participate in debates at Emory or Glenbrooks or Greenhill or Bronx, or at Round Robins at some of these and at other venues, you’re not really going to be exposed to, experienced in and, ultimately, successful at $ircuit debate. Whether what $ircuit debaters do is better or worse than non-$ircuit is arguable, but it is different. There’s little argument about that.

Over the space of a year, the debate schools invest a lot of money and effort into $ircuit events. The thing is, $ircuit events have a goal, to wit, acceptance into the TOC. $ircuit events provide bids, and while it is nice to win a tournament, a lot of people are happy just to get their bids. If they’ve gotten a bid, if they’ve made it to the bid level wherever that is, they’ve succeeded. Tournaments do not exist as an end in themselves but as a step toward entrance to another tournament. Yes, it’s nice to make it to octos at Big Bronx. But is the achievement the doing well at Big Bronx or the getting of the bid? Pretty often, it’s the latter, and it has been since my first day off the cabbage truck, when Soddy complained from the Jake stage that he did not run his tournament as an opener for some other tournament. If there were no TOC, every tournament would stand alone, measured by its own merits. When Bronx had little or no bid, O’C nonetheless put it on steroids with one of the strongest judge pools imaginable. Did he want a higher TOC level bid? Sure. But his primary motive as far as I can tell was building the best damn tournament he could to represent Bronx Science, and doing it the best way he knew how. That was his primary goal (at which he succeeded). I don’t think he’d do it if it were only for the TOC. He’s doing it for his team and his school and his alums. That is how it should be. Still, people who attend that tournament are spending a lot of money to get to NYC, to stay over for a number of days, etc. Those people want their money’s worth, and their money’s worth is more than just a nice lunch. Their money needs to buy them access to bids. Monticello has some of the best food in the region. It’s cheaper to stay in Monti than in NYC. They’ve got a nice building and great kids. But they do not exist on the $ircuit because they don’t have the bids. From the $ircuit perspective, they might as well not exist at all.

So throughout the year, thousands and thousands of dollars are invested by debate schools in an activity that has a clear goal: TOC. This is true, of course, for PF and Policy as well, although I can’t speak out of my own experience to the effects of TOC on content with them as I can with LD. But they share the goal, or more specifically, there are debate schools doing PF and Policy that share the goal, and doing the investing in that goal. And it is an investment. When one invests, one expects a return on one’s investment. And let’s face it, with these debate schools, there are people whose careers are riding on their debate success. I can coach a fairly ordinary team at Sailorville for eons because we are not one of these debate schools, and our express goals are inclusion on the team and the most benefits we can get for the greatest number. My principal doesn’t know TOC from Shinola. He’s like me. He loves it when Sailors win, but he doesn’t care if they don’t. The VCA knows my motivations by now. At debate schools, though, a coach is expected to deliver the goods. If thousands and thousands of dollars are expended week after week and no trophies are brought home in the process, eyebrows are going to be raised. This isn’t some horrible, evil thing. It’s quite normal. If a school invests in a program, it expects results from that program, regardless of what the program is. Schools are in the business of education, direct and indirect, and the achievement of goals that support education are required. Even high level elite athletics support education when those athletics draw paying customers and revenues that can ultimately be put into new computers in the middle school.

$ircuit debate schools’ goal is the TOC. Their success or failure is measured in TOC terms. Unfortunately, this does not bring out the best in people.

(As a side note, I have seen what I’m talking about at high-level speech contests as well. This is not a debate-only issue.)

TOC 2011 Part 3

So in LD, a brand of debate has been created especially for the TOC. Those debaters who prefer this brand habituate certain tournaments throughout the year at which the brand dominates, or is at the very least accepted. You cannot access this brand locally in any quantity. Because this brand is, if nothing else, limited in its preferred judge pool, most regional tournaments can, at best, come up with only a couple of judges truly brand aware. These judges are for the most part actively engaged in promoting the brand, either as full-fledged or part-time coaches, meaning they are attached to the debaters who debate the brand. When a preponderance of these debaters and these judges get together at a particular event, then you have what we call a national circuit tournament.

One chooses for oneself, as a coach or a debater, what path to take. Obviously, a coach selecting a path brings a team along for the ride, although there are occasionally students who blaze their own path separately. The determination to do circuit LD debate, where the TOC brand is applied, has some prerequisites. Chief among these is serious mazuma. First of all, you need money to get the training to be a TOC debater (camp). Then you need money to get to TOC debate venues (the national circuit). And to have success, you need personal coaching. The circuit, being small, is finite, and it is not terribly hard to track what all the members of the circuit are running, and figure out how to deal with it, and to come up with comparable positions of your own, but if you’re also going to high school once in a while (and at most circuit debaters go to high school only once in a while at best), you need someone to do this for you. As a general rule, you or your coach hire associates. As I say, mazuma. Big piles of it.

Because of the expensive buy-in, pretty much all the same organizations attend all the circuit events year after year, because only a small handful of organizations can afford it. My school certainly can’t, although individuals in my school can—and have—on their own dime. Of course, to some extent organizations come and go, but for the most part, there are debate schools, and those debate schools go to the debates, wherever they are. How often does your high school ping pong team get on a plane? How often does the average circuit debater? The reason the same schools show up year after year is that they have the resources. They usually also have fine, professional coaches capable of handling those resources, but the resources are a must. Sure, a couple of schools sell enough pencils to the blind to cover all their expenses, but most don’t. Schools are paying the bills, or parents are paying the bills, but somebody is paying the bills, because the bills are there. Airlines don’t let you fly because they like your aff.

So it’s debate schools, the same debate schools again and again, that comprise the national circuit. On the fringes some individuals come and go, but those same debate schools are there all the time. And when the TOC rolls around, they’re definitely there too. Take a look at the names of the schools over time, the ones with the students who have won, if you don’t believe me. You could say, well, they just happen to be good, and maybe they are, but that’s not my point. They are also, first, blessed with financial resources and second, using those resources on a very specific, very small universe of debate. An analogy might be a big school that has a great football team year after year. In that situation, no doubt the school provides great coaching, great practice, great prep rooms and equipment, benefits of time out of class not granted to the hoi polloi, and maybe even a nifty stadium. Once you provide the environment for greatness, and if you have the resources (in football a big enough population so that you can find athletes, in debate a smart enough population), you can probably do it over and over. Can you be the top team every year? Probably not. But can you be among the top teams? Probably yes.

Again, there is nothing wrong with any of this. Some schools have more resources, and some schools have lots of smart kids, for whatever reasons. I don’t begrudge them this. But not having these resources means that schools won’t participate as these schools do. The good news is that in many cases these resource-poor schools can still provide plenty of great benefits, academic or athletic, without having to be on the so-called top circuit. From an educational point of view, the benefits of debating at a hotly contested regional event with no bids is probably indistinguishable from the benefits of debating at an octos tournament, much as the benefits of debating LD or Policy or PF are relatively indistinguishable from one another: although each might accent different aspects of the art of debate, they are all still debate when practiced seriously.

No matter how you slice it, the national circuit really is the $ircuit, statistical deviations notwithstanding. Again, nothing wrong with that, if you’ve got the money. And if you don’t, all the benefits ought to be available for debaters for whom the $ircuit is a mere chimera. The $ircuit is a tiny percentage of overall debate. Because the buy-in is so great, overall debate doesn’t pay a lot of attention to the $ircuit, and vice versa. There may be stylistic influences from the $ircuit to the real world, but that is to be expected in any active pursuit, where new ideas are always bouncing in. They’re going to bounce in from somewhere, and the forge of camps and $ircuit is a natural source, considering that these also inform much of what we might call the debate media. I mean, even this blog is way more than merely cognizant of the $ircuit: I tab week after week, often at tournaments with serious bids (and just as often at novice tournaments). I’ve been on the LD advisory committee. I just tabbed PF at the TOC and LD and PF at the NDCA.

The question is, then, given that we’ve demonstrated that the $ircuit exists with the dollar sign, how does that affect TOC?

TOC 2011 Part 2

On the last day of TOC there is a breakfast where a number of people speak about the value and values of debate. Not much of what they say applies to the event that we are at that point concluding. Put another way, we do debate (and all forensics) as a means to an end. We do it for the educational and social benefits. We do it to make a better world. We do it to teach ethics and justice and morality.

At the TOC, none of that matters. TOC is all about the competition. That might not be so bad if all those educational/social/ethical/just/moral thingummies were implicitly upheld within the competition. They’re not.

TOC is about itself. For one thing, most people in the general debate population don’t debate the way TOC debaters debate, at least in LD (and, I understand, in Policy). JWP, the founder of the tournament, clearly pointed out that one of its goals was to allow people to debate at a tournament the way they’d been taught at institutes, which was not their weekly norm. There’s nothing wrong with that, but keep in mind that the percentage of debaters who go to summer camps is fairly small. I don’t impugn debate camps. There’s all sorts of specialized summer camps out there for high school kids, and debate camp is no better or worse, no more or less elite. Lots of people can’t afford the things I can afford, which doesn’t stop me from doing them, although the knowledge of this does, presumably, establish within me a social conscience and a moral drive to do what I can to improve the situations of those whose situations need improvement. I’m lucky, and other people are not so lucky. It’s the old birth lottery. I strongly believe that it should be a goal of society to ameliorate the situations of those who are the least privileged. But that’s beside the point. The thing is, only a small number of debaters get camp training, which by and large is TOC-focused. All the camps are run by folks with TOC experience as coaches, staffed by instructors with TOC experience as debaters. If I’m going to hire for my camp, what other criterion do I have other than competitive record? Visibility on the TOC circuit means better staff; how else are high school seniors recruited? Their manifest teaching skills?

So, the camps are run by TOC folks, united by their TOCness. Logically, therefore, they teach to the TOC, that being the only test there is to teach to. Parents spend the camp money on the promise that the students will become more competitive. Doing well at bid tournaments should be the result of being more competitive. Camps whose attendees go forth and get bids, run by staff who have already bidded up, are the ones that succeed. I have no doubt that VBI, for instance, does a great job, and I recommend it to my own students. They come back home the better for it. They make a lot of new friends and learn a lot about a certain kind of debate. So far, so good.

TOC-style debating is a number of things. One of these things is that it is fast. It can be riddled with jargon. It often includes theory. It is seldom strictly about the resolution. It is all of those things that work to make it obscure and “special.” Some people suppose that being obscure and special is somehow better than being clear and simple, perhaps because they’ve worked so hard to acquire the obscure material. If they are talking about a complicated idea, according to this logic, they need to sound complicated. To which I reply, e=mc2. I read a lot, and I read a lot about complicated things. The best writers are the ones who make complicated things simple, not the ones who make simple things complicated. What has happened to LD, in the TOC arena, has happened. So be it. My point is that it hasn’t happened in the LD world in general, or at least not so much. It’s really hard to run any sort of critical argument if you’ve barely been exposed to critical arguments. Theory has some great uses, but it’s not in the everyday debate vocabulary. The inclination of the average unschooled debater/coach is to look at the resolution, figure out some reasons to affirm it and some other reasons to negate it, and try to sort them out. To figure out some reason why the aff is more topical than the neg to run an RVI, for instance? Not so great an inclination.

Although I have my opinions, I don’t contend that TOC-style debating is any better or worse than any other style. I merely contend that it is a style, and is unique to the TOC. That is the first premise of my position.

TOC 2011

The TOC experience has gotten crazy. Simple as that.

We were held up for hours in LaGuardia on Friday, waiting for our flight. It being the one direct NY to Lex flight of the day, it had been seriously attractive, especially compared with some of the other possible routings, like all those flights from JFK with a four hour layover in Beirut, the kinds of flight O’C specializes in. Hunter, Stuyvesant and Regis were traveling with us. We hung out at the food court, and every time Eric DiMichele checked the schedule, the flight was delayed another half hour. We begged him to stop checking the schedule and slowing us down, but you know how those Catholics are. He actually claimed it wasn’t his fault. (For the return trip, we tied him up at the airport and locked him in a custodian’s closet where he couldn’t do any damage until the flight actually started boarding.)

By the time we arrived in Lexington and got to the tournament hotel for registration it was around 9:00. I found Andrea, the tournament director, who pointed me to my printer for the weekend. After borrowing Dave Huston’s USB cable (like they should sell you a printer that comes with all the cordage—aaargh) for a minute, I proved that I could print like a house afire by pumping out schematics for round 1 and all the ballots, then ran across the street for dinner. Panivores notwithstanding, the Sailor army (that doesn’t sound right) marches on its stomach. (I had hoped that this open evening would mean a nice dinner with the traveling tab room. My late arrival meant otherwise.) The minute the pasta arrived, Andrea called to announce that they were shutting down, so Charles and I ran across the street to collect the printer and whatever crap was lying around, and got back before the steam had begun to rise. Charles was impressed with how fast I could walk. Charles has never seen a hungry Sailor before.

Our hotel, the Blue Grass Extended Stay Clean It Up Yourself and Don’t Bother Complaining Express, was about ten minutes down the road, no big deal in Lexington time and a lot cheaper than the tournament hotel. Kaz and Devin were also in residence. For Kaz, this was a repeat visit. I admire her loyalty. We sent Charles off to Devin’s room, the P went to hers and I went to mine, and a minute later, the logs were being sawed.

We were on the precipice of the craziness. We would fall off first thing on the morrow.

A kinder, gentler Menick

According to the TOC, there’s much more of a groundswell in favor of the 8 rounds than against it. The thing is, as the P points out, unless they’re going to handle this some way we don’t know about, they’ve added a double-octos round. I used to be a little ambivalent about the run-off when it only affected a couple of kids. At least, I said, those who didn’t win the run-off ought to be grandfathered in to the next year’s tournament. That doesn’t make sense when you’ve got an army, though. Trophies? Probably not. We’ll see how it plays out.

I’ll futz around a bit tonight with CP’s suggestion of adding one more round each to everyone to single-flight the Pfffters. I’m not quite sure why singles are more highly acclaimed in a doubles-sked environment. Whatever. As a general rule I believe whatever CP says, and I do whatever he tells me to do. This does not always work out for the best, but it seems to make him happy, and my goal in life is making everyone happy, isn’t it?

No, wait. That’s not me. I’ve got to get a grip on myself. Jeesh!

I can’t remember the last time I flew to a tournament. Come to think of it, I can’t remember what I had for lunch, either, but my point is that lately I’ve been a stay-at-home type. That has been deliberate, because I have just so much time away from the DJ for gallivanting, plus I like to work local tournaments whenever possible because I feel a commitment to the more homey turf and to the younger Sailors less likely to pack themselves off via air transport. But I would imagine that I would always go to TOC if I had a qualifier. Ambivalent though I may be to the concerns of the $ircuit, one has to appreciate that this is a unique event, and I enjoy being a part of it. Last time I was there I mostly hung around schmoozing, but there’s worse things. This time I’ll be hanging around schmoozing and also tabbing, so that’s an improvement. I just hope that there’s a decent restaurant near my hotel, which is not the tournament hotel (and also half the price thereof). Not much point to a tournament hotel that isn’t within walking distance of the events, if you have to pay a premium for it. I mean, we can drive there in five minutes if we have to. Speaking of restaurants, I’m trusting that JV and CP have that mostly under control. I mean, I’ll have the Panivore with me. She gets cranky if her cervelles aux beurre noir isn’t exactly perfect.

Putting it together

Sophie was right. I had assumed without looking closely that there would be a run-off of the down-three folks, and the victors would advance. When we do something analogous to this with partials, maybe one or two more secure people have to fight for advancement. With as many 5-3s as will be at TOC, though, they’re really going to sear up through the ranks of the 6-2s, which seems extremely counter to the approach of TOC in the past. I wonder if people, like me, have not thought it through completely. If they have, then this is really a literal double-octos. That just doesn’t compute for 77 entrants.

Things are so much saner in PF land. We have 72, and 7 rounds. The only wrinkle, which also affected NDCA, was the partial obligation of judges. One team = 4 rounds. Without having MJP this shouldn’t hurt too much, but it is something different I don’t normally think about. Still, there’s plenty of judges. If it wasn’t for this, I would have set it up with single flights, but I don’t want the hassle of fighting with people to explain that 4 rounds of judging would mean 8 single flights; debate judges are notoriously suspicious when it comes to accepting my math. It was bad enough at NDCA when we went to the 8th round and told everyone that their obligation was now their obligation +1. Making it their obligation (a perceived) X2 sounds really dicey.

Last night was the first time I entered data manually in a while. Normally I just upload from tabroom or the Goy, but here I used an old-fashioned spreadsheet. I dug up my old registration sheet that has the formula for taking the name of the school and the kids’ names and concatenating it into Bronx Science OC, and then just pasted in the results. Reminded me of Bump in the good old days (if there are ever good old days when one is running a tournament). Maybe we should do the whole thing on index cards. Speaking of which, I may indeed toss cards for the random rounds. TRPC, with its randomization, does things that are mildly suspect, like the Bietz effect I’ve talked about in the past where single entries from a school are always paired against other single entries (meaning that if you have a round robin and some lone $ircuit kids, they always end up meeting in Round 1). At NDCA we broke the LD division into 4 groups and mixed and matched so that you never hit more than one person from any of the groups, which you can do when every student entered has a certain number of points. I mean, random needs to be random, but it shouldn’t be random violence. We save random violence for when we need it.

Next up, the TOC

I haven’t gone to the TOC for a while now, but I’ve always found it an enjoyable event. For one thing, it’s got the luxury of time, as did NDCA last week, among others, which makes attending something less than a crushing burden. Our normal life is two-day tournaments, usually of six prelims plus five elims, and that’s a lot of hoo-ha squeezed into a short amount of time. Success in debate relies as much on stamina as skill, in many cases. You have to win debates when you’re dead on your feet while the judges are dead on their butts, which is a radically different business than when one and all are fresh as the proverbial daisies. Drink lots of water, avoid fried foods, get as much sleep as possible and never forget that your judges would prefer being anywhere else: that’s pretty good advice on the average weekend. TOC-length events are different. Rounds are paced better, and no one is inherently exhausted (although some teams do succumb to the temptation to stay up to the wee hours prepping themselves into a coma, a process much like cramming for tests, with about the same chance of succeeding). There’s time to eat, and on top of that, it’s usually nice weather so you get the warm Kentucky sun when you’re not offering three RVIs, a response to the theory argument, then aff, then neg, then throw it into neutral and roll down a hill and see who runs out of the way. As a result, the debating tends to maintain a high level of concentration on all counts. But still, it is just a debate tournament. Those who will do the best will be the ones who look around and realize that. Just one more debate tournament. That’s all it is.

One thing that people will complain about is that they won’t judge much. There are so many judges that mathematically speaking even the most preferred adjudicators can take a nap or two (when they’re not judging). I’ve heard people complain about this as if it were aimed at them—“I’ve come all the way to Kentucky and only judged two rounds”—not realizing that everyone who came to Kentucky only judged about two rounds. Of course, I will point out that it is probably the same people who complain during the season that they had to judge every round, that they had to judge the first round in the morning and it was too early, etc., etc. Complaining, like pi, is a constant, not reliant on the circumstances in which it occurs.

The biggest news is that LD will be going to 8 rounds because of the perceived neg bias. I’ve talked about this bias a lot with the other professors on TVFT, and we talked about it endlessly at NDCA (where we actually did it), but I have to admit I’m still on the fence, not regarding the bias (which as far as I’m concerned is mathematically proven) but on the solution. Having 8 rounds at TOC means that most of the 5-3s will be tossed into a run-off, and as the Panivore points out, will flip a coin… O’C is pushing for side equalization and keeping 7 rounds at Jake, which sounds good on paper but I’ve never done it and haven’t thought it through yet. My biggest fear of TOC going to 8 is the runoff effect, that now all the large tournaments will go to 8, simply because that’s what the TOC did. At some point it behooves everyone, short of changing the structure of the LD round, to learn to pick up a few aff ballots, if you know what I mean. That is, the neg bias isn’t so strong that we can assume that you will always lose when you go neg so why bother to have the round. In other words, until a solution to the problem arises, work on your aff. Of course, that may be easier said than done. The P tells me that the announcement of the 8 rounds has raised a hue and cry throughout the land. Perhaps. As hues and cries go it’s more worthy than the other h&c that I have no interest in discussing. I’ll be curious to see if it stands.

In which various bits and pieces are reviewed, including the rearing of golf's ugly little head

PJ is someone to be listened to on the other side of the MJP coin; you should read his comments on what I wrote last week. The jury is very much still out on whether MJP would shut down innovation (or, for that matter, shut down change that isn’t innovative). One thing that should be pointed out is that, for the most part, a debater’s first couple of years are at the hands of random judges, a virtual bootcamp of learning to adapt, so MJP only affects seasoned pros. And for that matter, all highly preferred judges are not the same: each is highly preferred in his or her own way, hence all those paradigms. And all prefs are not 1-1, heaven knows…

This last weekend was without debate for me, and I don’t think I missed it. Saturday I played my first round of golf of the season, and wasn’t even terrible, although I wasn’t exactly good, and I couldn’t move my back for the ensuing twenty-four hours. Then yesterday we went into NYC for lunch with Kate, which was quite good. I did get bulletins along the way from the Sailor Speecho-American contingent at the NYSFL annual hoo-ha; not all of us had the weekend off, in other words. We broke one and got an honorable mention for the others, so nothing shabby there, I’m happy to say.

Next weekend will be roughly the opposite in terms of debate intensity, with the NDCA tournament running from Friday night registration to breaks on Monday. There’s been some discussion of the number of rounds; Bietz, with his anti-neg bias (so to speak), requested the eight rounds to even everyone’s opportunity to debate the dreaded aff. I think we’re even changing the name of the side from the Affirmative to the Dreaded Affirmative, complete with DAC, 1DAR and 2DAR. My research on this subject, as discussed on TVFT, supported Bietz’s position when addressing the strongest debaters. The problem is that there’s an immovable awards ceremony after our seventh round. One solution was to break 24, including lots of 4-3s, allowing folks on the bubble one last chance to debate neg. I’m not sure how this has been adjudicated; it’s up to the board of the organization. Either way, it’s a lot of rounds…

Also, I was comparing notes this morning with Tim Averill, with whom I’ll be tabbing PF at TOC. I think he was worried that I might not be up to the task, but I assured him that I’ve been down that road a time or two. I mean, with no MJP and no side restraints it will be the proverbial walk in the park. The only problem with that is that, historically, TOC weekend is also the weekend that the university fertilizes the grounds, thus making a walk in the park a little less…floral?

Thousands (all right, seventy-two) cheer!

I am, of course, going to TOC with the Panivore. While she has traveled with others often during the year as she has bounced around on the $ircuit, I have stayed at home running my normal local course of events, thankful that we have such good friends in the region who are willing to add Sailors to their travel list (and, in the P’s case, suffer through watching her eat bagel after bagel after bagel, interrupted only occasionally by toast, baguettes and the odd Parker House roll). Nowadays the TOC has more judges than the Panivore has gluten, but one still gets put into the pool, and in my case, no doubt ranked about as low as the numbers will allow, not because I’m inherently terrible (although I may be) but because I am startlingly out of practice, and while some debaters will cagily rank me high knowing that they can pick up my ballot without batting the proverbial eye, most will prefer someone who is, shall we say, a little more au courant. I don’t blame them for that. But it would mean a pretty boring couple of days for me (as it is most judges who are not at the top of the preference scale). I’d judge a round or two at most, and one of them would only be because the first choice got run over by a bus on the way to the room. There’s nothing worse than walking into a round with a ballot in your hand and having the contestants fall to the ground to beat their breasts in despair. Then of course I’d be in an octos round, the ballot no one bothers to pick up as they speed along merrily and I do my best to keep up without toppling off the bed as I do so. There is no worse RFD in the world than, “I was able to flow more of you than the other one so you win.”

But here’s the good news. I’ll be tabbing PF. I will be much happier (and busier) as a result, but I’ll still have plenty of time to schmooze and enjoy the event. I do always like TOC, which I haven’t been to in a while. It’s civilized, with rounds ending for dinner, and Kentucky is pretty that time of year. I have always resented not being able to watch the Derby, but this year the tournament is the week before the race, which is nice for an old railbird like myself. And since I’ll be tabbing, I’ll feel productive for a change. Needless to say, my exit from the LD judging pool improves that pool quite a bit, which I guess makes this a win-win situation.

And that will be the end of the year. Looking forward, there’s this weekend off, NDCA, Easter, TOC, golf. Ahhh.

(By the way, I am happy to report that the Aged P situation has improved quite a bit. She is thriving as a result of the monitoring of meals and medications and regular physical therapy. We are looking for a nice assisted living place in the area, where she can maintain both independence and security. All’s well that ends well, in other words. There is still work to be done, but the stress is much less. Once again, Ahhh.)

In which some tournaments are dragged and dropped on the calendar

One nice unexpected benefit of the State tournament was getting a chance to talk to Monticello’s RJT. Since her retirement from the field of forensics (but not from her teaching job) I’ve really only seen her on her home turf. This was a good opportunity to look at next year’s schedule and sort out a few things, namely, the positioning of the Monti MHL where it’s always been, followed by our taking a look at the Monti invitational. This has, since the beginning of time and perhaps even before, always occurred on Columbus Day weekend. But this year that weekend is right in the middle of the Jewish holidays, so an executive decision was made to move the invitational to the previous weekend, which is of course the earlier Jewish holiday, but the impact seemed less, and the day off on Friday would allow us to get an early start, so there you are. The best of a bad situation, simply put. As I’ve discussed with O’C in the past when the Vassar RR could have potentially fallen on the holidays, there is always the prospect of a special “Goyim Only” event, but no one has ever taken me up on that for some reason. Go figure.

Speaking of the VassaRR, I think O’C also declared what weekend that would fall on. (All of this is posted on my various schedules.) He’s been talking about holding it in NYC, but still under the Vassar auspices, to make it easier for people to get there from far afield. Makes sense to me. I have to admit, though, that I’m a little RRed out. I mean, there seems to be a round robin nowadays with almost every tournament. I can understand why it’s done, as an attempt to attract stronger competition, but that does tend to be the usual suspects week after week, and it does turn weekend tournaments into endless affairs and one wonders about regular old school after a while. The good news for me is that next year I’ll not be in the thrall of any usual suspect, so at least my calendar will be clear. I’ll miss Bean Trivia at Lexington, though.

Notes from a darkened, quiet sickroom [cough cough]

I think I’m mostly over this cold I picked up last week. The first thing to go and the last thing to come back is my voice. If I talk even for a little while I start rasping and whispering and saying things like “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.” At the Sailor’s meeting this week I pretty much gave up trying, but as I say, I’m almost back to normal now. One benefit of being sick is that one is allowed to pamper oneself, and I took advantage of my sniffles and coughs to pore over a little cache of comics I’ve been saving for just such an opportunity, not to mention an extra trip or two to the ice cream freezer. Life is good even when it sucks, if you just give it a little try.

We’re down to two entries at Lakeland this weekend. I really am beginning to feel the bite of small teamness. Next year, in the wake of the P and the P’s C's exits, it’s going to be pretty lonely if we don’t pick up a passel of plebes to replace them. I will certainly have no active seniors, for one thing. On the positive side, it gets me out of doing RRs, but on the negative side, I sort of like doing RRs, or at least hanging out at them. Can O’C handle the beans all alone during the Lexwegian event? I don’t know. All those questions about obscure Star Trek episodes and who won round 3 of the Ridge tournament in 2007 in room 204 are going to be pretty confounding to the assembled multitudes.

I am glad that I’m not struck by techlust over the iPad2. I was slow to embrace the iPad, but when I did, I fell in love, and I’d hate to have to upgrade so early in the game, or more likely piss and moan about not upgrading. I’m pretty sure that GarageBand will work on the original machine, and I want that a lot, and I really don’t care about having more non-camera cameras at my disposal (while I like having the iPhone camera in my pocket, my ultimate lenses are on my SLR), so I’m not going to get all het up about it. This could be a real problem for me. There’s an Apple Store in the mall right next door to the DJ, and I walk by it whenever I roll over to Starbucks. That is one strong temptation…

Anyhow, I saw today that some yabbo got 13 TOC bids this year, thus setting a record. Impressive. But I’ve got to wonder, doesn’t this guy ever go to class? Then again, when was the last time the Panivore saw the inside of her own academic devoir? She’s not doing Lakeland tomorrow pretty much because she felt she needed one weekend off this year. That’s probably not an exaggeration. I mean, I never get a weekend off, but then again, I don’t debate, and I don’t grind up the competitive adrenalin that goes with the activity as the students do. And of course, I’ve got nothing better to do on the weekends, at least until golf season begins (although whether golf is better than debate is questionable). Come to think of it though, next weekend is in fact a weekend off for me. No debates, not nowhere, not no how. And it’s too early in the year (just) for golf. Two whole days of… whatever. Sounds really, really good!