Author: palmer

So the LD resolution is about the oughtness of economic sanctions, which dovetails nicely with the discussion about what to do about miscreant programs.   In LD I’m sure there are all kinds of theory negatives running around, but in the real world, the major disputes with sanctions are that they are ineffective in correcting negative behavior, and they fall hardest on the people who have the least power to change that behavior.

In tournaments, sanctions are similar.   A regime of penalty fines works fine for usual problems, to gently discourage usual antisocial behavior that ignorant teenagers often commit — “Oh, you mean I can’t go to the tournament AND attend my Irish stepdancing lessons on Saturday?!”   Penalty fines work best if the students themselves end up paying them, in my opinion; the pain is felt where the flakiness originates.   However, for the under-chaperoned teams, it’s often some other parent who pays the fine, or someone yells at you for daring to call them on their non-compliance of the rules and expectations of the tournament.   At best, also, managing fines and collecting payment costs just as much tournament overhead as the original offense does.   You have to levy it, invoice it, track the person down, talk them into the necessity of paying it, and then give them a receipt.   Often, especially at tournaments where there are a lot of shenanigans being pulled, you simply don’t have the time to go punish them; you’re too busy fixing the tournament from their damages.   You can either keep the tournament ship afloat, or you can let everything sink while you go chase down fines and miscreants.

But the fine regime also doesn’t catch the edge cases of behavior that is both so bizarre and so unacceptable that it really throws tournaments and tab rooms for a real loop.   There are gentle forms of this; the folks who don’t read the tournament invite, and proceed to ask just about every question whose answer is in the invitation over the course of the three weeks before the tournament.   Those, typically, are the independent entries or parents registering.   Then there are the people who waft through the debate community heedless of anything the tournament director tries to mandate, but feeling they have an ironclad right to attend any tournament regardless of how they interact with the community.

Those are the Problem Children, and they are the same week after week.   Ryan M suggests public shame as a method of enforcement.   It would be satisfying but I don’t think it’d work; these folks don’t necessarily care that much about public shame, given that they piss off every tournament director week after week anyway.   I don’t think it’s any way illegal or immoral to call people out who, on the face of facts, are committing public harms in a public arena; just as I don’t think anyone giving an extemp speech in front of hundreds of people carries an expectation of privacy.   But I don’t think it’d be effective.

So that’s why I’m thinking about graver efforts, actual revolving tournament bans for people.   It would be certainly effective, in that the people wouldn’t be there to cause problems in the first place.     It would correct the behavior since it strikes at the immediate self interest of the students on the team, who are often themselves complicit in the various shenanigans programs pull — especially when programs show up without adult supervision.   And it wouldn’t require all the monitoring and checking in advance for “the latest way school X is going to try to get out of having judges” the week registration ends.

But maybe I’m too tired for that :)

This last weekend was the Columbia Tournament, which is probably the most tense tournament we of the Traveling Tabulating Circus run.  Not because the Columbia kids do it worse — in fact, they’re usually spot on with excellent tournament direction.  This year was no exception; Brittany did a fantastic job, which is usual for a Columbia TD.  But usually their great weakness is they have had to stand alone, since the team historically was quite small.  Not so anymore; Brittany had help in droves.  The help certainly showed in the tournament quality; folks like Nora, Dhruv, Justin, Rohan, and the Guido all played essentially roles.  And they had the best ballot sorting operation I’ve ever seen run by college students, which meant quite simply they took it seriously.

But Columbia is in the unenviable position of actually being in New York City.  I don’t like New York, that’s no mystery, but that’s not what I mean.  The trouble is, easily half of its considerable draw doesn’t see it as anything more than a local.  Lots of kids and judges stay at home, come in by ones and twos, and schools change everything under the sun at the last minute.  It’s very difficult to run an all events invitational as it is; it’s nearly impossible to do so when half the coaches are asking for consideration and help and special exceptions as if it were Just Another Local.  It isn’t.  And Palmer is a finite quantity.

So this time around, I snapped a little.  The Coach Who Always Registers Late wasn’t allowed to register at all.  Fines were levied and registration fees dropped after the deadline were paid.  My emails were decidedly less helpful and decidedly more accusatory when the situation fit.  It certainly felt somewhat good, but it didn’t really help the long term much, I suspect.

The trouble with our tournaments is that we’ve build up a huge scaffolding  of rules and monetary incentives to be good citizens in the forensics community, clearly defined in the invite as far as we can.  But let’s be honest, they don’t work.  95% of the people at a tournament are good citizens, and cause 5% of the problems.  The other 5% is a constant cast of characters who, after a decade or two of doing this activity, still cannot seem to figure out basic things about attending tournaments, no matter how many fines they have paid.

The good people pay fines on the rare occasion when they happen to screw up, but the people who flout the standards and rules all the time — the people fines and rules were created for  — often put up such an unholy fuss that it’s not worth the money to bother them about it.   So you end up penalizing and charging the very people you don’t mind doing favors for, since those favors are rare and apologetically asked for, instead of demanded as some right.

There’s no substitute for coaches understanding that the tournament director’s time is a precious, usually unpaid resource essential to our activity.   Coaches who routinely foist their own chaos on the tournament, by unapologetically changing everything at the last minute, sometimes after the tournament begins, cause a lot of direct harm when their changes slip; judge rankings, speech room sizes, byes given to opponents of missing debaters, etc.  But their biggest indirect harm is at the top.  It’s simply unconscionable that they value their own time above the tournament director’s.  It’s no mistake that invariably none of the Usual Suspects is a tournament director in their own right.

Because I have to put up with changes, oddball requests, missing judges, and efforts to break various rules and guidelines nearly constantly from Wednesday night until the tournament is done, I can’t do any number of things I’d like to make the college tournaments run better.  I can’t read ballots and evaluate new judges for elim rounds.  I can’t edit the extemp questions as carefully as I’d like.  I can’t spend time nailing down the exact rooms for elims until the last minute, or even go around and look at the rooms to see if they are in fact well suited for Congress supers or VLD semis.  I can’t sleep that extra hour so I don’t yell and snap at people the next morning instead of talking.

In short, by outsourcing their lack of organizational skills to me, the tab director, these 5% make the tournament appreciably worse for the other 95% of the tournament.  Not to mention me, said tab director, who often has a difficult and wearying time.  I’m also fighting a lot of burnout; I’m speculating how much longer I can do this game.  I dare say that I’ve done a lot of good for a lot of kids at college tournaments, but it comes at considerable cost to my own life, and this sort of behavior amplifies that cost considerably.

The trouble is, forensics lacks a league; the NFL and NCFL notwithstanding, there is simply no governing authority to our activity with both universal reach and legitimate and transparent decision making to be an effective regulator of our sport.  The NFL is universal, but not legitimate; the NCFL is neither.  Local leagues are often legitimate and transparent, but never universal.  Our own Northeast Circuit doesn’t even so much as have a league on paper, though in practice we are something of a league already, simply being a gathering of like minded people who run everything.   But at the end of the day, there’s no arbiter to really punish the screwups.  If you screw over Lexington with various shenanigans, you still get to come to Columbia.  If you screw with Columbia, Scarsdale’s still there for you.  And that means on subsequent weekends, Sara S, myself, and Joe V have to put up with your crap and make our tournaments suffer for it.

We talked about at one point getting each others’ backs in the event that a school stiffed a tournament on fees, the others wouldn’t let that school register until the fees were paid.  That gets triggered once in a while, usually when a school absconds with a lot of money, such as by pulling out of the tournament on the last day or something.  But that just treats money.  So I took a stand this year, and just didn’t let repeat offenders into the tournament late.  That gate has closed.   Perhaps we should close others?

Stephen Toulmin, who among other work created the argumentation form which debaters know as Claim-Warrant-Impact, has died.

A great guide to eating at away tournaments.

This weekend, I traveled to Maine, specifically Maranacook Community School, a little west of Augusta.   At Cat Nats last year, John B from Maine told me they’d talked about computerizing their tournaments this year for the first time on tabroom.com, and being the sucker nice guy that I am, I volunteered to come up and step them through an early tournament.     What we found in the MFL as we started using the program is that there’s more to computer tab than simply using a computer; you have to re-examine a lot of assumptions to find the best approach.   It took us a couple years in the MFL to nail it down; the Maine folk could therefore draw on our experience and learn things the easy way.

Now let me start by saying that I just love Maine.   I associate it with entirely good things.   We went there just about every summer when I was a kid, after Martha’s Vineyard grew too expensive for the likes of us.   We often stayed to just the southern tip — Old Orchard, York, etc — but I also greatly like the Real Maine, the part north of Portland.   It has several small cities very like the one I grew up in, without the overwhelming shadow of a Boston to domainate them.   It has a marvelous share of nature, and dark skies full of stars, and enough ocean to go around ten times over.   I’m truly a country boy at heart, and Maine satisifies all.   If a few million dollars were to fall from the heavens and land in my checking account, there’s little doubt I’d try to spend as much time in Maine as possible.   To whatever extent my family’s genetic memory survives in me, places like Maine resonate with “home”, the original homes of Nova Scotia, Quebec, New Brunswick, that go back several hundred years to a dimly remembered past in Normandy, Anjou and Lorraine.   I also have a odd like of being a guest at tournaments.   I’ve always had a good time as the guest of the NYSFL at their state tournament, and my trips to the Sunvitational and Ridge were quite nice, too.   Being an outsider makes the tournament experience somehow less stressful and more pure.   I merely have to advise, not decide; help, not be responsible.   I can also do what I do well without worrying about interpersonal rivalries and politics, which I generally find distasteful and which reduce my desire to be involved in forensics as a whole a great deal.   As a stranger, I am touched by no politics.   It’s a role I relish.

In Maine, they appear to have very few politics to go around.   It’s possible that after I leave, the long knives will come out, but they were to my eyes a truly warm and friendly group of people.   They made me feel right at home, from the kind hospitality of the tournament director to the absolute fun time we had in the tab room.   And the tournament director’s husband very subtly quizzed me as to my favorite scotches, pretending an interest, in order to go out and get me a fine bottle in thanks.   They sure know how to treat a guy.

As forensics go, they clearly get it.   They’d been doing their tournaments for a long time in their way, just as we’d done ours in our way for a long time when we computerized.   But they took suggestions left and right, saw the value immediately, implemented most of them on the spot, and by the end of the afternoon I had the feeling that their tournaments will be zooming right along in a matter of weeks.   Brave new world indeed.

There were some differences.   They had a judge’s lounge with a mighty food spread; it was possibly the best meal I’ve ever had at a tournament outside of a restaurant, despite it being merely ordinary by their own standards.   But as with most forensics, the language, the feel of the day, everything was pretty much the same world, just a different place.

Maine has fewer kids at their tournaments than Massachusetts does, though not fewer schools really, it’s just those schools are smaller. A huge percentage of the kids were double entered.   As a result their capacity for overhead is less — but they do run finals, just with only one judge.

By the time finals rolled around, things were well in hand in tab, so I offered to judge the extemp final, which was only four kids.   Now there are a number of stereotypes that would suggest themselves at this moment; only four backwoods hicks from some part of the country that no one has heard of forensically.     Well, far from it.   The kids didn’t speak a clear structure, that’s for sure, so much of what came through was a little muddled and confused.   But they also were clearly four bright kids, and pretty good speakers too.   There were no Painful Novice Moments, that’s for sure.   I think any of them would have a chance to be nationally competitive if they focused their analysis and cleaned up their style.   I could probably coach them into it in months.   They’d get slaughtered in a Massachusetts tournament as they are now, but only with a little fixing, they could certainly hold their own.

So what are you saying, Palmer, that the Maine coaches are the dumb and clueless hicks?   No, anything but; it was a great, intelligent, and dedicated group of coaches sitting in that tab room.   But the round did demonstrate to me the value of regional travel.   Maine schools don’t get the chance to travel out of region very often, through challenges of distance and budgets, though I suspect I may be able to coax them southwards a little more if I try and help a little.   But for now, it’s pretty much locals and Nationals — at the end, when kids can’t apply lessons learned — and that’s it.   That means they’re limited to the approaches and ideas that they come up with.   In Massachusetts, it’s different. Half of us go to Yale, and see the ideas that 20 different states have come up with, early in the season when we can make use of them.   We bring them back to the other half of us, and the standard in general is raised.   We have good coaches too, but we’re far richer for the access to the national community we enjoy.   In extemp, that makes us able to get our kids into finals on a regular basis; a knowledge dissemination trick, not a talent gap.

That smacks of injustice to me, that they have basically no chance at nationals and wherever because of where they were born, not because of anything they’re doing wrong.   I should never had access to a great number of things because of where I was born, after all, and only through chance and coincidence, combined with others’ generosity, did I find my way into them.   So I feel sometimes that I owe something.   I can risk hubris in saying that I’m pretty good at coaching extemp, using a lot of my own ideas, but a lot of others’ too.     I feel it would take very little teaching and explanation to bring these kids, and probably their coaches, up to speed.

I feel the doom of a new project coming on.   Maybe I’ll resist.   But I’d actually like an excuse to go up there again.