Author: palmer

Debaters

So I’m a debate coach again, which is funny, since that’s where I began with this whole mess about 15 years ago now. Which is great, since I missed this facet of forensics, and it’s fun to teach kids what overviews and claims and warrants are.

On the other hand it does mean that I have students coming to Little Lex and Big Lex and the other debate only tournaments that I’ve gone to for a little while now. I enjoyed them partly because I don’t have any horses in the race, kids to take care of, reasons not to swear in public, and the like. It’s kind of fun to be the only guy in the room who speaks debater language, and that’s probably going to end at some point soon on my team. Ah well, I guess I have to rejoin society.

But the latest PF topic is somewhat interesting to me. I seriously wonder if the topic can be handled by a typical debate team well. It’s seated around Keynesian economics, and asks students to weigh the relative merits of different approaches to public finance. That’s a rather esoteric argument, and far from the usual run of the mill LD social contract disputes. It’s also a pretty complex and second-order topic to attack for only a month. I wonder if in the end folks will just oversimplify it a bunch, and debate the wrong resolution. That’s something debaters in particular are careful not to do, usually, but with this topic, something much more familiar to extempers, it might just happen.

I like Public Forum so far, though part of me still misses the established routine of LD, that PF has yet to acquire. But I do find myself disliking this new topic per month deal; just as the kids start to sink their teeth into a topic and see how things are really working, boom! Next topic. I also am curious as to how the topics are formed; I don’t know if they do the whole LD write & vote thing; I suspect they do. If so I have to figure out how to get a ballot.

Family

So my sister wrote to me today.

An ordinary statement, usually, except this wasn’t Cassandra, the sister I know. In the wake of my great uncle Kenny’s death in August, when things were unsettled, it caused me to think of siblings and strangers. Uncle Kenny was a stranger to us for years; he let a spat with my grandmother go on for 15 years, and stayed remote until his wife passed away. He healed it somewhat at the end, but it wasn’t enough time for me to know him again, until he passed.

So that reminded me I have two half sisters through my deceased natural father. I never cared to meet the man himself, as he never cared to meet me. But the thoughts of other family, of blameless sisters and uncles and aunts, always interested me. His death freed me to meet them without encountering him; and Uncle Kenny’s spurred me to do it, lest I lose the chance.

And what a chance; I got a 20 page letter, a photo album, and just for the fun of it, a whole bunch of music today from the older sister. The younger I wasn’t able to trace, but the older’s name and hometown was in the father’s obituary, and that was enough to find her.

I like her. She’s like me in ways that never made sense in the context of my own family. She’s verbose, she’s creative, she’s caring, and she looks at her past with the same approach I do mine. It felt right in a lot of ways. It’s something worth pursuing, but it became more so now.

I have another sister, who it so happens lives in the same entryway as Josh at Yale. Small world that; I’ll take this one sister at a time for now, but we’ll see how this goes.

Red Sox Nation

In part of my identity that baffles about 2/3rds of my friends, I’m a sports fan.   Worse, I’m a Boston sports fan, which means I share that curious mix of rabidity combined with scarring, searing memories of crying when the ball went between Buckner’s legs (I was 8), and similar events.

As a kid, apart from that World Series and being aware of the Celtics induced hysteria going on around me, I wasn’t much of a sports kid.   I became a really serious baseball fan during high school, away from home, when it was often the thing being watched during the start of the school year and the very end; in other words, the two times I had to watch television.   I started watching football at Mackie’s behest when he started teaching me the game in 2001, and in a nice coincidence, the Patriots won the Super Bowl that year and debuted Tom Brady; I was hooked from then forward.

I’ve loved sports, because it’s real, unlike most anything else on television.   TV shows are focus grouped and bereft of creativity for the most part; even quite good shows can totally botch an ending or a plot twist, and jump the shark just like that.   They’re too contrived, and too aimed at a particular end.   Novels can work that way since there are thousands of novels written each year; it’s not hard to imagine there are hits.   On TV, there can only be a dozen or two new shows a year, and it’s unsurprising that most of them suck.

But sports is unscripted, and so they can get away with all kinds of corny impossible things, because those corny impossible things were not set up.   The various media and taking heads types do their best to rob sports of this aspect, setting up storylines and angles galore.   But I ignore them, and just watch the game, which stubbornly refuses to follow their anointed stories.   The uncontrived beauty of physical excellence, often with emotional person stories in the background, added in with the unity and camraderie of fan bases, is the best thing going in the entertainment world these days.

And what a time to be a Boston sports fan.   The Red Sox just won their second World Series this decade; this for a team where two a century would have made us happy.   The Patriots, the former laughingstock of the league, have emerged as dominant, excellent, and pissed off — they’re punishing the rest of the league for simply being there, in part just because they can.   The Pats traditionally were the nail; now they’re the hammer.   The Celtics promise a resurrection of their halcyon days, and even little Boston College is ranked 2nd in the nation, the year after their coach left for an in-conference rival proclaiming there was a limit to how far BC could go.

Was there now?

It’s enough to make one dizzy.   However, it’s also enough to turn me off to sports altogether.   Much of the appeal of sports is hope: oh I hope I can see them win the big one…..if only he hit a homer here….come on, make that first down…..anticipation of great things is more a part of it than the great things.   The great things happen rarely; that’s why they’re great.   Baseball plays 162 games in a regular season, and 50 home runs is considered a huge deal; that’s less than a third of the games for a given player.

If the hugely successful becomes commonplace, one wonders — is this it?   This is all I was hoping and waiting and pining for?   The Sox have won, and that indeed made me cheer and holler and hug random strangers; but it didn’t change my life much.   It did bring a happy smiling spirit to New England, but not much beyond that has shifted.

All the criticisms of the folks who imagine themselves too good for this sort of proletarian entertainment are suddenly ringing true, with a twist: it’s not “Why do you watch that, they just lose all the time.”   It’s “Why watch, they just win all the time.”   If this is as good as it gets, not only is it all downhill from here, but it’s not really worth anguishing through the bad times to get to the good.

I still appreciate the dramatic unscripted nature of sports, but along with giving up the various sports writers and reporters who suck all the joy out of it, perhaps I’ll find myself just watching any old baseball game, or whatever happens to be be on when I have an hour to kill.   It’s not worth the anguish and the torment, should the Patriots or the Sox or someone start to suck unrelentingly.   Time to find another thing; perhaps I’ll start reading more novels or something.   We have positively minutes between Patriots touchdowns to do so.

I’ll always hate the Yankees, though.

What that judge was smoking

So the nature of democracy is you have to make a unitary choice — yes to this one, no to that one — that cannot express your full range of preferences. Instead you have to weigh the opposing sides’ views together with the importance of those views to you — if you agree with Bush on Iraq, and Kerry on health care, the question is which matters more to you, Iraq or health care?

Judges make evaluations in the same way. A speaker speaks, and the judge must list a rank from best to worst, without ties, or award the debate to one side or the other. Hundreds if not thousands of factors can weigh into these decisions, some honorable and some not. Ultimately the judge is making a judgment of “did I believe you, or did I believe another, more?” But belief is composed of so many things. Aristotle’s ethos, pathos and logos can be divided and subdivided many times.

Here’s the thing, though; naturally kids will tend to mimic success. They look at the people lined up and getting their trophies and TOC bids, and want to be them. The first step is mimickry, then; figure out what they do, and mirror it.

Some things successful competitors do are the reasons why they succeed. Some things are the features they succeed in spite of. Often times students have a difficult time telling the difference, though. I see a bad habit of a good kid echoed in the years that follow, as everyone becomes convinced that that’s the formula for success.

I think that’s where we get things like the horrible delivery in LD and extemp. Extempers don’t talk like people do; their sentence construction is convoluted, their delivery too fast, and their thoughts made ever more unclear by it. Good extempers tend to sound impressive, but are often so unclear as to leave the judge with a slightly uncomfortable feeling that they don’t quite know what just happened.

LDers are much the same; the regime of RFDs and flows constantly leave the debaters with the sense that their impeccable logic games win them or lose them every round. However, I saw rounds at the TOC that were more or less determined by one debater having insufficient tags or clarity of structure to convey their thoughts, and quite qualified judges missing things that could have turned the round.

These things should be rookie mistakes. But they’re common at a high level. What’s worse, kids will resist attempts to coach away from them, since that’s not how its done. I’m ready to claw my eyes out the next time a child asserts to me that “The Judges” won’t like something because it doesn’t fit with their idea of the event.

Kids are naturally conservative; they won’t go against what their community defines as “legit”. They’ll blame The Judges and fear The Judges, but they really fear each other. When students vote, in Congress or in round robins, they’ll always go the safe route and vote for whoever Should win, never mind who actually did. They will routinely be shocked at the “illegitimate” results of rounds they did not witness.

So that plugs into what camps teach about structure; that anyone who doesn’t follow Our Style is somehow illegitimate, since it gives kids a club. It also gives kids an easy way out. Thinking deeply, and expressing those thoughts clearly, is very difficult. It’s also the thing that unites all the kids who do well, and separates them from all the kids who don’t. They may have a certain structure, and a certain analytic approach, but at the end of the day the ability to think and communicate those thoughts are what make the difference.

But that’s hard to do. So there are a lot of lazy kids, who want that brush with glory and prestige on the cheap. So they aim for substructure and approach, which are easy to learn and perfect. They miss the real point, which is intelligence and clarity. I don’t have much time for kids like that. Then there are other kids who have either intelligence or good fluency, and never seem to develop the other trait; they coast on one ability without making much of a dent in the other. They do better than the first group, but never as well as they could, since they’re not working on the right things.

Basics are boring, and magic forumlas are sexy though…