coaching – Page 4

Committees and nonsense

So once again, an NFL topic committee has caused havoc in debate, presenting us this gem for January 2008:

Resolved: That, by 2040, the federal government should mandate that all new passenger vehicles and light trucks sold in the United States be powered by alternative fuels.

This topic has….problems. That 2040 date, while factually significant, distorts the debates. Kids will argue “Too soon! Not soon enough!” and there will be little way to weight the evidence on either side. Additionally, that phrase, “alternative fuels” is just begging for counterplans and whatnot. It’s also uncomfortably close to the October topic, which was interesting at first, but tended to devolve into boring harms-wars with little interesting, original thought and creative debate.

There’s finally no honest way to predict the pace of scientific discovery, which this topic implicitly requires. I work in the sciences, and I have a hard time budgeting from year to year; if I knew exactly what we’re going to do next year, we wouldn’t have to do it. If my company can’t see six months ahead, how the hell are we supposed to forecast 32 years from now? Eegads, 32 years from now I’ll be older than Admiral Menick. Or we’ll all be consciousnesses floating on the grid by then.

So it stinks.

But what I’m more interested in is how the stinker was born. What has six or more legs and no brain? A committee. Committee creation of things like debate topics can be dangerous for a number of reasons. The topic passes a lot of the tests that a committee can institute; they hold internal debates, conduct research, give broad consideration. So presumably this topic passed those tests. But it, like the social networks topic, fails the “Ugh!” test. The Ugh! test is simple: does someone who wasn’t part of the decision process first react by saying “Ugh!” The reaction of my team — and me — to this topic was overwhelmingly in favor of Ugh!. It appears the Admiral and other interwebs agree.

Committees have a hard time figuring out the Ugh! test. First, committees are bad at creative endeavors to begin with; once social dynamics set in, good expression and daring ideas are dampened out, even if the committee is striving not to allow that to happen. I always prefer extemp topics written by one person I trust over those written en masse by a committee. Committee internal decisions also depend on a lot of extraneous factors; the length of their meetings, schedules, difficulties of remote communications.

But most of all, committee members grow too familiar with the topics and the research behind them to have an accurate “Ugh!” reaction. They work too hard, simply put. I’m sure they start with a list of topics, and give each one a fair shake, researching it out and producing cases. They then debate the sides against each other, and after finishing all that, pick the topic that seems to lead to the best debate.

It feels unfair and irresponsible to just reject topics as losers at an early stage. Topics often have more meat to them than is first apparent. However, once a committee has dug into a topic with research and testing, the “Ugh!” reaction is lost. They’re committed; they’ve spent effort now. The shouldn’t develop “Ugh!” topics at all in the first place, but instead the workflow actually ensures that Ugh! happens a lot.

Why not work past Ugh! though? Why not dig under the surface for that hidden lesson behind an apparently repellent topic? Well, PF is an “ugh!” driven activity. With lay judging, and students who are encouraged to develop broad knowledge rather than the depth that Policy encourages, “ugh!” is enough to taint an entire round, or an entire month. Ugh also proves prophetic.

See, the committee members are adults, and worse than that, they’re debate coaches. They are experts in how to argue things. Students are not. Teenagers can be breathtaking in their ability to come up with bad arguments; usually it’s the combination of a sharp, creative brain that possesses mature processing ability but an immature data set to compare ideas against. Adults may automatically understand a bad idea to be unmitigated BS, but teenagers lack that prior knowledge, and will often confuse bad ideas with creativity. They all think they’ve invented the square wheel for the first time, and that it’s a terrific idea.

The PF committee can have a good debate on just about any topic, but the point isn’t whether they can have good debates on it, but whether the average kids will have good debates on it. An “Ugh!” topic encourages debaters to find novel ways around perceived difficulties in the resolution. Some will succeed and find the ground that the adults on the committee found. However, many others will not. Generally speaking, when debaters strike out on their own, novel territory, all hell breaks loose. Sooner or later you have 16 year olds sagely advising me that every time I fill my gas tank, ten kittens die in Tibet. Or some crackpot running Mr Fusion.

A good debate topic will shepherd these young minds into good debates by presenting solid, top-shelf, interesting, and yes, sometimes obvious arguments that will appeal to them and teach them new things at the same time. A topic that lacks first-pass obvious arguments, like this one, will fail to teach a lot of students. The judges won’t understand the ground on the debate without having to have it be laboriously explained — the phrase “Why 2040?” will be appearing on ballots coast to coast. And the kids will hare off in wrong directions, and talk past each other all the time. And many many kids will never understand it at all.

There’s an easy way to avoid “Ugh!” topics; show the final topics around to people not on the committee, and see if they recoil in horror. However, often times such committees in forensics are more informed by a passionate effort to make a process best for competition instead of education. Many coaches believe the worst thing a process can do is give one team an “unfair” advantage, such as knowing a topic a week ahead of time, and releasing a topic earlier to wider audience makes a leak more likely. I doubt it’d be much of an advantage, and I’d prefer that to this nonsense. Even better, a completely open process is guaranteed to be fair. And I know many PF people are trying hard to prevent the event from going the way of LD and Policy, but too many of their attempts to prevent LDish behavior frustrate PF from reaching its full potential, and this certainly is one of them.

So now what do I do? I’ve seen what bad topics do; we’ve had plenty of them this year. The PF September topic was OK but not especially current; the October topic was this Jan topic done better, and it still was a harmswar; the November topic did succeed in teaching the kids a lot about the French health system, which was good, but then in the end they realized that the French health system is actually pretty good and Con got very difficult to argue, which was bad.

Then came December.

Social networks failed the “ugh!” test and the research test both; social network problems are anecdotal, not statistical, and never can be separated from preexisting social problems, which would probably have manifested themselves another way absent Facebook. And even though nervous, jittery school administrators block them the world over, social networks are also utterly uncontroversial among teenagers themselves; they’re part of the world they live in. Can a fish argue against water?

As a coach this is frustrating. I’ve enjoyed teaching only 2 of the 5 topics so far this year, and beyond that, neither of those 2 lead to particularly good debates. Without a really good topic these kids can sink their teeth into, I’m going to start losing kids to the math team. The math team is lovely, but that’s a shame, if this is the reason. I’m really irritated too that the NFL doesn’t even make a show of asking my preferences, and that of my fellow coaches; in typical NFL fashion, the topic committee is appointed in secret from on high (as far as I know) and it picks the topics without a open vote of the members.

Now, open voting can lead to stinker topics too, like the LD Sept/Oct topic. Yale’s LD numbers were down, especially in JV, and I feel that was probably related to the poor topic; Yale’s numbers in every other event were stable or up from the previous year.

However, I have little say at the table to make any of that heard. There’s no open way to gain a voice at the PF table. I’m sure there is a way, but good luck finding it on that atrocity of a website. Even if there were, in my experience the NFL views you solely by how many points & degrees you control. Assistant coaches like myself simply don’t get much traction with them, no matter what I’m in charge of. A lot of coaching is done by non-head coaches, so that’s one of the big reasons the NFL is consistently out of touch. But I’m also not just a coach. I’m a tournament director, and run lots of tournaments. That may not gain me any traction with the NFL, but that in turn means they don’t have much traction with me and my tournaments.

Kids on the pfdebate.org forums are bitching and talking about not bothering to debate in January, and I have a hard time blaming them. I was seriously tempted then to just abandon the stinker topic that was Sept/Oct for Yale, and run a tournament topic, and decided not to; it was in the middle of the topic’s lifespan, and then I’d have to come up with my own. Given the numbers Yale got, I partially regret that — though there’s no way to know if a tournament-specific topic would have lowered them more.

PF topics are more ephemeral, and so can be messed with more. I wonder if the time has come to just say “screw it” and run a tournament topic for Columbia outside the NFL. Or say that Columbia will run the February topic, which will be out by then. I like the subversiveness; I feel the NFL needs some tweaking, since there’s no visible effort to address, never mind fix, the endemic and consistent problems with its newest event. Maybe I could trigger a review if I start just screwing with the event on my own. After all, illegitimate systems deserved to be worked around, as we’re doing with the LD Modest Novice topic, all outside the NFL’s auspices.

And I can just up and do it, with no one else to answer to, the wellspring of creativity itself.

I think I’m going to head on over to pfdebate.org and see what happens.

Schedules

As you may divine from the increasingly sporadic bylines on this blog, I’ve been busy. Sometimes you spend too much time doing an activity to reflect on it; never mind having sixty activities going at once like I do. Currently I’ve got the dayjob, I’m on the LOPSA Board and spokesbeasting for them, and I’ve got five different classes of hats for forensics: I coach, I run the state league, I run and advise a bunch of tournaments, which is going to be bringing me to sunny Florida this weekend, I write and maintain tournament management software (which fact is largely responsible for the tournament advising), and I run a two week extemp camp in the summertime. Phew.

Part of the trouble with such a schedule is I don’t get much time to sit down and do things properly. I don’t get much chance to gently let an idea simmer and stew, and then prepare materials for it with care and precision. No, it’s a bunch of just-in-time sallies that seem to be mostly sufficient, but not as terribly coordinated and careful as I would prefer. Thus The Book for EXL consists of a mass of lecture notes that I have yet to collect into a discernable form; the tournament software manual is two years out of date, and I still haven’t gotten to the Columbia invitation. Long term projects fall by the wayside in favor of gettin’ it done.

I suffer from another curious affliction, in that my time is at odds with the time that most coaches spend on the activity. I can dedicate non-work hours to this show; I do my email and work on nights and weekends, and occasionally can sneak a minute or ten out of my day schedule to respond to something particularly urgent, but for the most part I am adamant that my employer be treated fairly due to my forensics involvement; they give me lots of leeway to travel around to tournaments, and they get their due out of me in return. But that means often I’ll send a wave of emails out on a holiday or a nighttime and the rest of the forensics world isn’t around to hear it. That’s fine, but a friction all the same.

So perhaps I should give something up, and make it easier. If only it were that easy; it’d be difficult to give up any chunk of what I do. Forensics is underfunded and underdue; the very fact that someone like me has so much responsibility even though this Isn’t My Job is telling about the state of debate education in the land. However, maybe someday I’ll get to take a vacation without ten screaming teenagers along for the ride.

What I’m basically saying is, if you sent me email in the last two weeks, you’re going to get a reply today at the earliest.

Camp

So I’m at EXL these two weeks, which is a symphony in three parts, though one played by an Eastern European radio symphony orchestra which is still being paid in Soviet era expired rubles, and unafraid to take it out on the music.

Running a camp is fraught with dangers and fears, especially one that’s small and focused and intense. “Will we get kids who can handle what we teach?” is first and foremost a worry; we explicitly teach a unique, advanced style; but rank idiots won’t do well with it, and so if we end up with a batch of them, we’re in trouble. There’s also the ever present chance that some unforeseen event will take out a day or two, and throw everything in disarray; normal life moves in a leisurely pace, but with only 11 instructional days, you don’t have much margin for curveballs at camp.

Then there are the wider pitfalls. Jonathan and I started this camp largely in reaction to a lot of the other things other camps do. We don’t teach down to kids; the stuff we teach is difficult material in a short period of time. I’ve seen most extemp camps teach current affairs, and present things like The Africa Lecture. We teach economics, nationalism, political parties, government structures, religions, etc. The kids have to make the links to current affairs on their own; and they do so, for the most part. It involves them having to think for themselves, but well, that’s the point.

We also don’t teach a cookie cutter style. Not every question is created equal, so not every answer format is equal to every question. It’s easy and cheap to try and get away with teaching students a single format and structure and measuring their success against the mastery of that formula. That usually has the kids sounding better and shinier at the end of their two weeks. However, at the end of the day, the wide variety of topics extemp teaches routinely demands a fresh approach. I find the better students break out of these formulas on their own eventually, but it’s better to start from a fresh perspective that structure and formulas are simply tools, and you use the hammer on the nails and the screwdriver on the screws, and not vice-versa.

That raises the bar somewhat. It’s not easy to teach approach, and it’s not easy to teach thinking; you can really only teach examples of other people thinking, and hope the idea catches on. But the kids this year are a very strong group, and they’re achieving in spades. I’m a little upset it’s almost over already, but that too is the nature of camps.

The nature of any walk of life, however, when you do as I do, is that inevitably people have computers, and equally inevitably they call me when this happens. It’s a dangerous skill, fluency in computers, since it is needed more than it is present. It’s very difficult to run a camp and teach and lecture and all that; but when my little free time is being impinged to fix printers and connect to Emerson College’s military-grade security on their wireless network, it leaves me with little time for introspection and consideration of things. That’s the danger of my field; it’s not like I can leave my skills at home and let it go; they come up everywhere and anywhere, and I’m not entirely allowed to be Just an Extemp Coach even on these two weeks, where ostensibly I’m taking vacation to do just that.

So I’m stealing a few moments this evening to recollect myself, and think, and reflect. We had a very good 17 kids at this camp, up from 10 the year before. They’ll have success and make us look very good, but ultimately I hope they end up making themselves look good most of all, thinking and challenging and speaking and doing exactly what our activity does best. It won’t be easy for any of them, even though they’re uniformly terribly bright students, but the difficult is worthwhile, even when it’s often short of the goal.

And you won’t hear a canned introduction among any of them.

NFL Finals

So I was thinking a little about the experience of NFL Finals. I saw three main finals (US Extemp, HI, and LD) and two supplemental finals (Storytelling and Editorial Commentary). I was officially present for the Oratory final, but Oratory tends to bore me to tears, so I opened up the laptop and discreetly caught up with my email during that one. I won’t apologize for this; until the event becomes something other than 70 minutes of pop philosophy, moral exhortations and poignant stories from a bunch of 17 year olds, I have little reason to listen if I’m not judging.

Anyhoo, the supplemental events are more or less usual final rounds that you could find at any regional tournament: they feature an appropriate but not overwhelming amount of ceremony, with a fair but not huge number of spectators, who are likely mostly drawn from the local leagues who have a student in the round. The students performed well, together with the vague sense of disjoint oddness that comes from supplemental events — no one does these things full time, and so no one really knows what they’re doing, or even what they’re supposed to be doing. But that’s fine, and they entertain, so we survive.

However, main event finals are an entirely different kettle of fish. The main final hall can hold around 3,000-5,000 people typically, and it’ll go from completely packed for the interp finals, to nearly a third full for the early morning Extemp finals. It becomes clear from the start that the NFL treats them as a Big Friggin’ Deal; they opened the day with an Elvis, they pack the judging panels with all sorts of people they want to impress and suck up to, and so on.

The effect, however, is distinctly harmful to the competition itself. In the US extemp final, the first three kids were able to handle it decently well; Becca, who was second speaker, was there last year, so she certainly didn’t have nearly the same epic tower of nerves going; this was familiar turf. The last three speakers, however, all looked like they were being led to their own executions, and they had to pull the trigger. Poor kids; nothing really sets you up for the experience of NFL finals except for making NFL finals, and since I imagine that most NFL finalists are first-timers in their senior year, there’s not much opportunity to gain experience. The last three kids basically forced their way through their final speeches, which were not very good. I imagine that for them to qualify for the final in the first place, each of them was a far better speaker than they demonstrated in the round; I bet their semifinal speeches were a great deal better.

The main event semis all happen at roughly the same time as one another, and they’re in normal classrooms with about 50 spectators at the most. Going from 50 spectators in a classroom to 1,000 in an auditorium in the course of one jump, and add to that the pressure of it being The National Final, and one grows surprised that more kids don’t wet themselves as soon as they set foot on stage. In some events, like Dramatic Interp, the effect is catastrophic; these pieces are designed to be performed in small, intimate settings and lose much of their punch when flung onto the stage. In Extemp, the kids don’t have their script and their memorized moves to cling to; they still have to make it up. The semis I’ve watched were better rounds by far than the finals I’ve watched, for exactly that reason.

It’s a shame in a way. The NFL is set up to be this big culminating event, and I understand their impulse to make the finals a Big Deal. They want to reward and congratulate the students with a huge experience, and they certainly do that. Their stage manager, too, is a wonderful guy, who very carefully guides the students through the process and tells them over and over, using different phrasing, to neither panic nor worry; he’s set up the process so the students don’t have to concentrate or remember any logistics or schedules, since they always have someone right next to them telling them what to do next. But, the spectacle itself degrades the quality of the round; it doesn’t permit each student to give it their best shot. I could wish the ramp up to a final wouldn’t be so suddenly vast, or that we could tone it down a little bit, so that I could have seen the best shot from the final three speakers, and not simply the best they could do when the stakes were at the absolute highest.

the LD post

The world of Public Forum is confronted this month by a particularly Lincoln-Douglas style resolution. The rez declares that civil disobedience in a democracy is a good “weapon in the fight for justice” or some such bombast. I rolled my eyes and realized there was major work ahead of us. Nobody around Massachusetts seemed to understand the November topic except for us, given that it was aimed at extemp-like squads. Civil disobedience, however, is the type of thing any PF team that’s an appendage of an LD team will have reams of background on.

So I trotted out the standard “Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau and oh I guess Rawls” social contract lecture, to give the kids background on approaches the LD types will have down pat. However, PF is not just theory debate. We need facts, and examples, and to prove feasibility to make our case here. Despite that, PF bans plans and counterplans. And the topic is limited to democracy, so we lose the Burma and Tiananmen Square examples. In democracies historically, civil disobedience and expansion of rights usually coincide. Nobody knows if the civil disobedience caused the expansion of rights, but nobody knows that it didn’t either. So that’s not very debatable; we don’t have evidence or even a way of getting evidence.

So harumpf. So aff writes itself, but what do you argue on con? You can argue that other means are better but oops, that’s a counter plan, and verboten by the gods of Public Forum. You can stick to LD style moral justification arguments on why citizens ought not break the social contract, but then if the other side comes up with one good concrete example, most honest judges are going to go for that first. You can start swinging around wildly and say the tyranny of the majority is a good thing, but good luck convincing an average mom of that.

The problem is Public Forum was designed in reaction to problems in other events. The founders of the event took a list of things they didn’t like about LD and Policy, and built an event that doesn’t permit those exact things from happening. Therefore, most of its rules forestall negative trends, instead of encouraging positive ones. But these rules and restrictions prevent more than critical, off-topic arguments; they also hamstring legitimate avenues of on-topic discussion. That’s not a good way to create a coherent event. PF shouldn’t be the way it is because of negative trends in LD or CX; it should be what it is because it’s good for PF.

We’ll muddle through somehow. Maybe we’ll come up with a clever way of imagining negative policy consequences to civil disobedience. But at the basic level I think the event as a whole could use some fine tuning, with the security needed to allow the students leeway to debate the issues fully.

I don’t like the coinflip either. But that’s another post.