Category: debate

Fighting with Menick

So I spent last weekend at the TOC, as a judge/scout/driver/EMT for Scarsdale.   My qualifying team, perhaps wisely, didn’t want to attend, but I’m a sucker for punishment that way.   We had a fun time all around, and there were stories of course.   Scarsdale did well; no one finished worse than 3-4, two made elims, and one of those was in the quarter.   I can claim precious little credit for that, though I can claim a larger share of credit than I should have for getting everyone to the airport; a non-life-threatening but nonetheless serious Medical Event, the one thing coaches dread more than anything else, sent our Monday travel plans, our focus on the tournament, and JV’s nerves into a tailspin dive.   Every one of those things survived in the end, and I made it onto my plane with a good ten minutes to spare.

One of the funnier things that happened at TOC is that people encouraged me to get into more fights with Menick.   That’s going to be hard, for one thing, since we do tend to agree on a lot of stuff.   But I think we can try.   However, it’s interesting; going back and forth about extemp apparently was deeply engaging to various PF and Policy coaches too.

Bietz is now NDCA president and he used a note in the yellow flyer the NDCA was posting around the tournament to encourage more online discussion by coaches.   He rightly points out that the students have taken to online discussion quite readily, but that coaches have lagged far behind.   That lends a certain immature, fanboyish air to most online forums dedicated to forensics, to the point that serious discussion simply will not take place on most of them.   Every now and then coaches do have to talk things over without student input, after all — there are times when decisions need to be taken that will be sharply unpopular with students.   Students, after all, are ephemeral — they’re rightly made much of when they’re in the world of debate, but soon enough most of them are gone from it, while the coaches have to remain behind with the consequences.   So it’s strange that students do most of the interacting in permanent online forums, and coaches very little.

Bietz’s solution is to call for coaches to simply start contributing articles for their newly revamped debatecoaches.org.   That’s a fine idea in its own right — it would be nice to see some online venue for coaches attain some critical mass. But I wonder if it’s not doomed and destined to become just an online version of the Rostrum.   I wrote a Rostrum article once.   Ironically, it was about computer usage in extemp.   I got a fair number of emails, and then the issue died.   Certainly no one in NFL officialdom appeared to notice.   But then when Menick and I went back and forth a couple times on the selfsame issue, the issue get all kinds of attention and feedback.   Though still none from officialdom, but what can you do.

So the point is, we don’t need static articles and little sallies in the dark.   The real value of online communication is dialog and discussion.   It’d be all the better if folks who actually ran things participated, too.   Meaningful communication, as forensics types should know instinctively, are not one-way.

The challenge is one of platform.   Message boards have a high amount of friction, which young people overcome but busier older folks rarely do.   Blogs are nice, if people start them, but someone who only wants to chip in on one conversation won’t do that.   That’s the trouble, getting a critical mass of meaningful conversation that can affect change.

The second hurdle, of course, is how diffuse and fractured we are.   Tomorrow on that one — and on that point Menick and I do disagree.   He urges the NFL on us as rule-setters of the Forensic Universe.   But it’s all too clear that they’re nothing of the sort.

A world divided

So I mostly live in the world of the Massachusetts Forensic League, which governs most of the local tournaments in Massachusetts.   It’s an inverse of what they do over in New York, where CFLs run the local show and they get together once a year for the State League to step in; here we do CFLs once a year to qualify students to Nationals, and then the State League runs everything else.   The advantage is that we can set our own rules and our own guidelines, create our own events — a mixed blessing, given some of our events — and guide our own path.

However, the MFL is strangely split.   The league, by member numbers, is heavily weighted towards speech events, in particular interp events.   Debate happens at the fringes, when it happens at all.   Most of the MFL debate centric programs therefore are not truly part of the MFL for their local circuit, but instead are part of the wider — and therefore more expensive — Northeast debating circuit.

The Northeast circuit does a lot of things right.   Most of the major tournaments offer student housing to defray the cost of having to go hundreds of miles each weekend, which boils down the travel costs to gasoline and a hotel room for the adults in many cases. It’s a good community where folks generally speaking trust each other, and it features a stable administrative crew that spontaneously grew up around the fact that most of the tab rooms are run by the same collection of usual suspects week in and week out.

As I see it, there are two major splits between the MFL and the Northeast debating world.   The first is cost.   The standard entry fee for an MFL tournament is $5.   The standard entry fee for a Northeast debate tournament is somewhere north of $40.   In other worlds, a student can go an entire season of competing in the MFL on a single weekend’s pay in the Northeast.   That price differential serves to sever the MFL schools from the Northeast schools; the debate programs which run tournaments take in more money than MFL programs that do, and so they have money to spend on others’ fees.   MFL programs that only charge $5 simply don’t have that sort of budget.   Our students, for instance, pay their own fees.

Personally I fall with the MFL on this issue; the $5 fee is far superior in making the activity accessible, both to students who cannot afford $50/week, and to students and programs who are new to the activity.   It’s far easier to tell people to blow $25 and a Saturday on trying something out with 5 of their students, than it is to get them to pony up $200+ for the same honor.

However, there is also stuff that goes the other way.   We’ve had a remarkable amount of turnover among the MA debate coaches in the past five years, while the speech coaching has been more stable.   However, back in The Day, the debaters were somewhat more hostile towards the speech coaches, claiming that they were being abandoned and ignored — but at the same time, when speech coaches attended debate tournaments, ignoring and abandoning them.   At this point, the instinctive reaction of a lot of MFL speech coaches is to regard debaters as snooty hooligans who are just there to be nasty to people unlike them.

However, we have some of the nicest debate coaches in the country in Massachusetts.   JP is blending in with the speech side, for which I thank my lucky stars, since it means I’m not the only hybrid.   I’ve really enjoyed getting to know Sara S this year, and Jim M has always been a terrific guy.   Tim A and I ran Yale for years and though he’s less active now, he’s always good to have around.   And we have some newer coaches coming up (Anne B, Tara T, etc) who seem to really Get It.   Further, speech coaches might look at their own tournaments and programs, where there’s vast unmet demand for debate events.   We started offering Public Forum at formerly speech-only tournaments, for the standard $5, and in only its second year there are more students competing in PF at your average MFL tournament than any other event.   The majority of inquiries I get about potential new programs ask about debate, not   speech; and while some of those programs eventually convert to speech programs, it’s mostly out of the difficult logistics around debate.   The MFL needs strongly to offer more debate opportunities that are easy to get to; it’s such a simple win.

But some historical bad blood, together with unfamiliarity with the events, is causing MFL speech coaches to resist it.   A tournament that has 50 prose entries is viewed as a good thing, while 42 PF teams is viewed a huge problem.   Where there are space and room issues, tournament directors cap debate entries first, rather than instituting an overall cap.   Space is an issue, since the MFL is an awkward stage where we’re a bit too big for most schools, but also a bit too small to have two tournaments going at once.   But it’s not that much of an issue.   Ways could be found, and the current approach of just chopping debate off at the knees is not healthy for students or the League.

Ultimately, it comes down to lack of connections.   It’s easy to demonize someone you don’t know and interact with.   Debaters are teenage high school students seeking to learn much the same skills as interp kids or address kids: the art of being believed.   They’re doing it in a difficult arena — speech kids don’t have to face the possibility that everything they say will be immediately and forcefully contradicted.   I’ve tried to meld the two communities together a bit, but there’s more to be done.   I’d love to see 8-9 tournaments locally, at $5 a pop, offering both LD and PFD.   Policy may be a tougher nut to crack, but that alone would be a start.   And then perhaps debate would be seen in the MFL as an academic activity along the same lines as theirs, not just an imposition of grubby little space aliens taking away rooms from f’n Group Discussion.

The Last Harvard: PF Final

So Monday continues.   After the Oratory final, I headed into Harvard Square to buy myself a new phone, since the old razr was clearly dead now, rendered brainless by continually confused internal software.   It being around 3 years old, I was due for a relatively cheap phone anyway, in return for selling two more years of marriage to Verizon.

So I lost my phonebook meaning I couldn’t call anyone; but they could call me.   Tim A did, reminding me that I had foolishly offered to fulfill my school’s out round judging obligation with a round on Monday; sheesh, judges who do what they’re supposed to.   Seems that between dealing with the speech side of things, and then acquiring a new phone, I’d promoted myself all the way up to judging finals.

So finals I judged, together with PJ & JP, and two other folks I didn’t know.   I was happy about it since it would give me a chance to see the current State of the Art of Public Forum.

What I got wasn’t really debate, in a way.   The topic was tough: Resolved: That, on balance, the rise of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) has had a positive impact on the United States.   Those four countries have about one thing in common: they’re big. Connected to that, they each have the resources and potential to become a local hegemon in their respective regions.   But no one debated that.

Mostly what was debated, and what I saw in that final, was a complicated calculation of benefit versus harm in economic and foreign policy spheres.   Since the resolution was phrased in the past tense, there was little speculation or risk analysis involved; the teams could only offer stacks of numbers that pointed to their side of the resolution.   The topic offered little unifying principle for weighing across the various domains of national interest, be it economic or military or foreign diplomacy; and it’s even more difficult to demonstrate societal harms and benefits on the international scale.   Then, once you’ve done that, try establishing that those harm/benefits are the BRIC nations’ fault, and showing that the rise of those nations, not their mere existence, is what caused those harms.

Cha, right.

So a debate resolution that’s nearly impossible to do in a doctoral dissertation was even harder to address in the terms of a 35 minute debate round.   Public forum is short and sweet, so tossing them a topic that’s so fiendishly complicated is just begging for unsatisfying argumentation.   In this topic, too, the complexity was not because the topic itself was morally complicated, but because it was just data-sifting; the moral values aren’t addressed at all in this game of my-study-is-better-than-yours.   Even more frustratingly, 9 of those precious 35 minutes are wasted in crossfires.   Crossfires are short periods of mutual cross-examination when the competitors attempt, and usually fail, to make each other look stupid without appearing to do so.   As such, I still haven’t learned anything about how to judge or decide a debate round as the result of a crossfire.   I’ve begun putting down my pen and working on my ballots during them; half attention is usually sufficient to glean anything significant.   Some kids start trying to read cards and throw evidence into them, which despite being against the spirit of the thing, is probably more productive than the intended use.

The debaters didn’t make it any easier.   Both teams approached the round by simply flinging out a mess of varied evidence about the four BRIC nations in various sectors of policy; nuclear disarmament, trade balances, and arming Iraqi insurgents and Hamas (and I’m pretty sure the debater who ran Hamas was conflating them with Hezbollah.)   Neither team offered a weighing standard or proposed a mechanism for assembling all this variegated data into a decision.   That shortfall made the round fail at a critical part of debate.   The only thing that keeps a judge from having to intervene at some level is providing a standard of some sort — a burden, the v/c framework in LD, any sort of mechanism — on how to weigh thousands of lives lost on the negative, against hundreds of billions of dollars gained on the affirmative.   That’s not necessarily an automatic negative win, given that poverty surely has killed far more people globally than bullets or even global warming (so far) have.   Without resolving that key tension — and the debaters didn’t talk about it at all — the round itself cannot truly be resolved, without intervention.     With a standard to weigh against, and even an argument about that standard, judging becomes clear.   Without a standard, it’s an ungodly mess.

And an ungodly mess it was.   My ballot was cast without confidence on the upper end of a 3-2 decision.   Ultimately I weighed the lives the negative was killing off in Iraq and by killer smog as more valuable than the money being gained on the side of the affirmative, since most of those billions have been going to buy rich people’s yachts and not poor people’s medical care and food, and in the absence of aff showing me that poverty kills.   But that’s my take admittedly; however, the debaters didn’t give me any other option besides my take.   So that’s what they’re stuck with on my RFD, until they give me anything else.

The other flaw was the arguments were ultimately uncreative.   There wasn’t much room for creativity, between the topic and the limited format of the round.   We’ve managed a few creative arguments on past topics, but given that the ground to cover in BRIC nations is so enormous, there wasn’t much room for interesting argumentation.   It was just a vast, boring study-war.   Teams were just flinging evidence at each other, and while that’s certainly a skill useful to have, it’s deeply unsatisyfing to me, especially because the round was encouraging them to take all their evidence at face value, and really, that’s a terrible precedent.   But they didn’t have time or ability to question the evidence, to explain it, to understand it on a fundamental level.   So I was left taking on faith that Expert 1 said Russia was evil, while Expert 2 said that without Brazil we’d all be dead, when I know full well that most of these Experts have agendas and motives for saying what they do far beyond facts & reality.

The constant thread I’ve been trying to teach in forensics is encouraging students to think for themselves; that their own thoughts are as valuable as those of the journalists, analysts and experts, and has an equal duty to stand up to intense scrutiny.   After all, one of the defining qualities of our age is that knowledge needed to have deep insights is available and accessible to everyone.   One of America’s consistent social ills is that far too few take an interest in public affairs.   Governing elites always take interest in how the world works, but it serves them for no one else to; their viewpoint dominates when no one else is truly thinking.   That general ignorance may give those elites short term profit, but it also gives us thought-bubbles and echo chambers, and can lead to the lemming-effect disasters such as our economic disaster.   If I can send an army of kids into adulthood having learned how to think and reason from basic data, and to be skeptical of experts, I’ll have done a mitzvah for the world.

Public Forum is alive and well in the MFL circuit, flourishing with divisions of 30-45 teams at any given tournament from 20 different schools.   There are probably upwards of 80 active PF teams in the state.   I have a feeling that much of this success is that we’ve finally introduce a consistent debate event at speech tournaments; there was a lot of unmet demand for debate among speech teams, and the logistics of the MFL gave those kids only the unsatisfying, not-quite-right-for-them outlets of Extemp, Group and Congress.   It’s a shame because the more I exist in PF, the more I wish I was still coaching LD.   For a while I gave PF a pass since it was still trying to find itself, but at this point the brevity is so unsatisfying, and the standards of the event aren’t doing much yet to make up for it.   PF was created in large part to address ills in LD, and was adopted first and strongest by the coaches who felt that LD had lost its way without possible redemption.   I’d argue their leaving made LD weaker, but the manner of the leaving also harmed PF.   The anti-LD kneejerk is still keeping PF from becoming it’s own thing, and if it’s throwing out good aspects of LD such as voting standards in the process, then it’s just reactionary nonsense.   Popular reactionary nonsense, but not much different.

There’s hope for it since.   Better topics would be a start; topics should really have a stronger moral component with more judgment calls other than quantitative analysis.   The topics have trended in a Policy direction but policy permits much more creativity due to the length of the round and concomitant breadth and vagueness of its topics.   No, in a short limited round, a short sharp question-your-values-in-the-public-sphere style topic is best. But up until April’s PF topic, which my students will not debate, we’ve gotten no good ones.   Some acceptable, but none good.   (Change: April has now been published, and of course, it’s the best topic all year.   Sigh).

But radical reform would also be nice.   Get rid of grand crossfire, at least; it’s just stupid.   Reclaim the time into more substantial rebuttals.     I’d also actually get rid of the coinflip nonsense; it makes the ballot confusing, and leads to teams sailing through tournaments never debating one side of the resolution.   Encourage cross examinations, not crossfire, to restore some civility, and sense of intellectual achievement and openness, to the debates.

And for crying out loud, call it aff and neg.

But I doubt it’ll happen.

Sheesh

It’s been a while since I’ve written; dancing on the edge of burnout will do that to you.   In the last six weeks I’ve helped run tab at four tournaments: Princeton, University School, our own at Newton South, and then Big Lex this last weekend.   Now I’m prepping out Columbia, where we have a great pool of judges and our room situation gets less bad by the minute.

We had the Holly cancelled — surely more stressful for JA, SD and AP than me — and rescheduled.   I got two awards — one for coaching, one for mentorship, which isn’t quite the same thing — which are the first awards I’ve gotten in this activity since, well, I was a student.   I wrote 18 rounds worth of extemp questions for the Crestian.   I somehow managed — haphazardly, I’ll admit — to get the camp applications for Summit up and running.

And at work I moved the machine room and offices and phones to our nice new digs four blocks from the original office, with all the fun that entails.   That also meant giving up most of the break the company gives between Christmas and New Year’s.   Whenever you move, everything gets slower; I can’t find anything, there’s lots of stuff that needs doing, and I can only have one top priority at a time.   It’s a pain, that.   But I’ve been coming home from work these days more tired than usual.   It happens.

There have been highlights.   The Florida trip was a good time; it was good to see Steve and Jenny and Dave and Dario and Jon, and meet some new folks — I never really hung out with Ernie Rose before, and never met the personality-filled Jen Kwasman or the folks who worked with me in Tab (Dean Brooks, Travis Kiger, Carol Cecil) at all.   I got to hover at the edges of the SEC Championship Game.   I couldn’t help but mutter “Roll Tide” just to see the looks on their faces, but I was happy to see them happy when the Gators won.   Since I come from a school whose football team would have trouble with some high school programs, and a part of the country dominated by its professional teams, I’m out of my depth with big college games.   I did cheer for the Gators in the championship game, which they won.

The tournament itself suffered a little from neglect, though not what you think; the coaches and hosts did a marvelous job, to say the least.   The food, the awards, everything was planned to the hilt.   No, the neglect was on the part of the attendees — a lot of coaches went elsewhere for the weekend, so we had the assistant coaches or volunteer parents running the show for a lot of schools, and man does that show.   Judges wandered in and out of the tournament as they felt like, leading to all kinds of fun in subbing them.   The U School kids were very helpful, if a little clueless on how to do things at a big tournament; that takes some time to learn, and experience.   I’ll be bringing in the concept of the majordomo next time around; it works too well in the Northeast not to be exported.

In Florida, they also post speech schematics round by round, which I find doesn’t work well; if you tell the judges up front what their weekend is, they tend to appear more often; plus, you also tend to find out if someone has a conflict with a round enough in advance to do something about it.   We’ll fix that next year.   Debate cannot work that way; powermatching means things have to be done as we go through.   But for the first year of a tournament I was very happy; we ended nearly on time.   I think it’s a good start.

The other neglect it suffered from was on my part.   They gave me a mentorship award they started in Jenny’s name this year, an inaugural event, and I found myself blushing and not knowing what to say at that.   Then, this past weekend, a wide ranging conspiracy gave me the longer standing Lexington Coaching Award, which I gather is named for Michael Bacon now, for a coach in the debate community who is not a classroom teacher, as I am not.   Again, words failed me.   I’m not good at accepting compliments, never mind honors.   And as Jim said, the Lexington honor was probably one of things he’s proudest of, for good reason. I’m friends with a lot of the folks who are past recipients and it’s humbling to join them.

The Jenny Cook award means a lot to me, too, in a different way; to start out a tradition, and one with such a personal connection — it’s not something I can get used to easily.   It feels like moving around a bunch of bits on a screen at tournaments, and yelling at a few adolescents in a hopefully constructive manner, is insufficient to merit that kind of recognition, even as everyone keeps telling me it is.

Surely a lot of this sudden acclaim rests on the service I give to the community.   Certainly I’ve served the debate world in particular far more in service than in coaching; I coached LD sporadically at Milton, and our PF program at Newton South is only a year and a half old.   In speech I have a much deeper coaching experience, granted.   But at the same time, on the service side, I’m finding that I’m not doing any of the jobs I currently hold down all that well.   I did a competent job at U School, but not a super job, and a new tournament deserves a super job out of its tab director.   In particular, I neglected the planning stages; I can get away with less obsessive planning at the college tournaments, since I know the lay of the land there, but I really should have put more time into this one.   If I had planned things out a little more carefully, I wouldn’t have had to be the crazed idiot in the tab during the tournament.   The book for EXL remains unwritten.   I have no idea when the MFL 501c3 app will be completed.   And I need a true vacation, that doesn’t involve catching up on anything, or running anything.

So I begin the process of shaving off responsibilities that can be handed to others.   I think I have a couple candidates in mind of jobs I can pawn off on others.   The ones remaining will benefit for it, and the ones I give up will benefit too, since someone with more energy can spend some attention on them.

The last six weeks contain a silver lining too.   I did take an extended weekend to visit Josh in DC, which I had a good time at.   I saw the National Gallery, the Botanical Gardens, and the American Indian museum, all for the first time.   We had a series of very good meals, and one raucous night getting double-servings of good scotch from a cute bartender.   I came back better than I left, and Josh for once got to play host, not guest.   I’d not be friends with Josh if it weren’t for this crazy world of forensics; I’d not be friends with Jenny, or Chavez, or the Honeymans, or Sarah & Amanda, or Jim Menick or Joe Vaughan or any of the dozens of people I’ve raised a glass to or a ballot with in Lexington MA or Lexington KY or wherever else this little world takes me.   There are new folks, like Sara at Lexington, whom I’d like to know more — and old friends, like Caitlin who came to judge at Lex, who I’m glad to see more of.

So no, even though everyone is giving me awards these days, I’m not retiring.

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.