leagues – Page 3 – azuen.net

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.

The Night before Nationals

It’s the night before I depart for Vegas and the NFL Tournament. I have a sequence of horrible flights, but I can’t really complain too much since they’re a freebie from the airline. I also now am on some list of terrorists, so I can’t check in online anymore. A guy who’s never been out of North America and always travels with 5-15 adolescents, I guess, is highly suspicious; probably true, but not usually for carrying bombs. Pattern matching software is notorious for generating a huge number of false positives. Ah well, there’s a website where one can register one’s bafflement at this condition and see what happens. I bet I’ll get audited, though I’m sure the cavity search tomorrow will be gentle.

It’s raining. It’s a beautiful rain; that cold humidity in the air making one unsure if it’s hot or cold or both at once. It’s thundering, and pouring, which is something of a summer ideal for me. Watching the rain fall in a warm summer night with little lights here and there under the leaves just fills me with a sense of normalcy. You see, I grew up in the shadow of a mountain that flung thunderstorms at us with clockwork regularity. We get far fewer down here in the coastal areas, and I miss them, so whenever one does come roaring through, it quiets and comforts.

I mention this because this last night and last two weeks have had a pace of normalcy about them that’s often missing from the forensics life. Tomorrow I’m headed to Vegas, but I’m also staying longer than the tournament, and explicitly going to have a good time. The presence of the national tournament is tangential at best. It helps that I’ve come to not care about the NFL and its Nationals one way or another. They make their tournament too big a deal, spend too much time backslapping coaches publicly, and it’s a little too much about sponsors; no sense of a balance there. Most of all, they run their organization entirely on the incorrect assumption that everyone sees it as the singular apotheosis of forensics, which prevents them from seeing, or at least acknowledging and correcting, certain problems.

The NFL for me is now eminently skippable, while once upon a time I saw it as a Big Freakin’ Deal. But at this point it’s hard for me to see anything in forensics as a Big Freakin’ Deal. I’ve run tournaments, I’ve had kids win them, I’ve had them lose, and I’ve not noticed much long term difference between, outside the fact that kids sometimes learn something. I also lose respect for tournaments each time I realize that education and competition are at cross currents. It irks me when I tell the kids to do things that I know risks them defeat. I won’t compromise on that, but it saddens me when I become aware of it. And it really kills me when the kids themselves — and every kid I’ve ever coached has done this — push back and do the lesser thing to win the tournament, and get a trophy in return for their integrity. Bad trade.

The NFL does that to my kids more often than most tournaments. I hear the collective voice of NFL judges pushing back at me through the students’ mouths a lot, despite the fact that we don’t even get ballots back and so we don’t actually know why NFL judges do what they do. The tournament overall has a distorting effect, and cheapens the education I feel I can present my students. So I go there tomorrow, but I try to leave no wake, make no waves, and remain as anonymous and concealed as I can. And hope to God nobody asks me to fix their !@$#%!@ website.

I do this too much

I had a sure sign today that I have too many responsibilities in forensics. The Nassau Inn emailed me asking me after the standard details for the Princeton tournament; when were the tournament dates, how many rooms in the block, etc. These are all issues that I do provide advice on for any of my tournaments.

The trouble is, Princeton is not my tournament. They did ask me last year, but I had to say no, because I was already bringing kids to GMU. Then, at Columbia, Admiral Menick tries to talk me into adding Princeton, mostly because he likes the restaurants there. And now I’m running the tournament by acclamation of the bloody hotels; how they knew who I am is beyond me. I’m not sure exactly how I got appointed the chairman of the northeastern collective tab room. I suppose, in a volunteer-driven world, you just need to start doing a job, and sooner or later it acquires official weight.

But thankfully, it’s not much of a problem to foist that one off on actual Princetonians. The summer is a nice time; I don’t do much tournament management, apart from calming down an occasional Yalish panic attack. The Yalies sometimes fail to understand that the likelihood no one is coming to their tournament is lessened with every immediately sold out hotel block we acquire. But anyway, during the summer, I actually get to build curriculum for my camp, which then also informs the curriculum for the coming year at South. I’m also chairing the NCFL Extemp committee, trying to tackle issues there about moving the questions themselves forward, along with the Computers in Prep Question. I still think computers in prep is a huge Pandora’s box, but for now the power requirements of 210 separate laptops in prep put the idea out of practical reach anyhow. But it’s nice to think sometimes about this actual activity, and the reasons why I do it. I like nicely run tournaments so I run them, but at the end of the day, it’s the coaching that keeps me doing this.

And I try as much as possible not to touch much code, apart from a few weekends here and there when the mood strikes me. I do want to pre-empt the Admiral’s inevitable bitching about how housing requests work in my software, to save my poor bug tracking system from being overwhelmed by his love notes in early November. I’m sure he’ll come up with lots of….suggestions, anyway. But I want to at least make him work for it.

But beyond the summer, I’m also trying to build the tournaments in such a way that I’m not needed. There’s a common method to them, and the only thing I provide is a veto threat that sticks. The average college tournament is a collection of people who want to do the right thing — run a good solid tournament that the kids enjoy and learn from — and others. There’s the Profiteer, who spends a lot of time dreaming up concessions schemes that never pan out; the Lazy, who just wants the thing to go away; the Self Important Twit, who wants titles and recognition for being a marvelous forensics oracle despite not actually contributing to the success of the tournament.

My real role is to be outside of their internal team politics. As such, I can mercilessly crush the bad ideas from the Useless People, and be sure as much as I can that the Good People stick around in the tournament management. I’ve whittled down the other jobs I do as much as I can, and mostly focus on that. After all, if the principle motivations behind a tournament are sound, the rest falls into place with minimal, fact-based guidance. And if I finally do have that much-delayed nervous breakdown, at least then the details won’t all get lost.

The trick will be when I can “run” a tournament according to this regular method without actually going to it. Once I get that right, maybe I’ll run Princeton. However, I also hear tell of a Florida invitational tournament in need of a tabber that weekend, and if that proves true, it’ll be hard to convince me that the first weekend of December shouldn’t be spent in southern Florida. And gosh, the preparation is bound to be so intensive I’ll just have to come down a good week before….I’m easily bribed by beaches.

Communication and communication

As an activity, forensics is supposedly all about communication. That makes me wonder how we can be so surpassingly bad at it sometimes. We’re good at talking, but really rather bad at other forms as a community. There are pockets of active offline communication, but pockets they remain.

This past weekend was the NCFL National Tournament, where the LD and the PFD resolutions met a mixed reception at best. The tournament featured some pretty classic arguments on both topics; on the question of fine arts education versus athletics, we’re told that the fine arts should be defunded, since that will help reduce the homosexual population. Ah, how cunning: musical theater doesn’t attract the gays, it creates them.

That aside, people seemed more unhappy than not with the topics. So, unlike most folks who just bitched in quiet voices to each other, I asked Greg, our local moderator who’s also on the executive council about it. He said they didn’t have much to choose from, just three submissions. Submissions, you say? Yes, it appears for years now, a call goes out in September for anyone and everyone to suggest potential topics for Nationals.

Well, I’ll be damned. That’s the first I knew of that.

The fault lines here are several. One is that the NCFL is structured in such a way to permit a lot of things like this to pass through the cracks. The league itself only communicates directly to the diocesan moderators, who do a variable job at best of pushing it onwards to their diocese’s members. I think the NCFL, like the NFL, operates under the false presumption that the diocesan moderators run their local league. This is untrue in Massachusetts, where the state league runs the show; it’s untrue in a lot of other places as well.

So where you have a structure like ours, the local CFL moderator runs the show two weekends out of the year; once when the qualifier is run, and once when Nationals itself happens. I can imagine there’s a natural tendency to pay attention only then. Or, a tendency among the moderators to worry mostly about the really important logistic details, and leave everything else aside.

The second issue is that league leaders are not uniformly drawn from all forensics persuasions. Some areas might have great debate coaches with lots to contribute, but if their league leader is mostly an interp coach, the communications channel may be inadequate to the task. Relying on the diocesan moderator to be an everyman who knows all the events well enough to express concerns is going to fail sooner or later.

So the NCFL loses touch of its local coaches, since it doesn’t really try to talk to the coaches directly; it talks to the moderators, who serve as inefficient choke-points for a lot of this information. I have a good moderator who also sits on the executive council, and yet the open submission of LD topics was news to me. That’s a problem, certainly, on the NCFL’s part.

But it’s a problem on the part of the LD coaches bitching about the topic too. It didn’t take me a heck of a lot of effort to just walk up to Greg and ask what the process was, and I don’t even coach LD anymore. There’s a strong assumption on the part of a lot of coaches that Things Are The Way They Are, and the only reason they haven’t changed is because some pinhead somewhere has managed to accrue a lot of power and privilege and refuses to budge. That’s sometimes true, but it’s not true a lot, too. Not all nuns are conservative, and not all traditions are hallowed; sometimes they’re traditions because no one bothered to try and change them.

So I’m going to short-circuit the whole thing next year, and do what perhaps the NCFL should have done in the first place, and bridge what the LD coaches should have bridged long ago. When the call for topics goes out, I’ll just post the friggin thing on Victory Briefs. Doing my part…

Exclusivity

This weekend we held the State Debate tournament. It was a small affair, but that fit well into a small school, enough so that we could flight the Varsity LD and Public Forum divisions and zip through the day three hours ahead of the intended finish, while adding a fifth prelim round. That left the novices with 4 prelims and a final, but if they wanted to step up, they should have stepped up; it’s not like it’s hard to qualify for States in debate. Nor should it be, so long as it stays small enough to host.

We had, after much promotion and excitement, 5 Miss America pageant winners of various stripes in attendance. They were led by Amanda Liverzani, who judged mostly LD. The others, who hadn’t seen debate before, were in Public Forum. Their presence amused the hell out of everyone, though it was accompanied by a faint sense of doubt in everyone who had seen the infamous Miss South Carolina YouTube video. I wasn’t worried, though; Amanda was obviously sharp, and came highly recommended, so I doubted she would bring rank morons to a tournament. Any remaining doubts were dispelled by their first round ballots, which were crisp and insightful explanations of their decisions.

They were also terrific sports; they wore their tiaras all day, judged the Public Forum final together, and took pictures with the finalists and teams. I really hope they come back.

That got me thinking about aspects of exclusivity in our event. Public Forum, for all its foibles, has at its core a belief that it’s necessary to keep debate honest by routinely injecting fresh blood into the judges’ pool. Oliver Wendell Holmes described the law not in terms of an overarching theory, but rather simply as the accumulated set of actions judges take. If a judge will rule x, then x is law. Debate can be framed the same way. If judges collectively vote for something, then it will win; if not, then it won’t. If you have a stable judging pool with a long apprenticeship period, as exists in LD and Policy, you eventually grow a large body of unwritten rules and conventions that simply must be followed to win a ballot. In Policy and LD, the end result has been emphasis on argumentation that is logically sound, but ultimately unpersuasive; no one is going to change their own beliefs on the strength of most LD and Policy argumentation. But judges will change their ballots, so the students pick up on that, and leave aside the much tougher task of being persuasive.

Public Forum is an attempt to narrow the gap between ballot and belief, by constantly welcoming reasonably intelligent judges who have no preconceived notions of competitive debate. These judges are ignorant of jargon and must have it explained, so jargon is limited. But more to the point, they’re much more likely to vote on what they find more persuasive than some ethereal sense of context-less flow-logic. That keeps the event honest, and it brings a unique set of values to the forensics community.

The inclusiveness of the judging pool in PF highlights the exclusivity of the judging pools in LD and Policy. LD can be judged by novice judges, and the students sometimes adapt with success. LDers will often complain when they actually have to do this, even as they do grudgingly recognize the value of the adaptation skill. However, Policy doesn’t care at all. And therefore, it’s dying. The barriers to entry for new judges — understanding the event — are the same barriers faced by new programs. Those barriers are prohibitively high in Policy: the learning curve, and most of all, the lack of an immediately apparent educational benefit, together conspire to keep policy a closed and exclusive club. Forensics programs are not immortal, and every time a Policy team dies, it dies for good. We were down to 8 teams from 3 schools at States. Should one of those three programs decide to throw in the towel, especially Lexington, the league will likely have to follow suit.

I get a sense in talking to the true believers in Policyland that they’re waltzing on the deck of the Titanic; as a culture, they’re convinced of the complete superiority of the event, so they cannot countenance adjusting to others. Many don’t even recognize the value and abilities of those who do LD or PFD, to say nothing of IEs. So nothing changes. I remain sympathetic to their difficulties in finding rounds, but cannot do much else other than sympathize, and suggest subversively they give LD a whirl, or take a weekend and do Public Forum. I’m not going to start a policy program of my own, certainly.

On top of that, the expense of debate tournaments is amazing; our MFL events still cost $5 to attend, from the smallest Novice tournament to the State tournament. Debate events, however, can run up from $40-75 an entry, easily. As far as I can tell, debate is expensive because debate is expensive, and everyone’s passing the money around in greater amounts. It’s also expensive because travel is the norm, given the difficulty of finding those policy rounds especially. That effect too keeps new schools away; new programs are consistently willing to blow $5 on a day of trying debate or speech, but raise the tag to $75 and then you’re talking money; without a pre-existing, successful debate team in place, most folks aren’t going to bite. Most new programs are going to be creamed at first, until they gain some traction; they’re not going to continue to pay their $75 to get creamed week in and week out, but $5 for a year or two and that’s worth sporadic success until you can get traction.

With spiraling gas and air travel costs, however, the logic flips. I wonder if the debate community isn’t in for a severe retraction in the coming years, with former national circuit programs unable to travel, standing isolated amidst their local neighbor schools they ignored and kept out for years, not due to hostility but the inherent nature of the events we run now. PF will continue to flourish in Massachusetts, and I bet LD would grow given the big schools’ needs to host more local tournaments. But that will be the end of Policy, once and for all. An event cannot survive in the long term, or even maybe the short term, if a smart young lady in a tiara can’t judge it or even appreciate it. Adapt or perish.