Category: politics

I made some charts of the (Varsity) LD speaker points at Yale and the Bronx:

When you’re under that kind of pressure and strain, you start mercilessly prioritizing and looking at your life.   At least, I did. It’s a refreshing exercise, to be recommended when you have far lesser reasons to do it.

In the last year I looked around my life and realize I do a lot of unrewarding crap entirely out of a sense of tradition and obligation.

Speech has been my major diversion and my major activity for most of my adult life.   I’ve been involved at the highest and the lowest levels, which are remarkably similar.   I’ve run Nationals, I’ve coached champions, I’ve coached teams that bombed and failed, and I’ve cleaned up the cafeteria after the tournament is done.   I’ve built up and run several of the best tournaments in the Northeast, perhaps even the country.     I’ve changed extemp, and changed what students learn in extemp; hopefully I’ve made it much more rigorous and interesting.   I’ve done a lot, for a part-timer.

What the last year has brought into sharp focus, however, is that I’m tired of it, bored of it.   I’ve been identified as a rare commodity: someone in speech who has my organizational act together.   I have the temperance to run big events: organized enough to keep them running, but free enough to not allow obsessions over minor problems derail tournaments.     You need an apathetic brand of OCD to be a good tournament director.     But I’ve been around long enough that my responsibilities piled up; since I’m someone who can get things done, lately I’ve been doing little else.

Running the state league was Not Much Fun.   I did it for two terms in a row, which is twice as many terms as anyone else has done in a while.   It’s essentially an ocean of expectations offset by a puddle of resources.   Change is difficult there, especially changes that would have made the league easier to run.   Instead, the Board is dominated by the same tired agendas that boil down to who gets which trophies and why.   Several of the people were willing to go to any length to achieve those agendas.   It became depressingly constant, and I don’t need it.   There’s a lot of good in the state league, but the people running it don’t get to experience a lot of it.   And I’ve realized, there’s not much good I can do with it anymore.

Running invitational tournaments is better, as you get to do whatever you want to.   But attending coaches also treat you as if you owe them something, when I decidedly do not.   To some degree, the speech world doesn’t deserve well run tournaments, because t0o many of its members do their utmost to make them impossible to pull off.   In debate we talk about how the same 2% of schools cause 98% of the problems; in IEs there are far far more trouble-making programs.     The tournaments were worthwhile and the work I did do was more immediately realized.   So I’m going to cut back, not leave altogether.   I found an eminently able successor to handle Columbia in Joe A.   I’m also skipping Princeton this year, having already formed a committee to take over.   A permanent solution for Princeton still awaits, but we’ll do right by it.

Penn remains a good weekend for a great cause, and Yale is my premier tournament, so I’ll keep those for now.

And finally and hardest, speech coaching had lost a lot of its appeal.   The kids were great and fun like they’d always been, but I began to dread speech itself.   I spent a whole year not really wanting to go to practice, even though I usually had a good time once I got there.   I’d mastered extemp, the speech event I do best; but it’s been years since I’ve seen a new idea out there that wasn’t mine first.   I have an image in my head of what extemp should be, and coaching at this point is not creation, but teaching each student to approximate that Platonic ideal to the limit of their ability.   There’s not much joy in that, once you’ve done it a dozen or so times.

Once a coach has really mastered an event, often they’ll stay in it to rack up a ton of hardware and feel good about themselves through their students.   If we expanded and aggressively recruited and had 20 extempers on our squad, we’d almost certainly have at least a few students who could be nationally competitive every year.   We could have an empire.   But I’m not that kind of person.   Trophies are cheap in more ways than one; they’re not worth the effort.   To some degree in speech, most of the education is realized in making a bad freshman into a good sophomore.   After that level, the rest is just ever more precious refinement; the educational differences between a national champion and a kid who breaks their senior year aren’t that great.   At that level, it’s more of a talent difference.

I coached and did this to learn myself, create, and grow.   And I’d stopped doing that.

So I was ready to stop coaching speech.   I wrote a note over the summer, strangely so far not replied to, asking for a quiet end.   It was too quiet — some of my old students don’t seem to know the score.     I left behind a solid group of extempers and a dizzying array of senior PF debaters.   And now at last I’ve come public.   I’m an ex speech coach.

I didn’t want this to be a Big Shocking Announcement with a bunch of tearful goodbyes, because I haven’t ever viewed myself as institutional.   Every year I asked the question “do I want to do this again?” and had to make the choice to continue, rather than it being automatic.     I’ve never had great loyalty to any particular school or program, not even my own alma mater — because I feel that excessive school loyalty is corrosive to education.   If coaching and help from me could make a difference to a kid who happened to be born in another school district, it’s not in my nature to withhold them.   Ultimately being part of an institution isn’t what I want out of forensics, and being a part of an institution is the only thing that would be left for me in speech.   So I bade it goodbye.

But this is not, as it happens, a complete goodbye.

You know, every year when I start putting together the Yale tournament, I go through a few irrational moods. The week before Yale, I totally dread it; that’s the moment where the tournament’s size, scope and complexity are most clear, but the details on how it’s going to work exactly are most unsettled.   It always passes as I get into the week before.

Two months before Yale, I always worry about registration. The worries are twofold; what if everyone suddenly secretly hates me and the tournament will be 50% smaller than last year. At the very same time, totally without cognitive dissonance, I worry that the opposite will happen, and the tournament will suddenly expand by 50% and I’ll have no idea how to manage it all.

Well, guess what:

• Congress 111
• Dramatic 150
• Duo 56
• Extemp 101
• Humorous 123
• JV LD 124, 16 WL
• Oral Interp 132
• Oratory 118
• Parliamentary Debate 21
• Policy Debate 35
• Public Forum 121, 60 WL
• Varsity LD 161, 43 WL
• Totals 1276, 96 WL

That would be 1470 total students. Dear God.

Now, that’s not what the final numbers will end up. We’re working on a different venue for PF so we can hopefully at least clear off at least some of that waitlist. VLD and JVLD will stay stable; going beyond 160 leads to badness with breaks/competition. And Speech and Congress (which had waitlists until today but we found more on-campus rooms for them) will likely shrink through the usual last minute attrition.   Depending on how much they shrink, we’ll have to expand the initial break a bit, especially in DI; breaking 150 to 24 is brutal, especially so early in the season.

Unfortunately, with Yale being as large as it is, it’s grown to inhabit multiple venues.   That means that the attrition in speech can’t go towards admitting more students in PF.   These numbers still represent easily 30-50% higher registration numbers than we’ve ever seen at any point during Yale registration.   Furthermore, many events (VLD and PF in particular) hit their caps and in PF’s case blew past the previous tournament registration record on the second day of registration.

I moved registration up to August 1st this year in the hope that I could spread out the registration at least over a week and people didn’t have to pull the Midnight Vigil to get their spots in.   It didn’t work.   It’s doubly irritating that I’m sure that some of those registered debaters aren’t actually firmly committed to coming, and many on the wait list would be 100% committed to come if given the chance now, but won’t be able to if I admit them off the list the Tuesday before the tournament.   I wish there were some way of running registration such that the people who were totally committed to coming had priority over those who haven’t figured it out yet but want to grab a slot just in case.   Right now the first-come first-served system rewards first those teams whose coaches are on the ball, which isn’t the worst approximation, but isn’t good by any means either.

But as it stands, there’s no way for me to know who is who.   Some tournaments (VBI, Glenbrooks) solve that problem by requiring advance payment before registration; that’s a good way to know that someone is more than casually committed to attending.   But with Yale happening early in the year — it’s the kickoff tournament for many of its attendees — I doubt that requiring advance payment is feasible.

So that’s the story for now.   It’s going to be a fun tournament; despite the growth, we’re going to offer 5 prelims in speech instead of 4, and will probably (depending on the final numbers) be able to finish it in 7 time slots instead of the former 8.     We’ll have the much sought for 7th prelim in LD (and possibly, no promises here, but if it grows enough and we get the rooms we may hold a 7th in PF as well).   Plus there’s the atmosphere of Yale in late September; it’s the perfect time of year to be outdoors in New England.   It’s the start of the year and the first time you see many of your fellow forensicians, at the point in time when you’re least sick of them.   The kids are getting back into the groove too: it’s the first major tournament for most of them, so the strive for it — success at Yale may be a barometer for a good year; but doing poorly is more of a kick-in-the-pants incentive to get to work than an individual tragedy; it’s early, and some very good kids just aren’t ready yet.   So you can gain, but you can’t really lose; it’s no one’s last chance to get to the TOC or whatever.   That means you rarely have a competitive Cloud of Doom hanging over the tournament.

Maybe this year I won’t dread it the week before.   But maybe not.

Some quick thoughts:

• Today is the platonic ideal of a summer day.   High 70s, clear and breeze, the perfect temperature if you’re wearing shorts or if you’re wearing pants, scattered puffy clouds by day and none at night.   Right now I’m sitting on the deck watching the sunset and Venus shine in the west.     The weather can suck a lot in New England, but there’s nothing like these jewels of perfect days anywhere else.
• Evidently there exists a band whose entire repertoire consists of songs about the lead singer’s breakup with my sister.   It’s knowledge like that that gives big brothers insomnia.
• In the spirit of not letting anyone get too complacent, I’ve decided to start screwing around with Public Forum at the college tournaments more.   We’ll start with giving 4 minutes of prep time at Yale this year.   It was suggested by email and the reasons made a lot of sense to me, so here we go.   It’s clearly spelled out in the invitation and on the website, so I’m waiting to see how many people will react like it’s a Great Big Surprise.
• Speaking of the sister, she’s in Vietnam at the moment.   If there’s a coup, chances are we can blame her.
• I need to be better about staying in touch with friends.