I’ve come to realize that most of my job in running college-hosted forensics tournaments is the judicious granting or withdrawal of permission for the hosts to engage in mindless panic attacks.
But the underside of that rock was lovely
So I’ve been on hiatus lately. I know. I expect the last post goes a long way towards explaining things, but time and life do pass on.
I just sent out about four dozen emails to various and sundry folks. It’d look more responsible and on top of things if it weren’t for the fact that most of them had been sitting in the old inbox since June & July. Eep.
The new look tabroom.com is going all right. There’s the usual whack-a-mole of error messages and weird corner cases, but the brushfires didn’t burn for too long. It’s altogether too bad that my largest tournament is also my first and thus gets to be the guinea pig, but that’s the nature of the schedule. The new interface will take some getting used to, but I think it addresses two pressing realities better. The first is that schools don’t all live in one league, but register across league borders all the time; it makes that easier. The second is that the number of leagues using it is going to continue to grow; it’ll scale better on the new layout.
And now, we’re a month away from Yale and a week and a half away from the MHLI. I suppose I should, you know, plan some cirriculum. We might have as many as six or seven coaches from the MFL going down to Bronx for the event.
That’s all. Just wanted to signal to my three readers that I’m actually alive and kicking and will be doing things soon. But right now it’s midnight and, erh, I should get some dinner.
Eulogy
Grampa always valued education more than anything else. But he was not an educated man. He wasn’t a stupid man, or an ignorant one. Throughout his life, he was always curious and hungry for knowledge. He read all the time, and above all loved history, both of the country and of the family. We couldn’t go to a new place without Grampa trying to drag us to some battlefield or fort. He learned constantly, and strongly believed that education makes a person. So the fact that I went to Harvard, I think, made him prouder than anything else. He never stopped talking about it.
A lot of people at Harvard also think that education makes the person, but there it can be more sinister and snobbish. Since it’s supposedly the Best College in the World, it’s very self-satisfying for folks to tell themselves that a person only matters if they have a degree from an ancient institution, and everyone else is simply a peasant. Most of them lived all their lives around privilege, and don’t know real struggle; they think two exams on the same day is the toughest challenge in life. Those that don’t come from privilege often forget where they came from, and turn their back on their homes and families as much as they can.
But I never would have been there without my grandfather, both through his generosity, and his example. A geeky little boy with big glasses who wanted to read everything might not have kept up with it without knowing his big fireman grandfather was doing the same thing. And once I got there, I knew that you didn’t need education to make the world a better place. Grampa made the world a better place all the time; it’s practically all he did.
He was born into a very tough world, but instead of looking out for himself, he always tried to make things better for others. His brothers and sisters had little more than each other and their remarkable mother, and Grampa always took the worst of it onto himself. His own family life wasn’t perfect — he had had no one to teach him how to be a father — but he always strove to be the best he could be, never neglecting his family, always making sure they had enough even when times were hard. He made us all as Leblancs better, and this extended family was so important to him. We came close to not doing the Fourth this year, and I thank God that my cousin Rhonda did it anyway, even though her life was busy and hard at the time, and she probably shouldn’t have. That gave his wider family a chance to see him one last time, without knowing it. Most of my friends don’t understand how a family this large and extensive can even know each other, much less get together on a regular basis. But many of his nieces and nephews saw him as a second father, and Uncle Lester and his brothers and sisters kept us together. He made his city better, serving for 15 years as a firefighter, and then as a small businessman in neon signs, real estate, and God knows what else. He was instinctively friendly, and would strike up a conversation without effort wherever he went. He made his country better, serving in the Army in Korea and Germany. We all know his patriotism knew no bounds.
So I could never turn my back on any of that, when I was at Harvard and people there assumed I came from an awful, terrible past simply because I don’t have wealthy ancestors. But I had something better. I had a grandfather and the family he helped create for an example and a support. He may have been proud of me going to Harvard, but I am prouder to be a Leblanc, and to be his grandson. We could all do well to live like him, always making the world a better place. The only time he ever made the world a worse place was when he left it.
Lester Joseph Leblanc Jr, Jan 21, 1931 – July 22, 2009.
Civility
You know, there’s nothing like a summer night in New England. We don’t get too many scorching ones, and at night it’s even more rare to feel the heat. Tonight I’m just sitting on the deck of the Sapphire, writing the EXL camp book by the light of a citronella torch. There aren’t many bugs, but I like the torch anyway, for the pagan sort of light it casts. It’s one of those nights where the blue and the sounds and the just-enough wind are such perfect conspirators in making one stop and think. The deck right now only wants for one more torch, a bottle of fine scotch, and a few people to talk of weird things.
Reading Menick’s blog lately in full torrent mode has been difficult. One because I go for my daily dose of bile and get all this other crap instead, that I used to skim over elsewhere. I get what he’s trying to do, but I can’t say as I like it. Content of different types should be easily separable; the paradigm of the web involves being able to slice off what’s of most use to me without having to wade through the rest. That’s why I get my news from RSS these days, not television.
Plus, the policy posts bug me, if only because when they start talking about counterplans, namely CP, I automatically assume that Menick’s talking smack about me again. I expect Vaughan has this same problem with JV LD.
This weekend is camp move in weekend. The first year I was excited for camp; last year I was stressed for it, mostly because I was juggling too many other things to really dedicate my full attention to any one of them. That last year’s camp succeeded so well is probably a testimony to my own relative uselessness. However, this year I’m feeling calm. We’ve made a great schedule — it gets better every year — and I’m teaching fun things. Better yet, I have outlines of most of my classes already written, either from having taught them before, or from having time this past month to sit and craft them. Some are even fully written, for the long elusive camp book that I’ve finally given some serious attention to this month. Writing English is much more restful than writing code, which either works or doesn’t, with a hard edge.
I’m liking this new balance of life, and much looking forward to this sort of pace in the coming season. A big event, then a few weeks to a month off to make the next event happen the way it ought. Quality, not quantity. It has reinforced my thinking on a number of fronts, especially regarding to some of the tournaments I was on the edge of continuing with or not. I want to be able to sit on the shores of Lake Shirley in a thick pile carpet and taste the relaxation that to this day I still only know when I’m back home in Fitchburg. The weather smells better there, and the rain is cooler and more real. I miss the fireflies I’d see right now, and the Milky Way, and the birch trees. So I should see them more this fall.
But for now, sitting in my favorite spot outside above, during my favorite time of year for it, some more writing.
The PF Paradigm
PF is caught between two opposing forces. The first is community-based lay judging. This feature helps avoid the false-logic style of debating that infects policy and LD to some degree; you end up with long chains of evidence that are fine for a flowpad, but the end result is simply untrue — increasing health care coverage in the US will not lead to nuclear war between China and India. An experienced policy judge will vote for those logical chains; it’s what the event is for. A lay judge will not, and that’s what PF is for; the art of convincing an ordinary person.
However, that’s a decidedly messy proposition. There are as many was of convincing people out there as there are people. Some folks think that there’s a golden “Way of Debating” that works for all audiences, but that’s simply not true. Anyone in the business of convincing people will find out as much about their audience as they can; jury profiling, focus grouping, the works. Being able to argue in front of many different audiences is one of the finest skills of the persuasive art.
In LD and Policy, judge adaptation is handled by means of a relatively tight community, but beyond that, a paradigm: a short statement of preferences and values that the judges supply to the community. Some folks don’t like paradigms, thinking they enable the tendencies in debate they don’t like — like folks creating their own rules, or voting for non-traditional and sometimes completely unrealistic argumentation — but I think they’re more a reflection of the diversity of debate. Unless all judges see everything exactly the same, which was never true — otherwise, why have panels in elim rounds? — a paradigm is an essential tool to enable effective argumentation through judge adaptation.
Currently adaptation in PF takes the form of walking into the room and saying to oneself: “She looks middle aged and female, so I’ll assume she’s a mother.” In forensics terms, “Mother” rates somewhat below “Mouth-breathing troglodyte.” Those who have reared teenagers may not be especially surprised that teenage debaters place parents among the stupider, less developed life forms. But shockingly, sometimes that’s not true: debaters might end up arguing, say, economics in simplistic and moronic terms “for the Mommy judge”, without realizing that said Mommy is also the chair of the economics department at Columbia. It happens. In Boston, with all the colleges around here, it happens a lot.
However, with the ever-cycling judge pools in PF, paradigms as we know them are impossible. A PF judge doesn’t know how to express his or her preferences in a way that a debater will understand. If you ask them to write one, they’ll stare at you blankly, and rightfully so; how can someone who hasn’t seen a debate express what their preferences are?
So my notion is to introduce the PF Paradigm Questionnaire. It’d be a simple sheet of maybe 10-12 questions of various ways a judge might like to judge, designed to both allow debaters to figure out a judge’s paradigm, and to prompt the judges to think more explicitly about how and why they’re making their decisions. The questions can be “I prefer arguments based on 1. Sources & Evidence . . . 5 mixed . . . . 10 Independent reasoning.” It could ask about speed versus presentation, background knowledge, and so on. It could ask if the judge prefers teams to be vicious jackals or wussy teddy bears in cross-ex.
Then the judges carries their sheets around with them during the tournament, and shows it to the two teams before each round if they want to see it. If a judge’s beliefs should change as a result of growing experience after a few rounds — “oh, I didn’t realize how fast ‘fast’ meant!” — they can alter it, or get a new sheet between rounds.
That would allow PF to keep the carousel of community judging, to teach the fine art of convincing people who are not debate judges, without cutting debaters off from knowing next to nothing about their judges and essentially yelling into a void and hoping some of it sticks. The tricky bits are coming up with the questions on the questionnaire in a way that’d be helpful to the debaters without steering the judges into decisions, and figuring out how best to train them.
Thoughts?