Service

This year’s Yale Invitational was an exercise to answer the question, “Can Palmer run a major invitational tournament while mostly walking around in a relative fog and running at a rather low level of motivation?”   The answer, it appears, is yes.   The tournament ran fine, and the crack tab staff did their usual crack thing.   We had gloriously deep and quality judging pools, and a model for the tournament that has mostly fit and worked really well over the last decade.   The ballot scanning effort worked decently well despite a bug in the software which was my fault entirely — and the nice thing about a scanning system is when you screw up ballot sorting, you get to redo it, unlike with paper when the mistakes are eternal.   So even though I’ve been tremendously off my game — culminating in this awful cold this week that won’t go away, though it turns out it’s not swine flu — Yale went along just fine.

However, this year’s Yale was the one that has me seriously reconsidering my generosity towards allowing independent entries into the tournament.   I feel for independents, because it’s only by a very twisted and coincidental path of fate that I ever participated in forensics myself, and there’s more than a little “There but for the Grace of God go I” when I look at struggling programs that often are on the outside looking in.     Public channels in the forensics world will periodically express ineffective concern that the activity is only truly accessible in the fullness of its opportunity to a select few students, mostly white, suburban and wealthy ones.   Not even all suburban wealthy and white students have access, even.   The penetration of this form of education in the Northeast is very uneven.

But nothing seems to come of those conversations, because ultimately it points to a wider problem in society that we have very little influence or control over: education as a whole is underfunded.   It’s sad that only one high school out of ten has a debate or speech program, but it’s ultimately because high schools are kept permanently cash strapped and resource starved by a tax-averse society that tries to believe, often through the best efforts of our elected officials interested in staying our elected officials, that there’s some Magic Formula of Education out there by which we can get great schools on the cheap and not have to pay more into the common good to get more common good out.   Schools are expensive, and good schools more expensive still — but we’re democratically hiding behind these notions that evil teacher’s unions and bureaucrats and various other obstacles are what make schools perform badly, not simple lack of funding, because to believe otherwise would mean paying more taxes, and nobody seems to want to do that.

So only a few schools have programs and that won’t change until the shape of society itself changes.   What that does mean, however, is that some programs have folks who can contribute to the maintenance of the activity as a whole, and some don’t.   The latter serve as a hidden tax on the former — I run a lot of tournaments, and that’s a tax on my own students and teams.   I have finite hours, and they’re growing smaller — and so Newton South itself pays a bit to make Yale happen.   As does Scarsdale, and HenHud, and NFA, and University, and Ridge, and St Joseph’s, and Trinity…

So here’s the thing about independent entries.   They’re a pain in the ass.     They don’t read instructions, they don’t read the invite, nd they constantly are screwing things up.   I don’t mind when, say, a new coach screws things up, honestly, because I know the time I take to explain how things work to a new coach won’t be wasted — they won’t, unless they’re a blithering idiot, screw things up the next time.   Independents carry no such promise.   Easily 75% of the registration screwups and questions whose answers were in the invite this year were from independent entries — and we had less than 10 of 124 schools consist of independents.   And independent entry schools will never pay it forward.   They won’t be tab staff at Yale some year, as a new coach might.   They won’t ever do their part to make the community run.   Often they view tournaments as a transaction — I pay you money, you provide me service.   But that’s not really how tournaments work.   I’m not paid to run Yale, I run it because it’s worth doing — and the money itself goes forward to other tournaments and more debate, on the college level or the New Haven Urban Debate League.

So the more hassle and the more nonsense I have to put up with when I run tournaments means less time for my own students.   There’s a reason my debate teams never clear at Yale, though the extempers have had good success.   And the more I consider whether it’s worth it to give those 5-10 kids each year who have no team at their own school the chance to come to Yale.   It’s all good to claim that we should do everything and anything to provide students with fair opportunity, but that’s not exactly true — coach time and adminstrative time is a finite resource, and it may be best to conserve it where the payoff is small to spend it later where the impact on the community is better.

For now, I’m considering levying some ridiculous fine on anyone who asks a question whose answer is in the invite.   Good luck enforcing that one, I know.   But it’s tempting.

College Debates

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.