Tubs

So Menick says it’s a no-brainer to allow computers in Extemp prep, and supports it with largely two arguments: one, cheating would not be rendered any easier than it pragmatically is, and two, manipulation of internet-based resources is a more valuable skill these days, so reality demands it.

I’ve gone on, perhaps at too great a length, about my objection to computers in Extemp Prep before, but Menick inspires me to add a couple more.   He’s an inspiring guy that way.   He says it’s silly to worry that students will bring in unauthorized material, particularly pre-written speeches, because that horse is already out of the barn: he asserts that it’s quite simple to include pre-written speeches and notes in an Extemp tub.

Spoken like a guy who’s never run a prep room.   Extemp tubs are single purpose devices, and thus no grey areas exist — if there’s anything illegal in a tub, the game is up.   So it becomes easy to just blanket-ban all student-written material, and be on the watch for the same.   I’ve checked tubs before, found illegal material, and booted students from tournaments for it.   I suppose a student could try really hard to make a pre-written speech look exactly like a Lexus printout, but you know, word gets around, and certain students and certain teams get checked more vigorously than others.   As a result, including pre-prepared speeches in tubs is simply not done all that much, especially when compared to other source-based abuses.

However, a laptop is not a single purpose device.   The laptop will contain the students’ extemp files, their Biology homework, their pathetic attempts at love letters to that one Girl Extemper, all in one vast concatenation.   One could ban the presence of any files besides Extemp files, and therefore eliminate the practical benefit of allowing laptops in the first place.   Or one must accept that there’s going to be a lot of student written material, easily accessible, in the prep room. Further, the student can access that far more easily on the sly, reaching into the bowels of the hard drive, and then click it away very rapidly when the prep monitors walk around; much more so than stuffing paper back into the tub.

The second brand of cheating is even more direct: once you involve the internet, you uncontrollably involve the coach.   The Gods of Extemp aren’t Google; they’re the coaches who can outline a better speech in 2 minutes than students can in 2 hours.   I’ve been coaching this event for 14 years now, and I can do it better than my students — that’s why they’re students.   The point of the activity is not how well I can extemp, but to discover how well they can, and to make them better at it.   But, plainly speaking, a lot of coaches are driven more by the need to win.   I don’t see that giving them such easy, and unprovable, way to talk to students during prep won’t turn into temptation and contamination.

Lastly, the curricular impact of this extends far beyond the cheating.   Jim says “Why shouldn’t we develop great extempers whose success is predicated on their ability to manipulate internet resources, a life skill, versus their ability to manipulate tub resources, an irrelevant skill in a computerized universe?”     First, most of the sources in a tub nowadays come from the internet already, so it’s not like internet research skills aren’t being taught.     But more critically, he misses the point.     The point of extemp is to develop students whose success is predicated on their ability to manipulate their own brain and knowledge.   An extemper who relies on their sources and evidence, no matter the derivation, is already failing.   Evidence tubs should be hard to use, because the goal is to wean students off of them, and make them into clear, independent thinkers.   Your brain is the fastest database you own, and developing and expanding it is the best investment we can make.

A computer offers the most nefarious shortcut imaginable: the search function.   Have you ever used Spotlight on a Mac?   It indexes the contents of all your files, and is remarkably easy to use.   So take an extemp question, dump the key terms into Spotlight, and there’s your pre-written extemp speech; the thoughts and the words of all the thinkers in your database, strung together topically.   Copy them down — no need to understand them! — and you’re ready to go.   Search functions thus remove the necessity to walk into an extemp round with prior knowledge of a breadth of subject areas, and thus remove the purpose of the activity altogether.

Knowing the stuff would be easier still, but it’s not enough easier that the bulk of students will need to develop that internal database to succeed.   In short, more kids than currently would get away with bullshit.   And enough already do; internet sourcing has proliferated the use of sources at the expense of both academic integrity and the student’s ability to think.   Sure, the Great Extempers will need to know that stuff — but why should we even allow moderate success to come to those who don’t know anything at all about the world, but sure know how to run a database search?

I’d much rather just keep hauling tubs.

If I owe you an email…

It may be on the way already.   The last two weekends were the capstones of my six-week long sprint of doom, with each tournament being progressively more difficult and taxing on yours truly.   I let a lot of thing fall into the “I’ll deal with it after April 4th category.”   Then JV came up for a fancy dinner & visit Sunday, and that left me tired and nonfunctional on Monday.   So I took an internet break, and a forensics break, for a couple of days.   If you don’t like it, then by all means, dock the pay I get for forensics related activities.

I came back to an inbox full of progressively more panicked emails from folks trying to register for NCFL nationals; it appears that I’d typed a > when I wanted a <, and therefore people with too many judges were being warned, not folks with too few as should have been.   Who brings too many judges to a tournament, anyway?

But at any rate, I had intended to write a recap of the MA State Debate tournament tonight, together with getting around to posting the results of the same, and then MA State Speech tomorrow, and then perhaps after that talk about how Menick is predictably utterly wrong when it comes to computer usage in Extemp, but then my friend Greg from high school texted me and offered me a ticket to the Red Sox game tonight.

So screw you guys, I’m going to Fenway.

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: Recap

So let’s sum it all up.

Apart from some of the inherent problems with various events, which are not the tournament’s own fault, discussion of the Harvard tournament inevitably settles on its flaws and faults, not on its strengths.   The strengths are the strengths of the community; the sense of seeing a large gathering of forensicators in one place at the same time.   I didn’t actually get to see even half the folks I wanted to share a meal with going into the weekend, and yet my weekend was still relatively full.

The tournament staff itself is cut off.   I can sort of blame the tournament staff for it, even though it’s not really a failure of intent; they do try to ferret out advice and feedback.   However, they’re simply not part of our community.   The directors and staff have their own tournaments every other weekend of the year.   They go to exactly one high school tournament, and that’s their own.   No amount of soliciting feedback and advice is going to make up for that, especially since coaches and people are lazy and most won’t bother to commit their thoughts and ideas to email or paper.     Even when they do, the directors are left not really knowing whose feedback and advice to follow.

The crucial advantage to the college tournaments I help run is not so much me, as the fact that many other coaches are stupid gracious enough to help me run them.   I provide continuity and the portal in; but the posse I belong to matters most.   Each of the four college tournaments has many experienced tabbers who hail from multiple states; thus at Yale you have folks who collectively run about 150 other tab rooms during the course of a school year, and thus have access to all the lessons and experience that carries.   The college hosts have a chorus of ideas, a parliament of sorts, who can help them sort out the spurious complaints from the real, the good ideas from the failed.

The Harvard staff have one over the other colleges, in that they’re grownups, who come back year after year the way I do.   So that helps, but it’s not a total solution.   Their links to the community are weak, and so they’ve failed to adapt to a lot of best practices for simple lack of seeing them in action elsewhere, and refining them week after week the way our posse does.   And at a certain point I have to stop apologizing for people who are making a quarter million dollars off the community, and still don’t provide enough food in the judges’ lounges; our PF judge almost starved on Saturday evening as a result.

So the answer is to go elsewhere.   Since there aren’t many tournaments that weekend, I may as well put one of my own there.   UPenn has been squeezed out of a clear date in October by the calendar again.   They have to compete against someone, and I’d rather compete against another college tournament than a high school hosted affair.   Of the 130 schools that attend Yale, a good 60 or so do not go to Harvard.   Lots of folks I know stay home rather than go to a tournament at all.

So we’re going throw ourselves a nice, gentle, inexpensive affair down in Philadelphia next year on President’s Day weekend.   The money goes to Perspectives, which teaches LD debate to inner city high school students, thus keeping it in the family.   I know it’s bold, but I think we can make it work; for my PF entries, at least, attending UPenn will actually be cheaper than going to Harvard, even including hotel costs.   I wish the Harvard tournament well for what it is, and indeed hope the competition, for what it’s worth, helps them improve as well.   But next year, we head southwards.