6. Progress

Well, working with the Lex program so far has been a blast.   I remember, of course, that the reason I committed so much time to this activity in the first place was because it was fun. It’s easy to lose sight of that, as responsibility replaces engagement for so many coaches as time goes on.   And indeed, someone does have to take responsibility for the various mechanics of tournaments and teams.

Now I’m happy to tab the odd tournament and help out here and there, certainly.   I’d rather tab a well run tournament that judge at a horrible mess of one, as a rule.   But I have to focus more on having fun in this activity.   I don’t get paid to do it.   In fact, I refuse to get paid to do it, despite having been offered payment for it many times.   The only time I’ve taken money out of forensics was at camp, and even there I made less than the two weeks of work I skipped for it would have paid me.

But the main iron in the fire for me in debate is to have fun.   I wasn’t having fun for the last few years, and it had nothing to do with the people around me, but everything to do with what I was doing and what I wasn’t doing.   I could have probably just left altogether and been OK, but so far I’ve been happy with where I am and what I’m doing; coaching great kids who’re having some real good early success, doing interesting work in interesting new fields, and so on.   Hell, I already have three cases in my head ready to be written depending on what Jan/Feb is.

So it’s going to be a tough year; 2010 will grind on for much longer than the end of December, for me.   It will not always be easy.   I may yet have to abandon a tournament, suddenly, midstream, and horribly.   But I’m glad, at last, to have rediscovered the fun in it.

So that ends this exercise in navel gazing.   I’ll be back to sporadic posting about nothing in particular.   But I’m glad to have this out there, for the people who read it to see.   It started so negative, but ended on an up note, I hope.   Which is what I hope for the year, the decade, the life to come.   I’ll have down days and sad days and days where I can’t do much.   But at the very least, in a perversion of the Kantian logic in debate rounds, I can begin to treat each day as an end unto itself, not as a means to serve another day.

5. Finity

One of the things that bored me about speech was how uncreative it was.   It’s very difficult to get speech kids to try new things, and go in different directions.   Extemp speeches all sound basically the same; oratory too.   You can walk into any round of IEs and know immediately what event is being performed.   It should be difficult to tell the difference between oratory and extemp, just for listening; but it’s not.   You can spot a DI a mile away.   The house style rules all.

PF at local tournaments has caught the same bug; an essential conservatism behind the approach settles on the event.   It’s hard to get kids to break out of the mold and run interesting new things; you always get the same response: “I don’t know if The Judges will go for that.”   The Judges, a group of people who may be at their first tournament ever, nonetheless have preferences and convictions about debate that are so deep they cannot possibly be overturned by weight of reason and logic.

But we talked about that lost interest already.   I had already made the decision to leave speech based on it.   But it informs the second choice that I made.

Last spring, I had committed previously to tabbing at the TOC in the PF division, and traveling with Lexington to the tournament once it became clear my own debaters would not qualify.   The TOC is a gentle tournament, and a lot of fun, without the sleep deprivation and bad meals that seems par for course at the IE culminating events.   And it’s only the second time all year I get to see nearly everyone I know and like from the world of debate, after Yale.   So even with everything else I was juggling and canceling, I went to the TOC.

It was a highlight of my year.     Firstly, I remembered that I do like and get along with coaches in debate a great deal more easily than speech coaches.   Lynne has always said that I truly belonged in the dark side of debaters, and she is proven right.   It’s a different mindset among debaters; as I said before, debaters are introverts and people about the mind, like me; while speech people can’t think without talking at the same time.   Speech people can’t imagine a world without trophies to motivate; debate people (with one glaring exception in northern New York City…) for the most part don’t care nearly as much.   Speech in MFL has gone the way of everyone’s a winner — explain having 16 events with tons of mutual overlap otherwise — while debate is still fiercely selective.   The real focus then is not necessarily on hauling home trophies.   Discussions in the hallway are about what people are running, not nebulous conversation about how good a given competitor is.

The TOC felt much more comfortable to me.   Among speech coaches, I’m a little out of place; here, I was among My People.

I also got to be the asshole who introduced the K into Public Forum debate.   The NFL had been selling topics — or in their parlance, allowing outside groups to sponsor topic areas, which is a   distinction without a difference.   A rich, shadowy group that apparently doesn’t like unions much — gosh, who’d’ve thunk a group opposed to unions might have a lot of money to burn — had bought the TOC topic, along with a conveniently timed Cato Institute report on the same subject.     So, I suggested the Lexwegians attack this fact in their cases directly; tell the judges to vote for public unions and against moneyed interests as an external factor in the debate.   It’s a critical position, but the PF rules define kritiks as “off topic arguments” while banning them, and this criticism was about the topic itself.     So it didn’t meet the definition of the K which the PF rules attempt to ban.   Besides, bans on certain types of arguments in debate depend mostly on the judge enforcing that ban, which is spotty at best.   The poobahs of debate don’t appreciate that fact enough when they attempt to legislate away argument styles they don’t approve of.

To my surprise, the Lexwegians ran with it, full speed.   I’d have had to threaten kids raised in our local circuit with a taser to get them to run a K.   I was half joking when I suggested it to the Lexwegians.   But no, they ran it with relish.   And was it a lot of   fun.   We were the talk of the tournament, though neither team cleared.   Conversations stopped when the kids entered the room.   We were working on something new and different — could a K be pulled off in the constraints of PF?   I think we could have done much better had I worked with the teams earlier; we may well have cleared with a K in Public Forum debate.   As it was, we came very close.

I returned energized and refreshed.     I remembered judging and coaching real circuit debate, in LD.     I also realized that if I gave up on forensics entirely, I’d miss socializing with the coaches of the Northeast, even if I kept with Yale, Penn and the two Lexington tournaments.     Debate coaches in particular are generally non-annoying non-screwups, and net helpful, not harmful, when you need things done.   So these aren’t people I want to scope out of my life.

Debaters also tend to go to fewer tournaments, of larger scope.     There are less dead weight weekends, tournaments that are practice to the kids and don’t truly matter to the adults.   I actually like judging debates, which is more active and engaging, even as I avoid the passivity of IE rounds.   The intellectual rigor of the activity is certainly like nothing in IEs except for extemp.   I’ve never been a artistic events coach, and don’t have the talent for it.   In extemp, all your coaching work is general and anticipatory; in debate, coaches get to be directly involved, since they’re an active part of pre-round prep, not forbidden from the sanctum of the prep room.

Also, I was afraid to give up on tournaments altogether.   The blessing of tournaments is they’re all consuming.   The entire time you’re at a tournament you’re engaged by it, working on it, being part of it.   Novices quickly learn that bringing homework to a tournament is utterly futile; you’ll never crack your math book.   There are vast swathes of underused time in tournament schedules, but somehow the tournament fills them up with debate stuff.     That’s often a minus for people’s lives.   But right now I need to take a weekend every month and be fully engaged by something other than normal life.   At a tournament I get 2-3 days to not think about Things.   Given that’s all I do all the rest of my life these days, I’m good with that.

So I had dinner with Sara, and she asked me if I wanted to coach LD and PF at Lex.   And I said yes.

So how’s it been?

4 Actions

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.