23
May
After researching U.S. military presence for the last year, how well do you know the topic? Students have undoubtedly learned a great deal during the course of the season, but how much do they actually know about U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the rest of the topic countries? I thought it would be [...]
23
May
Daniel Gaskell has recently released ScreenOCR, a front-end for the Tesseract engine that lets you instantly OCR anything visible on your screen with a single click. After playing around with it, ScreenOCR gets my official stamp of approval: it’s the easiest way yet to OCR text so that it can be copied into your debate [...]
23
May
The Tournament of Champions has released the list of approved qualifying tournaments in policy debate for the 2011-2012 season. Changes reflected in this year’s list include: Meadows (NV) moved up from semifinals to quarterfinals Scranton (PA) moved up from finals to semifinals Stanford (CA) moved down from quarterfinals to semifinals Capitol Classic (MD) added to [...]
17
May
There hasn’t been the lead in discussion of the disclosure award this year that there was last year, which to me is ironic because I believe the graduating class last year did a much more thorough job of updating their wikis than several schools this year. Part of that may be that I found this [...]
15
May
In order to qualify for the Tournament of Champions, debaters must earn bids at invitational tournaments by reaching the designated elimination round. The most competitive TOC qualifying tournaments award bids to all teams in the octafinals. Since the 1996-1997 season, the number of octafinals bid tournaments has remained between seven and ten: Greenhill, St. Mark’s, [...]
14
May
The 3NR Podcast is back with a new hour-long episode that is divided between two conversations: one looking back on this year’s Tournament of Champions and the other looking forward to summer institutes. Our TOC debriefing covers a lot of ground from the schedule to the judging pool to the class of 2011. The student-centered [...]
11
May
There are too few women in debate. There is no shortage of potential explanations for this phenomenon-lack of female role models, difficulty in a confrontational learning environment, sexism in society, lower speaker points or even male students in the activity. While many have attempted to pinpoint the causes, there is a group I’ve been working [...]
9
May
When going through some old materials as part of an ongoing effort to construct an institutional history of the National Debate Coaches Association, I came across the following short piece from Alan Coverstone. The longtime debate coach at Montgomery Bell Academy, Coverstone wrote this article for the NDCA Newsletter in April of 2003. It is [...]
9
May
With the exception of a few early adopters, many high school debate teams have completed or will soon complete their first season of paperless debating. From a coaching perspective, one of the most difficult parts of the transition has been managing the distribution and organization of our squad’s files. Looking forward to next year, improving [...]
8
May
Can’t get enough TOC history? “More TOC Trivia: Non-Seniors in the Elimination Rounds Since 1995” prompted several questions that merited a follow-up. How many non-seniors have reached the final round of the TOC? The semifinals? How have they done as seniors? Who has won the most elimination rounds at the TOC? The answers (again, since [...]