28
October
The National Federation of High Schools has announced the final two topic candidates for the 2012-2013 season. Based on voting by states and national organizations, the candidates are infrastructure and immigration: Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its transportation infrastructure investment in the United States. Resolved: The United States federal government should [...]
26
October
You can now get a team dropbox account, so that your debate files count towards the team accounts quota, not the individual members.
26
October
At the Meadows tournament this weekend we will be recording a joint podcast with The View From Tab. If you have questions you would like answered, put them in the comments here.
24
October
I started this post a long time ago but the draft got deleted and I never really came back to it. Recently, however, I have been annoyed again by the chatter about how stupid the offense defense paradigm is. So, I am going to attempt to part explain/part defend the theoretical usefulness of seeing things [...]
20
October
Each year at the Heart of Texas Invitational at the St. Mark’s School of Texas, a senior debater is selected to deliver a speech at the Sunday morning breakfast. Quarterfinalist teams, Sophomore Hoe Down competitors, and their coaches are invited to attend. This year’s speaker—joining an impressive list of previous honorees—was Evan McCarty from Mountain [...]
19
October
John Tierney, a science columnist at the New York Times, wrote an interesting article in the New York Times Magazine about the concept of “decision fatigue”. In it, he explains that the mental work required to make decisions is substantially more taxing on our brains than we typically think and that the associated “decision fatigue” [...]
19
October
Each year at the Heart of Texas Invitational at the St. Mark’s School of Texas, two special awards are given to deserving students and coaches: the Senior Speaker Award and the Acolyte Award. This year’s recipients were Evan McCarty of Mountain Brook High School and Jon Voss of Glenbrook South High School, respectively. A list [...]
17
October
Kids Today will be a new feature where I don my corduroy pants, cardigan and slippers, grab a Werthers original and complain about why debaters today are terrible and everything was better back in the day.
12
October
The October issue of Rostrum—the National Forensic League’s monthly magazine—features an excellent article written by Josh Brown of Homewood-Flossmoor High School about competing in policy debate as a “small school” (pdf). It echoes much of the advice provided by Dr. David Cheshier in a 2002 Rostrum article, “How Very Small Debate Programs Can Achieve National [...]
12
October
So far this season, 55 bids to the Tournament of Champions have been earned by policy teams at qualifying tournaments. Rohan Sadagopal of Edina High School and the University of Minnesota is curating a comprehensive record of this year’s bids using a publicly-accessible Google Doc. To make it easier to remember, you can access the [...]