Master (De)bators
Not that this would surprise any of you, but I did high school debate for three years. Really though, four, if you count the freshman Public Speaking class where, after my final - a speech in which I expounded for ten minutes upon the merits of Sisqo's "The Thong Song" - I was recruited for next year's debate team, and signed up for the class without a choice.
My forensics teacher/coach was one of these tough-but-fair assholes who was consistently on your ass, yet, was also one of the few adults in that panopticon of bullshit who - as much of a punk as you were - you couldn't quite stomach not respecting. My first year, I did this terrible event called Congress. They put you in a room and you ran a debate on individual policies and legislation which you would propose (i.e. "Resolved that the U.S. military strategy on the Middle East be 'Jews or Nuke 'Em' as applied to nuclear proliferation"). The Congress sessions would run for five or six hours; there were 20 kids in a room, the kids ran the room, one unfortunate parent had to judge it. Congress is the bottom-feeding of debate, as I soon learned: all the greenhorns, all the idiots, the hicks and mouthbreathers. Fuck that.
My next year I did what's referred to as Parliamentary Debate (now they changed it completely, it's some other dumbed-down single-resolution bullshit. At one point it was actually called Ted Turner Debate, which is astute, because the rule-change encouraged all of these bombastic idiots and psychopaths to sign up for it). The one kid who came up with me from said freshman Public Speaking class was the school's B-Team quarterback. By the time he was my partner, he was the second-string Varsity quarterback. We had the worst goddamn high school football team I'd never seen. I think I went to a game once, and it was really depressing. Anyway: I was a funny Jew, and he was a quick-on-his-feet Goy. It worked out, somehow.
Parliamentary Debate gives you 15 minutes to prep on a topic you're given for each individual round, each team gets three speeches, and one team gets to make a closing argument without being interrupted by cross-examination, which you can otherwise rudely subject the other team to for the entirety of the debate. Oh, and also, if you had an audience, they were encouraged to knock their desks or boo you, depending on what the situation called for. Needless to say, it was the least civil event one could partake in, and eventually, amounted to a bloodsport by the time you got to that closing argument. I loved it. Soon enough, our first-string quarterback got fucked up due in no small part to a particularly diminutive offensive line, which my partner now had to deal with. So I was out a partner and, when you lose your debate partner, you don't team up again, because you will no doubt hate whoever they pair you with. Also, I wasn't about to do Policy debate, which required both a new teammate and a great deal of intensely extensive research. And possibly some Debate Camp. Policy was the "hardcore" debate, and is now the most popular form. But no way in hell was I going to Debate Camp. Those kids were freakishly good, and really, unless you did Policy, camps were for suckers who didn't know about Jewish summer camps. Suckers.
He does not want your life.
So I did what we called L/D, or "Lincoln-Douglas Debate." You wrote your case based on that month's resolution, and you supported a value for and against with a respective criterion that helped execute said case and a few contentions using philosophical imperatives to back it. I would get stoned the night before, spend two hours bullshitting my way through guys like Kant, Maslow, and Bentham (who I still refuse to take the time to care about or understand), wake up the next morning, ritually eat an Egg McMuffin while downing some black coffee, and debate five or six rounds, the Egg McMuffin and coffee excitedly leaving me between rounds. It was a rush, I promise.
I was both a stoner and a disgrace to anybody who worked hard at their cases, which were most people. I was what they referred to as a "lay" debater: ignore the "flow" of the argument (or the by-the-numbers scoring that encourages technical debate) and go straight for the judges, who were often parents. At one point, I even went so far - while debating a topic regarding government spying powers in times of war - to wear a tie splayed with an American flag and a gigantic eagle's head on it. Swear to god. Looked something like this. That kind of shit was sadly eaten up. Don't ever mistake Nevada for a blue state. Anyway, I ditched the tie towards the end. I started to feel hollow.
I eventually blocked out state my senior year - i.e. I'm actually a state champion at something that doesn't involve a civil disobedience charge - on a resolution debating "the spirit of the law over the letter." We also unseated the team that had won the last twelve years, and my name went on a wall in a classroom at Silverado High School. That wall is probably now painted over - the year after we graduated, Coach Misel left for an administrative position. The team fell apart, and the program, which mostly relied on fundraising and had little district funding in the first place, lost all funding and was disbanded, insofar as I know.
This is sad because in high school, I was all but destined to be a total dork who receded into his bedroom at night to make mixtapes and discover bands like Suicide and Bad Brains who I pretended to like but didn't actually like until at least five years later. And I still was that person, for all intents and purposes. But, in all sincerity, debate gave me the confidence to be a total fucking asshole, and to not take any bullshit from anyone without at least making them feel like an idiot, first. It made my high school career exponentially more fulfilling - from being totally and completely unfulfilling - and it wasn't just me.
A large segment of our team were on with us because they were taking the class for the "easy credit," and it was a wide category: kids who had parents who worked graveyard shifts; kids who would've coasted through high school, gone to dealer school, and shuffled decks for the rest of their lives, whose enormous potential was completely untapped; kids who had yet to walk out of sixth period and shuffle home with any shade of the magnanimous or sense of self in a school overcrowded by about 2,000 warmish bodies. When you did Varsity, you got a Varsity letter - I never wore it, because I hated those ugly-ass jackets (teal and purple; also, who needs a Varsity jacket in Las Vegas?!) - and to some people, that meant something. It should have.
Two movies came out on DVD recently about high school debate that are better than good; this is important because there are plenty that aren't. The first was a Sundance darling called Rocket Science, brought to you by the guy who directed the great documentary about the other famous schoolyard-intellect throwdown, Spellbound.
Rocket Science isn't perfect: like most indies to come from Sundance nowadays, it's a little too quirky for its own good at some points. But it is the story of a kid with little to no talent for this kind of thing, tapped to try and give it a go. It has all the crucial elements of a good debate movie (a genre being invented in front of your eyes): the up-from-nothing shykid story; the "legend" whose talent is as misunderstood by him/her as it is everyone else; the beautiful alpha-girl who stands in opposition to almost every girl you'd ever meet in high school (brilliant, smart, assertive, confident, smoker), who would just as soon break your heart as she would hand your ass to you in a round (played stunningly by Anna Kendrick); the public school vs. prep school competitiveness; the ambivalent family who doesn't understand debate (most people don't), etc. It's also about teenage love and existentialism, and it's a decent take on it. Again, not perfect, but a little difficult to resist.
Better yet, though, is the superior documentary Resolved, which might still be available on HBO On Demand.
Resolved spares us none of the complexities of high school debate and its very real implications: the costs, both figurative and literal; the vast differences in capability in regards to wealthy schools and schools in lower-income neighborhoods; the intense work put into debate, the students who're truly passionate about it - complex individuals for 18 year-olds, far more than you or I ever were - and strong evidence of the very real fulfillment I argued for earlier. I don't want to ruin too much, but if you watched the trailer, you saw kids speaking at supersonic speeds: that's called "spewing" or "spreading", and it's a common policy debate tactic. The idea is to fill in as many words (and thus: arguments) as you can within your allotted time.
It's bullshit, and it takes away from the intellectual discourse at the heart of debate. Two kids from a lower-income school - Louis Blackwell and Richard Funches of Jordan High, in Long Beach - see through it, along with the mounds of evidence better-funded teams use to their advantage during debates that they don't have access to (you think a public school is going to pay for a Lexus-Nexus subscription? Ha!). They're underdogs like hell, but they take the California state championship, and go on to compete for the motherlode (which I never even wanted to attempt; I tried to quit after every year) at the Tournament of Champions. And when - against the odds - they get there? They take the entire system on. They run a three-contention round om which they speak (relatively) slowly, and turn the debate into something it never was and probably never will be again: an argument about the nature of discourse, and the heart of the "sport" itself. It's the kind of intellectual rogue spirit that all of us could take something from, the kind that should be championed in public education more often. The fact that it comes from two kids from a dilapidated public school in Long Beach makes it that much sweeter. They're the heart and soul of this film, they're not in it enough, and they're unbelievable to watch. If you don't have faith in the youth any more, this might help restore a little. They make a near goddamn perfect case for it, and high school debate at large.
My forensics teacher/coach was one of these tough-but-fair assholes who was consistently on your ass, yet, was also one of the few adults in that panopticon of bullshit who - as much of a punk as you were - you couldn't quite stomach not respecting. My first year, I did this terrible event called Congress. They put you in a room and you ran a debate on individual policies and legislation which you would propose (i.e. "Resolved that the U.S. military strategy on the Middle East be 'Jews or Nuke 'Em' as applied to nuclear proliferation"). The Congress sessions would run for five or six hours; there were 20 kids in a room, the kids ran the room, one unfortunate parent had to judge it. Congress is the bottom-feeding of debate, as I soon learned: all the greenhorns, all the idiots, the hicks and mouthbreathers. Fuck that.
My next year I did what's referred to as Parliamentary Debate (now they changed it completely, it's some other dumbed-down single-resolution bullshit. At one point it was actually called Ted Turner Debate, which is astute, because the rule-change encouraged all of these bombastic idiots and psychopaths to sign up for it). The one kid who came up with me from said freshman Public Speaking class was the school's B-Team quarterback. By the time he was my partner, he was the second-string Varsity quarterback. We had the worst goddamn high school football team I'd never seen. I think I went to a game once, and it was really depressing. Anyway: I was a funny Jew, and he was a quick-on-his-feet Goy. It worked out, somehow.
Parliamentary Debate gives you 15 minutes to prep on a topic you're given for each individual round, each team gets three speeches, and one team gets to make a closing argument without being interrupted by cross-examination, which you can otherwise rudely subject the other team to for the entirety of the debate. Oh, and also, if you had an audience, they were encouraged to knock their desks or boo you, depending on what the situation called for. Needless to say, it was the least civil event one could partake in, and eventually, amounted to a bloodsport by the time you got to that closing argument. I loved it. Soon enough, our first-string quarterback got fucked up due in no small part to a particularly diminutive offensive line, which my partner now had to deal with. So I was out a partner and, when you lose your debate partner, you don't team up again, because you will no doubt hate whoever they pair you with. Also, I wasn't about to do Policy debate, which required both a new teammate and a great deal of intensely extensive research. And possibly some Debate Camp. Policy was the "hardcore" debate, and is now the most popular form. But no way in hell was I going to Debate Camp. Those kids were freakishly good, and really, unless you did Policy, camps were for suckers who didn't know about Jewish summer camps. Suckers.
He does not want your life.I was both a stoner and a disgrace to anybody who worked hard at their cases, which were most people. I was what they referred to as a "lay" debater: ignore the "flow" of the argument (or the by-the-numbers scoring that encourages technical debate) and go straight for the judges, who were often parents. At one point, I even went so far - while debating a topic regarding government spying powers in times of war - to wear a tie splayed with an American flag and a gigantic eagle's head on it. Swear to god. Looked something like this. That kind of shit was sadly eaten up. Don't ever mistake Nevada for a blue state. Anyway, I ditched the tie towards the end. I started to feel hollow.
I eventually blocked out state my senior year - i.e. I'm actually a state champion at something that doesn't involve a civil disobedience charge - on a resolution debating "the spirit of the law over the letter." We also unseated the team that had won the last twelve years, and my name went on a wall in a classroom at Silverado High School. That wall is probably now painted over - the year after we graduated, Coach Misel left for an administrative position. The team fell apart, and the program, which mostly relied on fundraising and had little district funding in the first place, lost all funding and was disbanded, insofar as I know.
This is sad because in high school, I was all but destined to be a total dork who receded into his bedroom at night to make mixtapes and discover bands like Suicide and Bad Brains who I pretended to like but didn't actually like until at least five years later. And I still was that person, for all intents and purposes. But, in all sincerity, debate gave me the confidence to be a total fucking asshole, and to not take any bullshit from anyone without at least making them feel like an idiot, first. It made my high school career exponentially more fulfilling - from being totally and completely unfulfilling - and it wasn't just me.
A large segment of our team were on with us because they were taking the class for the "easy credit," and it was a wide category: kids who had parents who worked graveyard shifts; kids who would've coasted through high school, gone to dealer school, and shuffled decks for the rest of their lives, whose enormous potential was completely untapped; kids who had yet to walk out of sixth period and shuffle home with any shade of the magnanimous or sense of self in a school overcrowded by about 2,000 warmish bodies. When you did Varsity, you got a Varsity letter - I never wore it, because I hated those ugly-ass jackets (teal and purple; also, who needs a Varsity jacket in Las Vegas?!) - and to some people, that meant something. It should have.
Two movies came out on DVD recently about high school debate that are better than good; this is important because there are plenty that aren't. The first was a Sundance darling called Rocket Science, brought to you by the guy who directed the great documentary about the other famous schoolyard-intellect throwdown, Spellbound.
Rocket Science isn't perfect: like most indies to come from Sundance nowadays, it's a little too quirky for its own good at some points. But it is the story of a kid with little to no talent for this kind of thing, tapped to try and give it a go. It has all the crucial elements of a good debate movie (a genre being invented in front of your eyes): the up-from-nothing shykid story; the "legend" whose talent is as misunderstood by him/her as it is everyone else; the beautiful alpha-girl who stands in opposition to almost every girl you'd ever meet in high school (brilliant, smart, assertive, confident, smoker), who would just as soon break your heart as she would hand your ass to you in a round (played stunningly by Anna Kendrick); the public school vs. prep school competitiveness; the ambivalent family who doesn't understand debate (most people don't), etc. It's also about teenage love and existentialism, and it's a decent take on it. Again, not perfect, but a little difficult to resist.
Better yet, though, is the superior documentary Resolved, which might still be available on HBO On Demand.
Resolved spares us none of the complexities of high school debate and its very real implications: the costs, both figurative and literal; the vast differences in capability in regards to wealthy schools and schools in lower-income neighborhoods; the intense work put into debate, the students who're truly passionate about it - complex individuals for 18 year-olds, far more than you or I ever were - and strong evidence of the very real fulfillment I argued for earlier. I don't want to ruin too much, but if you watched the trailer, you saw kids speaking at supersonic speeds: that's called "spewing" or "spreading", and it's a common policy debate tactic. The idea is to fill in as many words (and thus: arguments) as you can within your allotted time.
It's bullshit, and it takes away from the intellectual discourse at the heart of debate. Two kids from a lower-income school - Louis Blackwell and Richard Funches of Jordan High, in Long Beach - see through it, along with the mounds of evidence better-funded teams use to their advantage during debates that they don't have access to (you think a public school is going to pay for a Lexus-Nexus subscription? Ha!). They're underdogs like hell, but they take the California state championship, and go on to compete for the motherlode (which I never even wanted to attempt; I tried to quit after every year) at the Tournament of Champions. And when - against the odds - they get there? They take the entire system on. They run a three-contention round om which they speak (relatively) slowly, and turn the debate into something it never was and probably never will be again: an argument about the nature of discourse, and the heart of the "sport" itself. It's the kind of intellectual rogue spirit that all of us could take something from, the kind that should be championed in public education more often. The fact that it comes from two kids from a dilapidated public school in Long Beach makes it that much sweeter. They're the heart and soul of this film, they're not in it enough, and they're unbelievable to watch. If you don't have faith in the youth any more, this might help restore a little. They make a near goddamn perfect case for it, and high school debate at large.
Labels: Debate, Go Skyhawks, High School
