Scrimmages

On Thursday we innaugurated a new year od debate scrimmages with The King’s College in Manhattan. We meet up usually about every two weeks and try to have as many practices as possible at once. We’ve been doing this for almost four years now, and it is easily one of my favorite debate activities of the year. I think meeting for an event that mimics competition without all of the elements of a competition hones and revitalizes students that get a bit halcyon in their approach to practice, debating the same teams with the same judges week after week. Debating someone from another institution puts you on alert due to the unfamiliarity and newness of the round. It also gives you a chance to debate against those not from your “school,” as it would be termed in martial arts, and confront a different style. This helps you fall out of bad, tired, and familiar habits that you pick up debating people from your institution all the time. I encourage everyone to add it to your practice. Tomorrow morning we head to Adelphi University to do it again, this time with a whole day of practice debates for all experience levels. There will be opportunities for adjudication practice as well – something that should be sen as central to the development of great debating strategy. Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Wednesday Morning

Debate practice on Wednesday morning seems to be going alright. I think the new schedule here (M-R and T-F classes with Wednesday open for labs) has given us some valuable practice time at a different hour of the day. I like realism in practice. Time, space, and geography as well as physical conditions in which you debate are also critical to improving one’s debate discipline.

Finals at Binghamton

This house would make all middle schools and high schools single gender. This is an amazing judging panel. Chris Croke, Sydney
Mary Nugent, Cambridge
Louis Iwu, Oxford
#edu
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Semifinals

This house would ban the creation of artificial life. Congrats to those who made it! It was a wild motion and some interesting arguments were made.