Dipped toes and cannonballs: Debate edition

Excited. Nervous. Filled with trepidation.

All accurate descriptions of what my emotional state was before the parliamentary debate tournament on Saturday.  Although I did this sort of debate in high school, the comparison between the two is comparable to the difference between an original Ford Model T and a 2010 Lamborghini.  The fundamentals are the same, but so many things are changed in translation.

Like country of origin and doors.

In high school, sophisticated debate is when both teams manage to fill their times, stay on topic, and refrain from name-calling during round.  Solvency, inherency, topicality, kritik, plans, debate theory, or even what sort of debate the topic dealt with (policy, value, fact) has very little play into a typical high school round.  For one, many competitiors haven't reached that level of maturity/logic.  For another, the judging pool tends to be made of parents, bus drivers, and people off the street - a group that, while they may understand logical and rational argumentation, generally is unfamiliar with competitive vernacular, especially if students are spreading (speaking waaay faster than normal speeds).

In college, this all changes. 

Judging pools tend to be full of debate coaches and former competitiors.  Students tend to be more mature and are held to a higher standard (and get Internet during their preparations).  This all adds up to making parli, to use a collequialism, "OMG-super-freaking-holy-crud-on a stick-difficult-hard".

So nervous-ness?  To be expected - especially since I had a partner even more green than me and only 2 half-practice sessions to refresh me/gain an idea of what my partner's and my strengths and weakness were. 

First round: Our disjointed-ness showed.  I was PM (the prime minister or head speaker) and sucked quite badly at both of my speeches.  I was uncertain and gave up control of the round almost instantaneously.  My partner, the MP did quite well in defending ground in her speech, but that was exactly it.  We defended, not attacked.  We lost.

Second round: The topic was heavily skewed negative - the side that we had.  I acted as the LO (Leader of the Oppisition or the other side's head speaker), but dominated the speech.  This may have had to do with my confidence on the resolve, the general lack of confidence of the other team, and my practice within the first debate.  I was  choppy, but looked - and felt- as if I knew what I was doing.  Due to our burden's press argument (arguing that the other team needed to prove that their argument was based on facts - which they couldn't), we won.

Third round: The other team flipped the resolution around so instead of arguing against "The Estate Tax is Unfair", we argued against "The Estate Tax is Unfair (because it is too low)".  We did a decent job of refuting their points - not brilliant, but for not being mentally prepped for such a turn, we did alright.  One of the most interesting things about this round was that our judge was a 3rd year law student going into tax law.  We were careful not to get into a factual debate, but just hit values (it was "unfair" to those that created their wills to take the money from those that they intended to give it to and hand it over to the government).  Due to our defeat of their points - and a fumbled last speech by the PM - we won.

Fourth round: This was a fun round, but ultimately was lost due to a confused definition.  I also did a bad job allocating time in my last speech as PM.  Essentially, we won all of the arguments except for the one that the judge decided on.

I feel much better about college parli now - especially since my partner and I are both ambitious and want to do better.  In addition, most of the stuff that we lost at was due to the unfamiliarity of different terms and speech roles.  My partner needs to work on organization, while I need to work on trusting my partner - in high school, I never had a partner long enough to where I could relax and start to trust their competency - especially when I had newbies as partners.  I just hope that I can relax to the point where I can start to do that with her.  Y'all will know when that point is because my blog post will be entitled "We kicked ass".