Mediocre commitment

In the first place, in case there's any doubt, I am grateful for the existence of competitive debate. I owe much of what I do successfully as an educator to the years I spent pouring most of my energy and attention into winning debates. Here are just a few of the ways my debate heritage has imprinted my teaching:

• It taught me to be quick on my feet. Very little has built my credibility with students like my response latency.
• It taught me to be assertive, and, when necessary, nonverbally dominant. I have very few classroom disruptions, and the handful that happen rarely drag out for more than a few seconds.
• It made it very real to me that college students can excel, can work hard, can understand unbelievably complex concepts if they're given the right motivation. That certainty is the best inoculation against low expectations.
  

The list is nowhere near exhaustive. The one bonus I noticed most recently was the way debate prepared me to grade essays. I spent most of my debate career giving the first negative constructive (if you never debated, don't worry about the lingo), which means I was exposed over and over again to the experience of needing to pick apart someone's arguments on first hearing, under enormous time pressure. Every speaker in the debate has to do that, but the first negative is the first speech where actual line-by-line clash occurs, so there's a certain first impression to the picking apart, a certain feeling of getting first crack at the other team. In some debates, my immediate reaction was "Oh gosh, is that all they've got? That's pathetic. A good hard sneeze will make them fall apart." In others, their positions were solid enough that I had to rack my brain, but I managed to come up with winnable arguments in opposition. And in some debates, what they said was of such high quality and made so much sense that I had to shake my head and think, "Too good. I'll make noise, but it doesn't look good for us." So last week, when I was grading essays, I noticed that my brain was back in first negative mode, and where I could sneeze hard and make the essay fall apart, that was a C or below; where I could think of some things to pick apart, but on the whole what they said was sound, that was somewhere in B range; and when, as happened encouragingly often, I thought "Too good; nothing much to quibble with," then those were A essays. And the fact that I was using that gear in my brain both sped up the work and gave me an extra layer of enjoyment, based on my association with those past experiences.

So, as I started out by saying, debate has done a lot to equip me for what I do today. And, since I'm the communication faculty at NCU, and the director of forensics to boot, it would seem that I'm in a position to give that learning experience to the students here. Unfortunately, there are a few complications.

To begin with, virtually no one here has a background in debate from high school. Some college debate teams put a lot of time and resources into novice development, teaching college students how to debate from ground zero on up, but other college debate teams mostly recruit successful high school debaters and teach them from moderate experience up to the top of the activity. All the programs I worked with during my full-time coach years fell into the latter category. Honestly, my debate coaching instincts don't run in the direction of teaching novices. I can certainly do it -- I taught novice labs at summer workshops for a number of years -- but it's much harder work, and doesn't come at all naturally.

To continue, learning how to debate is very time-intensive, and I've rarely seen college students as overcommitted and overstretched, time-wise, as I have at NCU. Students here do a lot of stuff. Scholarship athletes hold key posts in student government. RAs also do small group Bible studies. And I've got at least two team members who have both of those sizable commitments on their time, not to mention classwork, before they ever set foot in my office to practice anything forensics-related. If we had a critical mass of students who could find two two-hour blocks of time each week in their schedules, then I could devote one to bringing them up to speed on vocabulary, concepts and strategy, and we could use the other each week for a practice debate. But I may as well wish for the moon.

Not only that, but the very best format of debate isn't practiced at all in this part of the country. I debated NDT/CEDA, which is research intensive and involves the most actual speaking time of any of the formats: nine minute constructives, six minute rebuttals, two for each debater in each debate. But tournaments in that format simply don't happen much in the Pacific Northwest, and not at all in Oregon. Instead, people here do parliamentary style debate, which is different in a number of ways. In parli debate, research is certainly a good idea as preparation, but it's against the rules to cite the research directly in the actual rounds. This means it's often a winning move simply to make things up. (I didn't originally write "things.") Plus, the speeches are both fewer and shorter, which makes the debates more shallow. The benefit for time invested is a lot less; not zero, but a lot less.

Last complication: I got out of full-time coaching back in the last century because I was burned out on it. I started debating in the fall of 1982, and seventeen years later, I had simply worn out the game. In my last year of coaching, all the debates were sounding alike. I was no longer getting excited about any debate, even debates that I could tell were extremely good. In the years since, the burnout hasn't worn off; I'm glad I debated, and I'm glad I still have the skills and confidence that debate built into me, but I'm not especially interested in being actively involved in debate. It's devilishly hard work for me to get the slighest bit motivated to think, or otherwise work, on debate.

Put all of that together, and I'm left in a terrible dilemma. The students' commitments mean they don't have time to reach a certain minimum level of competence before going to compete, and they compete in a severely limited format, and I'm not as much help as I could be both because my coaching gifts aren't geared to novices and I don't really want to be thinking about debate. We put in token effort and make token appearances, but there are days when I think if we're going to do it in this half-hearted, halfway fashion, we may as well invest that time and effort in something else. But every time I have that thought, I remember what an enormous difference the opportunity to debate made in my life, and I feel an almost painful wish to give that to my students.

To be honest, dealing again and again with this dilemma is about the only part of my job that I genuinely don't like.