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Interesting... when I did high-school debating (in Canada), we never argued both sides of the same resolution. I did Parliamentary style almost exclusively thou

by felixc 16y ago

Interesting... when I did high-school debating (in Canada), we never argued both sides of the same resolution. I did Parliamentary style almost exclusively though, but did make it to various Canada-wide and North-America-wide tournaments. Were you perhaps out on the West Coast? I heard there was something of a schism in style there, and as an East-Coaster myself I never really met a lot of people from out West at the tournaments.

ghshephard 16y ago
British Columbia, 1986-1987, Went to the Provincial Finals in the Grade twelve, mostly, I suspect, because I actually managed to get to all the preliminaries and score enough points. The people (a lot of them from private schools) at the at the finals were really, really good. Our poor teams from Kamloops, and 100 Mile house didn't know what hit us. We actually had both approaches to debating in terms of advance preparation, one time we knew in advance, and so had time to prepare (My high-point in those debates was using the text from Catholic Doctrine that demonstrated abortion was acceptable if the purpose of the operation had some other principle medical reason - hard to do if you haven't had a chance to do the research in advance), but we also had one in which we showed up without knowing the topic in advance - the rationale I thought, at the time, (or had been told) was so that we didn't have to do even _more_ studying around mid terms. Maybe it was just a debate format. We definitely switched back and forth (sometimes with just a 5 minute break in between) between the Pro/Con on each topic - though the way to weasel out of actually doing that was the way it was done by the debaters cited by the OP in the prison - they didn't argue against providing education to Prisoners directly, they argued against the entire educational structure. We also switched from Cross Examination to Parliamentary throughout the debates, and some significant time was spent on what was an acceptable level of "Heckling" during Parliamentary, and what would be scored down as abusive. I recall in the finals one effective debater absolutely devastating her opponent with "Point of information - I'd like to note that the honorable member opposite has his fly down." :-) [Oh, and just to make things insanely difficult, there were a few round thrown in that were in _french_ (And this is in British Columbia) - I'm not sure how you got selected into that round, presumably some bilingual competence was a pre-req]

by felixc 16y ago

ghshephard 16y ago

British Columbia, 1986-1987, Went to the Provincial Finals in the Grade twelve, mostly, I suspect, because I actually managed to get to all the preliminaries and score enough points. The people (a lot of them from private schools) at the at the finals were really, really good. Our poor teams from Kamloops, and 100 Mile house didn't know what hit us. We actually had both approaches to debating in terms of advance preparation, one time we knew in advance, and so had time to prepare (My high-point in those debates was using the text from Catholic Doctrine that demonstrated abortion was acceptable if the purpose of the operation had some other principle medical reason - hard to do if you haven't had a chance to do the research in advance), but we also had one in which we showed up without knowing the topic in advance - the rationale I thought, at the time, (or had been told) was so that we didn't have to do even _more_ studying around mid terms. Maybe it was just a debate format. We definitely switched back and forth (sometimes with just a 5 minute break in between) between the Pro/Con on each topic - though the way to weasel out of actually doing that was the way it was done by the debaters cited by the OP in the prison - they didn't argue against providing education to Prisoners directly, they argued against the entire educational structure. We also switched from Cross Examination to Parliamentary throughout the debates, and some significant time was spent on what was an acceptable level of "Heckling" during Parliamentary, and what would be scored down as abusive. I recall in the finals one effective debater absolutely devastating her opponent with "Point of information - I'd like to note that the honorable member opposite has his fly down." :-) [Oh, and just to make things insanely difficult, there were a few round thrown in that were in _french_ (And this is in British Columbia) - I'm not sure how you got selected into that round, presumably some bilingual competence was a pre-req]