A few days ago, I watched an HBO documentary called "Resolved." It's a documentary about High School Debate team competitions and tournaments. It was interesting for me to watch because believe it or not, I was on my High School debate team, so it brought back alot of fond, and weird memories. It's funny to think that through most of my High School years, on almost every Saturday I was wearing a suit, participating in speech and debate tournaments. I was quite a catch (at least that's what my mom said :).
What I liked about this movie is that it fairly accurately portrayed what High School Cross Examination (CX), policy debate was like. Most CX debates are absolutely indecipherable to outside observers. 2 teams of two debaters would enter a room wheeling anywhere from 2 to 8 rubber-maid tubs full of files, all clipped from books, magazines, and newspapers, all dealing with the topic at hand (the chosen topic for the year the movie was filmed was about racial profiling). The first team would stand and present a plan to support the topic. The other team would try to argue that the first team's plan is inherently flawed somehow and that the disadvantages of their plan far outweigh the advantages.
What was unique about CX debate was that over the years, it had turned into more of a speed reading and speed speaking competition rather than a policy debate. Unless you were trained in CX debate, there's no way you could follow it. A debater would literally stand and read his plan and arguments at somewhere between 100 to 150 words per minute. The whole debate sounded like the old 80s commercial with the Micro-Machine Man (remember that?). Why'd we do that? Cause somewhere along the way, some debater figured out that since there was only a short amount of time alotted for each side to present his arguments, if he could speak fast enough, he could flood his opponent with more arguments than his opponent had the time or ability to respond to. All uncontested arguments were won by default, so whoever had the most arguments (even if they were poor arguments) won. Since this post is getting alittle long, I think I'm going to split this into two parts. So stay tuned for the conclusion on my second post. Trust me, it's interesting. In the mean time, check out this youtube clip of a high school debate student practicing her debate skills, and you'll see what I mean . . .
Comments