From the beginning of the year the Debate Club has been planning to host a Books and Cookies. Books and Cookies’ are presentations held by a member of the OSC community every wednesday at lunch time in the library, focusing on that person’s profession or interest. Mr. Luvinzu, the Debate club’s supervisor, thought that a Books and Cookies would be an excellent platform to show off the progress everyone in the club has made. My co-leader and I reached out to Ms. Lockwood, the librarian and scheduled a date- Wednesday the 25th of October.
We spent the two sessions of the ASA before the 25th preparing, choosing a motion and dividing into teams. I became of the two team captains, with a randomly selected group of other students including Vansh.
The motion Mr. Luvinzu came up with after discussing with the class was “Masculinity is dying, not evolving.” Initially I thought that seemed too presumptive, but I realized that masculinity is such a broad topic that a narrow motion is kind of needed- and as I discovered later, the motion isn’t that narrow.
At the beginning of the research process my team did not know which side of the motion we would be on. That meant that we formed arguments to both propose and oppose the motion. Initially I thought we would only have three speakers per team, but later we clarified we would have four. This changed how I structured our arguments.
Roughly what happened is that I outlined what each speaker would say, then the other people on my team chose which speaker they wanted to be and then elaborated and found examples to back up each argument. There was some confusion about if they could have their phone when talking, but I clarified the answer which was that they could have their phone while sitting down but not while giving their argument.
After some internal discourse, we chose which team would argue which side at the end of the session before the books and cookies, which because the ASA was on tuesday was the day before. This gave us a full night to plan and emotionally prepare.
The actual debate went really well. Because of poor communication with our peers most of the people who showed up were middle schoolers who were less informed on the topic, but still they were engaged. All of the speakers successfully gave their arguments and filled their time, and the discourse happened. It wasn’t quite as tactical or planned as more experienced debaters would manage, but it went pretty well.
I am happy with how this went. The Debate ASA still has work to do, but this was an excellent step.
The library recorded it, so here is the link.