From the beginning one of the ideas in the Debate club was that we would debate on contemporary issues. However, this got lost in a push to get good topics that had lots of stuff to engage with and not be too one-sided. The issue we kept running into is that when you really get down to it, most controversial issues are actually fairly one-sided when it comes to actual facts.
Two sessions ago, I let the -now much larger- class of participants in the ASA come up with a Motion. Much to my surprise, they went straight for a contemporary issue. By near unanimous agreement, they thought that the best motion would be Everyone has the Right to an Abortion. I was somewhat surprised, and I actually asked them if they would be comfortable arguing against that motion. They said yes, so the plan was laid out.
As I mentioned briefly, the Debate ASA got much larger for the new ASA block. This gave us an interesting opportunity- what if we did two debates at the same time? As it turned out enough people didn’t come to each session that we ended up going with a simply four vs. four debate structure. However, we did have a slightly different team structure while researching as a result.
We had one full session of research, but most people couldn’t make it because of classwork reasons. That meant that when it came to debating today, a lot of people were surprised and were disorganized as a result. They made it, though. They organized arguments and got into debating position. I didn’t end up debating with them, though. Aura couldn’t make it today so I had to adjudicate, and I tried to help both teams equally in research- although ultimately I think both teams needed more support than I could give.
The Debate itself (Pictured above) was incredibly short because people didn’t have enough prepared. It was over in fifteen minutes, which was somewhat disappointing, but I’m more happy that it worked at all. At the end I gave some (a lot) of constructive criticism, and Mr. Antoney added more suggestions, most notably that we spend next session researching persuasion and workshopping how you try to convince someone of something.
This didn’t end up being that big a thing, but still I’m glad it happened. I have been wanting to move towards a shorter researching portion for each debate, so basically we achieved my goal by accident. I think that if this was our baseline we can start getting somewhere.