Humor

I don’t remember why I took Debate 101 my  sophomore  year of high school.

I’m not an enthusiastic public speaker nor was I inclined to become one. Perhaps I was interested in learning advanced debating techniques. Then I’d be ever triumphant in the important debates of daily life:

“You think you deserve that last piece of pizza? Let me tell you why you don’t.”

The explanation may be much simpler:

• my experience suggests that teenagers aren’t terribly bright
• my later experience as a junior and senior suggests that sophomores aren’t terribly bright either

Entering Debate 101, I was:

1. a teenager and
2. a sophomore.

The evidence, however circumstantial, is sufficient to convict.

If I was interested in learning debate technique, I was disappointed: the debate class wasn’t designed to systematically instruct students to taking apart their own position, reassemble it into a stronger position, and then use their new strong position to destroy their opponent’s position. This debate class was designed to cull skilled debaters out of the general student body who would then go on and compete in regional and state debate competitions. Some technique was dispensed in miserly bursts but mostly it was one instruction-free speaking assignment after another. Those with innate debating instinct went on to join the school team with all the glory that bestowed (not much). The rest of the class had to live with disappointment (again, not much).

One debate format we were taught, Lincoln-Douglas (LD), was roughly similar to this format laid out by Wikipedia:

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