Not to be outdone by Mia, it was also Luke Stuttgen's birthday, Thursday. Happy birthday, Luke! What better way to spend your birthday than teaching debate!
Viewing entries in
Briefly
As the 2012/2013 Season fast approaches, remember to order your 2012/2013 Topic Analysis Books for LD, PF, and Victory Briefs' Policy Files. Ordering a subscription not only gives you a substantial discount when compared to purchasing the books individually, but also means that the books will be delivered directly to your email as soon as they are released. Follow the links below for more information.
2012/2013 Lincoln-Douglas Topic Analysis Subscription
Congratulations to St. Louis Park's Leah Shapiro for championing the 2013 West Des Moines Valley Mid-America Cup over Collegiate's Andrew O'Donohue. The decision was a 2-1 for Leah (Legried, Hymson, *Melin). Leah is coached by Christian Tarsney and Charles McClung, and Andrew is coached by Aracelis Biel and Mark Gorthey.
The Federal Aviation Administration says you'll be allowed gate-to-gate usage of most of your personal electronics.
Congratulations to Apple Valley sophomores Prince Hyamang and Sophie Ober for closing out Minnesota's JV State Tournament. Prince and Sophie are coached by Chris Theis, Ed Hendrickson, Josh You and David Quinn.
In the Novice division Kiley Eichelberger a junior from Chanhassen defeated Edina Freshman Annie Amen in the final round to win the Novice State title. Congratulations to both debaters. Kiley is coached by Zach Prax
Congratulations to Cypress Woods' Xixiang "Shawn" Xiong for winning the 35th Isidore Newman Invitational! In finals, Shawn defeated Greenhill's Mitali Mathur on a 2-1 decision. Shawn is coached by Heath Martin and Jared Woods. Mitali is coached by Aaron Timmons and Rebecca Kuang. Isidore Newman is a semis bid to the Tournament of Champions.
Congratulations to Collegiate's Andrew O'Donohue for defeating Scarsdale's Noah Thaler to win the 2014 Columbia Invitational!
More and more, there appears to be disconnects between judges and debaters on the virtues of using theory as a strategy practice. Theory debate has steadily garnered the reputation as a frivolous, unpleasant practice, labeled as a tool employed to garner “cheap wins,” a “crutch” for those who lack substantive debate skills, and even a mechanism to exclude underprivileged debaters from the activity.
However, I find that a lot of these issues are not inherent either to theory debate or strategic theory debate, but the way debaters run these arguments. While it may occur much less frequently nowadays, excellent theory debate does exist. The goal of this article is to establish guidelines to help debaters improve on theory debate, should they choose to engage in it.
Congratulations to Collegiate's Andrew O'Donohue for defeating Scarsdale's Noah Thaler to win the 2014 Columbia Invitational!
More and more, there appears to be disconnects between judges and debaters on the virtues of using theory as a strategy practice. Theory debate has steadily garnered the reputation as a frivolous, unpleasant practice, labeled as a tool employed to garner “cheap wins,” a “crutch” for those who lack substantive debate skills, and even a mechanism to exclude underprivileged debaters from the activity.
However, I find that a lot of these issues are not inherent either to theory debate or strategic theory debate, but the way debaters run these arguments. While it may occur much less frequently nowadays, excellent theory debate does exist. The goal of this article is to establish guidelines to help debaters improve on theory debate, should they choose to engage in it.
We know the coronavirus concerns are weighing heavily on everyone’s mind, especially as summer approaches, and we are sending our best to you and your families.
Swarthmore College has cancelled its summer programming until July 31 due to uncertainty about the duration of current public health requirements. LMU has moved its summer classes online, and we expect they will also cancel other summer programming through July. Because most colleges and universities seem to be headed in this direction, we expect that this will happen to most camps that are hosted in June and July.
- As a result, we are announcing the following changes to our summer 2020 offerings:
- VBI Philadelphia (June 27–July 10) and VBI LA Session I (July 12–31) will be held in a virtual format.
While we are still planning to host VBI LA Session II at UCLA (August 2-15) in-person, we are adding virtual labs for this session, for those who would like to participate in LA Session II, but would feel more comfortable doing so online.
For those already enrolled in Philadelphia or LA I, you will be receiving an email with instructions and additional details. For those interested in signing up for any session, you can REGISTER HERE.
While we are disappointed that we won't be able to run two of our sessions on campus, our team has been hard at work planning our virtual curriculum, and we are really excited about the new curricular opportunities furnished by an online platform. Not only are we confident that we can preserve—with some adaptation—the best elements of our in-person curriculum (such as in-lab synchronous drills, and extended one-on-one Q&A with instructors), but we are also looking forward to giving our students a whole suite of unique educational opportunities that were not possible with an in-person camp. For example, our new modular lab design will mean that students not only get the benefit of in-person drills with their own labs on how to give a round-winning rebuttal, but will also be able to watch, after camp, how other lab leaders, with different emphases and at different experience levels, covered that same content. We promise that no debate camp will have put in as much time and effort in developing a virtual curriculum as VBI.
However, if you want to maximize your chances of attending an in-person camp, we suggest that you sign up for VBI LA Session II at UCLA (August 2-15). It’s the mostly likely debate camp to operate in-person this summer. While not every camp has moved their June & July sessions online yet, we expect that host colleges will be canceling summer programing through July 31st to comply with state guidelines. UCLA is still planning to offer its in-person summer courses in August, so we remain optimistic about our last session of the summer. Our student life staff will be working with UCLA to craft policies and procedures to ensure that an in-person session will be held in way that maximizes student health and safety while complying with all government guidelines.
The 2020 National Tournament Lincoln-Douglas debate topic is, Resolved: The intergenerational accumulation of wealth is antithetical to democracy.
The 2020 National Tournament Public Forum debate topic is, Resolved: On balance, charter schools are beneficial to the quality of education in the United States.
A total of 310 coaches and 474 students voted for the resolution. The winning resolution received 59% of the coach vote and 58% of the student vote.
Congratulations to Lexington's Evan Li for winning the 2020 Tournament of Champions. In finals, Evan defeated Valley's Animesh Joshi on a 3-0 decision (Castillo, Davenport, Li). Congratulations to Strake Jesuit's Zion Dixon for being top speaker.
Full results and pairings can be found here. Links to livestreams of rounds can be found here.
Hi all! We need your help!
What
We need volunteers! As we are researching online education and developing VBI’s online curriculum, we are coming up with lots of ideas for how to run an effective online program. The problem is, we don’t really know which of them will work. Many of our ideas strike me as awesome (e.g. correspondence debate rounds), but we want to test them out before we build them into the curriculum.
And for each cool idea we want to test, our curriculum team comes up with two new questions that bear on how we design the overarching curriculum: How long can students stay engaged during online lab? And how well can instructors monitor student engagement? (I’m planning to ask some of our volunteers to jump on and off social media during instruction and will then test to see if the instructor can tell who is engaged and who is not.) How painfully awkward are our go-to icebreakers when done over Zoom? How many hours of synchronous online instruction are even effective over the course of a day?
Thus, VBI is looking for current high-school students who are interested in volunteering to test run various elements of our online curriculum as we continue development. You will try out different drills, you will attend various sample modules, you will test various online platforms that we are thinking about using for an online camp. Hopefully, you will get some top-notch free coaching and we will get regular and honest feedback about what is working and what can be improved.
How
If you would like to volunteer,please fill out this form (unfortunately,depending on the number of volunteers, we cannot guarantee that we will be ableto work with everyone).
Why
In the opening of Flower Darby’s andJames Lang’s book Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science inOnline Classes, they note that one unique challenge to online education is thatmost instructors have never experienced the “apprenticeship of observation.”Most teachers, before they ever start teaching, have spent decades learning ina physical classroom. They thus have a developed mental model of what classroomteaching is like, and more importantly, they know which of their teachers werebest and what it was that set them apart. It is this experience that mostteachers rely on when first beginning to teach others.
With online education, however, we“can’t fall back on the apprenticeship of observation” because we neverattended an online debate camp as students! Everyone is designing curriculum inthe dark. And while we can make some very good guesses about what willwork best, we still want to test these ideas to see what is really mosteffective and will give all of our students the best summer experiencepossible.
Victory Briefs is excited to announce our new podcast “Next Off”! The podcast will feature VBI Executive Director Chris Theis, VBI Researcher and Squads Coach Jacob Nails, and VBI Director of Publishing Lawrence Zhou. We’ll be discussing trends and arguments in contemporary circuit Lincoln-Douglas debate on episodes every other week.
Our first episode is already out, where we discuss the impact of COVID-19 on the debate community and arguments. Chris and Jacob also debate about whether or not it makes sense for the judge to kick a counterplan in the world of a permutation.
We’re also re-releasing all previous Argument Clinic episodes as a Youtube playlist which can be found here. This is an excellent resource for traditional debaters or those looking to improve their debate fundamentals.
Follow us on your favorite podcast app!
- Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-next-off-victory-briefs-podcast/id1505226021
- Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-next-off-victory-briefs-podcast
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/78sJcmWTCXfKlQvrLQSQZx?si=zz925v_RRieyTdOS-wqotQ
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-86431574
- Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/vmhfp0lu
- Google Podcasts: Coming Soon!
Recommend us to your friends that may not know about us and contact us with episode suggestions, Mailbag questions, guest suggestions, or just to chat: https://forms.gle/T9t8ukpDZDkK4c2n9!
The 2020 April Public Forum debate topic is, Resolved: The United States should remove nearly all of its military presence in the Arab States of the Persian Gulf.
A total of 472 coaches and 834 students voted for the resolution. The winning resolution received 48% of the coach vote and 59% of the student vote.
Congratulations to Santa Monica's Rex Evans and William G. Enloe's Tej Gedela for closing out the 2020 Stanford Invitational. Congratulations to Harvard-Westlake's Alexandra Mork for being top speaker.
Full results and pairings can be found here.