Category Archives: Speech and Debate

The Prospect Invitational yesterday (Saturday, October 29th, 2011) was my first debate tournament for a full year—I didn’t manage to get to any as a junior. As a result, it came to be somewhat of a surprise as my partner (Anjana Rao) and I finished the tournament with a 5-0 undefeated record.

More than just the debate, though, my speaking seems to have changed pretty significantly—I used to get relatively few speaker points, and rely on argumentation to win, but at Prospect I walked away with the second speaker award (following first by only 0.25 speaker points).

Since Prospect had hidden elimination rounds, the final round (that is, the Finals round) was rather interesting. The second speaker on the team we were supposed to debate (Milpitas GO) had decided to leave with his girlfriend, since we were unaware that it was actually the Finals round. As a result, another member of their team stepped in to fill the spot, and we began the debate. Just after my first speech, however, their coach ran in and forfeited them, giving us the win… with a seven-minute round.

Through some strange trail of events, I was asked to create a Facebook profile pic for Lynbrook Speech and Debate. After GIMPing for some… 15? minutes, I came up with this:

You can download it here by right-clicking on the link and selecting “Save As…”

This past weekend I went to my first tournament outside of the Bay Area. The University of the Pacific (UOP) tourney was an interesting experience, showing a few differences from parliamentary debate in the Coast Forensic League.

First off, the tourney had a strictly-enforced 10-minute forfeit rule, causing 7 teams to be disqualified in their first round. This meant that 14 teams had zero speaks for at least one round, which I believe skewed results.

Secondly, the quality of the other teams seems to be held to a lower standard. In our second round, Betty and I hit a team which provided no relevant on-case arguments and spent the entire debate flaming us. They claimed that we were “lying” and “[didn't] deserve to be in parli”. Of course, we took offense, and gave around 10 joint points of order and clarification.

The judging at the tourney was really iffy for most rounds. Other than 2-3 flow judges, most judges were UOP students asked to judge a round. This meant that we only had legitimate judging for one round, and the rest were as lay as lay can be.

Overall, I thought that UOP was a pretty good tourney, and that it was a lot of fun. I do wish we could have gotten better than a 3-2 record, though… maybe next time.

Dum de dum dum… a smart guy said this:

I remember, that as a student in high school, I would often question my math and science teachers after school about topics that we covered only superficially in class. A good 80-90% of the time, however, their reply would be “Don’t worry. You won’t be tested on it,” and out of politeness, I wouldn’t ask them any further. I was quite annoyed at that answer, since my reason to learn wasn’t to pass some exit exam or do well on the SAT’s. Currently, in Stanford, I’m learning the same topics that I queried about in high school, and that makes me realize that exit exams are a simple excuse to limit the learning of curious, intellectual students. –Upadhyayula Prajakta