Debate season is here. Oh joy. Debate season. Not only that, but I have my first debate "tournament" on Monday. Be still my beating heart.Well, I have had just over five weeks of "debate intensive". The coach of our club has gone through with the newbies and broken everything down into understandable sections. We have created a case, formed teams, and are going to go against each other in two rounds of in-club debating. One round is an hour and a half long. That is three hours of debating. As our coach says, "The best way to learn to swim is to jump in the water feet first." I always hear this saying, but everyone neglects to mention that there are those who drown before they figure it out.
Although we have had five weeks to be quite literally submersed in the lingo and happenings of debate, I still find myself confused by all the terminology. Our coach calls it "debate speak" and some of the debaters in the club are better at speaking in the debate language than in regular English. It seems like I'm always hearing, "I'd like to address their third Inherency point in our Solvency, after I've provided a link-turn to show that their Advantages are actually DA's." Or "Judge, the Affirmative team has dropped our arguments regarding the significance and topicality arguments---which are major voting issues---so you can just carry that through the flow." Now, I'm sure many of you are thinking what I'm thinking when I hear this, which is: WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT???
I still am a bit confused, but hopefully everything will turn out all right in the end. Again, as they say, the best way to learn is to jump right in. We all have permission to fail, so that is alright. I don't think anybody really expects anything mind-bogglingly amazing from us, so we should be safe. I will update on Monday to let you know how I survived the lion's den.
