Lawrence Zhou is a Lincoln-Douglas curriculum director at VBI and an assistant LD coach at The Harker School. He was the 2014 NSDA LD National Champion and currently attends the University of Oklahoma. Thank you to Marshall Thompson for his input. Introduction I take the following claim to be uncontroversial: “The educational value of novice […]
Opinion
Nina Potischman debated for Hunter College High School for four years, and is currently a freshman at Pomona College. Her senior year she was top seed, top speaker, and a finalist at the TOC, and won a number of national tournaments. Thank you to Maddy Stevens, SunHee Simon, and Marshall Thompson for their input. My […]
Opinion
Raffi Piliero debated for Harrison High School for 4 years, clearing at the TOC twice, and finishing as bid leader his senior year. He also won several national tournaments and several top speaker awards, and now debates for Georgetown University. Introduction: Nobody is perfect. There will never be a 1AR that makes 0 mistakes, an […]
Opinion, Resources
The average summary speech is not a summary; it is a brazen attempt to cover 18-20 minutes of content in two minutes while adding extra analysis. Under the average PF judge’s current expectations, the first summary speech is the hardest to deliver in all of debate. In fact, as I’ve written elsewhere, the natural limit […]
Briefly, Opinion, PF, Resources
Introduction More and more, fewer debaters are choosing to engage in framework debate, instead choosing to use preclusive strategies such as theory, or Kritiks that don’t use framework. I’m not going to claim that one strategy has merit over the other (I quite often do run critical arguments or directly topical arguments that don’t rely […]
Briefly, Opinion
Underlying Bob Overing’s recent three-part disclosure epic is a single, fairness-based argument for the practice. I argue that it fails. I’ll briefly summarize the argument for those without the fortitude to make it all the way through the series. Bob begins in Part 1 with the uncontroversial premise that if something gives a debater an […]
Opinion
Author’s note: This post is based is based on a longer research paper that can be accessed here. Ariel Shin approached the same problem in this recent post. This analysis uses a different methodology and examines some other issues to continue to shed light on performance disparities in competitive debate. Thank you to Chris Palmer for providing Tabroom.com data and […]
Community, Opinion, Resources
Shrey Desai debated for four years at Saratoga High School (CA). Shrey qualified to the California State Tournament, championed Western Championships and SCU (twice), and won speaker awards at the College Prep, Stanford, and Berkeley Invitationals. He would like to thank Chris Theis, Jake Nebel, Sajeev Saluja, and Prachit Bhike for their thoughtful comments and […]
Opinion
This article consists of two parts. The first section, written by Noah Simon, is a criticism of Moral Hedging and an endorsement of Moral Confidence. The second section, written by Jack Wareham, is an endorsement of Moral Hedging and a criticism of Moral Confidence. It has been brought to our attention that ‘Epistemic Modesty’ is […]
Opinion
In debate we revere analytic philosophy in a way that we don’t tend to respect other forms of critical thought. In countless rounds I have seen debaters say that “philosophical education precludes the kritik” but there is never a discussion about what it means to be philosophical, or who counts as a philosopher. Initially this […]
Opinion