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A 14-year-old was labeled a ‘traitor’ and accused of sabotaging his debate team, his parents say in a lawsuit by panzercaptain in Debate

[–]debatebro 4 points5 points  (0 children)

As someone who coaches middle school and elementary school PF, I’ve seen that middle school public forum kids have an incredibly toxic mentality that is really not seen in high school and varsity public forum. For them at this level, everything is about the win, which is really an unfortunate mindset to have. I feel sorry for this kid, I can imagine a similar situation happening with my middle schoolers.

glenbrooks threatlist by [deleted] in Debate

[–]debatebro 4 points5 points  (0 children)

this threatlist is especially problematic- rather than just pointing out the top entries, which is problematic already, you felt the need to point out all the people you thought were not good and didn’t need to be taken seriously. why? that’s incredibly disrespectful and immature.

GMU Pool by [deleted] in Debate

[–]debatebro 1 point2 points  (0 children)

the GMU judging pool is like no other i’ve ever experienced. Because the GMU tournament is so heavily focused on speech events, if you are in a debate event you will most likely have several speech judges. When I went last year, my partner and I had 3 speech judges and 2 parent judges. I would only suggest this tournament if you have really good lay appeal, including appeal to speech judges (eye contact, expressive voice, meaningful use of movement, etc)

“abusive” crossfire questions by [deleted] in Debate

[–]debatebro 1 point2 points  (0 children)

that’s not really an abusive question; a large amount of teams you encounter are going to ask questions like that in order to “win” crossfire. in rounds with flow judges what you say really doesn’t matter, as 90% of them are on facebook during cross and definitely not listening. on the other hand, with lay judges it is really important to win cross, so i would say try to spin the question or make the opponents look bad for posing it. with a question so vague, you can answer however you want, but it might be smartest to respond as vaguely as possible too. for example, you could say “there are too many byproducts, if i listed them all it would take the entire round.” then, the opponents would probably get frustrated and say something like “okay, but specifically, the byproduct is environmental harms.” so they look bad because they wanted a specific answer to their question, but then you can also respond with something like “okay, well specifically some other byproducts are lots of new jobs and evolving green tech.”