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WACFL II    [ Rants ]

Took three kids from Forest Park HS to the second WACFL Lincoln-Douglas debate tournament on Saturday, and they did fairly well.   Jessica found out that Forest Park had a debate team earlier this year, and was scheduling team meetings when the sniper attacks shut down all after-school activities.   So we ended up having about 3 weeks to get the kids prepared for the tournament, with two meetings and practice rounds on Tuesday and Wednesday last week.

The current topic is (more or less) "Resolved: That when in conflict, academic freedom ought to be valued above community standards in United States high schools."   Rather narrow topic, especially compared to past ones, but pretty easy to get started on.

Over three weeks, Jessica covered basics like flowing, case structure and writing, rebuttals, and cross-examination.   We worked together to run practice rounds between the kids once they had their cases done, and gave them suggestions for the cases.

The tournament was fun, was nice to see all the ex-Woodbridge folks again.   Ann-Marie's still coaching at Centreville, and taking two of her kids on the national debate circuit.   Kristin, Chip and John are all coaching at Woodbridge now (always good to have a 1:1 coach-to-student ratio).   Brian was helping to run the L-D tournament, but had to leave before awards, and Roland was generally busy with Nationals-related work.

Our kids ended up doing well in Novice, especially given the limited time we had to work on the topic.   They went 3-1, 2-2, and 1-3, meaning that the team broke even overall.   We'll have some more work to do with case revisions and rebuttal practice before the next tournament in December, but they all had a good time.   They're all involved in MUN, which also has a conference the same weekend in December, but they seem willing to think about doing L-D instead of MUN.