On Wednesday evening, not an empty classroom could be found at Old Rochester Regional. The debate team was holding the first debate of the year, with nine schools from the local area attending to compete. When all the debaters and the judges were added up, there were over 400 people at the school participating in the event.
From the name, it’s easily assumed that the debate team meets up with another school and then proceeds to yell at each other about completely non-relevant issues. That, however, couldn’t be farther from the truth. There are strict rules and guidelines, judges, and time limits.
Debaters are broken up into two “teams” of sorts: affirmative and negative.
“The affirmatives create a plan based on the resolve of the year, and the negatives have to argue against the plan no matter what it is,” said Colleen Garcia, who has been a negative for the past two years and is testing out the affirmative side of the team this year. “This year’s resolve is ‘Should the United States Federal Government Substantially Curtail its Domestic Surveillance?’”
This plan Garcia mentioned can be on anything that falls under the resolve, which allows students to focus on hot-topic issues like drone and Muslim surveillance in America.
In order to ensure these plans are relevant and pertain to modern issues, they must follow the guidelines set by ‘stock issues,’ which are: “Solvency – how does it solve the problem?
Inherency – why is it not already in effect? Need for change – why do we need it in the first place? Topicality – does it relate to the resolve?” explained Garcia.
“Especially because we’re debating domestic surveillance, the topics that we’re debating are actual things that happen in the world. So while your debates don’t really have a direct effect on current events, they help you see new ways to counter modern issues that really do exist,” said James Goulart, a three-year affirmative for the team.
But what’s the difference between the negative and affirmative teams?
“The affirmative team, throughout the season, has one plan, and they just have to perfect that plan over the season,” said Goulart. “But the negatives go into the debate without knowing what they’re going to go up against, so they need to know every single plan.”
Yes, that’s right, the negatives need to know a little bit about every possible plan in order to debate whatever surprise the opposing school’s affirmatives have up their sleeves.
Practicing debating may seem difficult for the team, but they do a scrimmage of sorts – to put it into sports terms – to perfect their techniques.
“Well, so far, because the season’s only just started, we’ve been working on our plans and writing them,” said Goulart. “As the year goes on, Mr. Everett [the teacher in charge of the group] comes up with mock questions and sometimes we’ll practice debating that way.”
So, we’ve covered the basics on how the team runs, but how is the winner of the debate determined?
There are two separate scoring systems. One is for who wins and loses the debate, and that’s comprised of four stock issues and disadvantages of the plan. The affirmative team needs to win every single issue, and the negative team only needs to win one. And if they do that, then they win.
Although that might not seem like a fair scoring system, the work of the negative team is quite a bit more intense, as they need to know a little bit about any possible issue, so it evens out.
Old Rochester itself did well in the debate, but it’s not possible to name the winners by school, as each individual team of two gets its own individual score. That means we’ll just have to wait and see which debaters end up on top.
By Sienna Wurl
