On Case

The school bell rings. Cue the ordinary hubbub of kids rushing to get out of classrooms. People push, plow and shove themselves through the stampede of students. For three months out of the school year, a curious thing can be found after school ends. In a 2nd floor, C wing classroom, the kids will not be leaving; they will be settling in and getting comfortable for a good afternoon debate practice.

The Policy Debate program at Wayzata tops any other club. It involves a band of dysfunctional exemplars that have nothing better to do in their lives but read stacks of files in preparation for competition where they yell at their opponents using other people’s words. It’s goal? To educate – of course. But it is difficult to comprehend beyond this. Who in their right mind would spend so much time preparing for a scholastic activity? Who in their right mind would carry tubs full of files on skateboards? Who in their right mind speaks like that? But we’re not in our right minds. Not even close.

Policy debate first and foremost seeks to argue whether a political policy is good, or if not, if another is preferable. The Affirmative team defends the resolution (last year’s was if the United States Federal Government should increase social services for persons living in poverty). The Negative team negates the resolution with disadvantages, proves a lack of solvency, or proposes a counter plan. Either team can critique (our jargon is kritik) the other in the hopes of swaying the judge that the other is wrong. An Affirmative case should include a plan text, contentions explaining why the plan is good, and inherency to prove that the problem is in fact a problem. Sound simple enough?

Here’s where it gets twisted. The constructive speeches are eight minutes long, but there is a limitless mass of evidence to be gathered, and so much is applicable to a round. Because of this, policy debate has developed into a contest of speed – who can read the most evidence, and who can present it the best. Spreading is the term for this technique of reading quickly. I don’t just mean reading at a generally quick pace, though. I mean talking faster than your lips can annunciate, faster than is comprehensible for almost all “lay” people. Debaters could be speaking Latin, for all the onlooker knows. The only people who can understand 600 words per minute are the person speaking, the opponents, and hopefully the judge. It is an odd thing to see a high school student hunched over a makeshift podium (a chair on a table), bracing themselves, and rocking back and forth with a timer clenched in their shaking fist. Spreading is a carefully acquired skill, a mark of a good debater, a true art.

And the files. The national debate community shares evidence on websites, and individual teams cut specific cards and make specialized files in the hopes of beating opponents. Let me be frank; these files are huge. We print them on white paper from the office. Rumor has it we have our own plot in the Amazon rainforest to use for trees. The office printing room is very familiar with our needs. The secretaries print our work, and bring us our alabaster mountains, and stumble under their heavy weight. Two-hundred pages are then highlighted down, and stored in tubs. Each debate partnership has two or three tubs in which to accumulate evidence. My advice to a prospective debater: invest in a skateboard. They make very handy tub-carriers, and they’re rather stylish too.

Speaking of style, Wayzata debaters are full of it. Puffed with pride and self-righteousness, we occupy the 2nd floor C-wing horseshoe like it is our kingdom. We waltz out of our other classes when it is time to leave for a tournament. We expect other teachers to be accommodating – we are debaters, after all. But as I said, it is a style. Wayzata is known for dressing casually, which means Converse shoes on the feet of our best team, and sassy t-shirts instead of polo’s. We wear argyle in tradition, and saunter about with speaker awards hung around our necks. We laugh at jokes that no one else gets, and then laugh some more when no one else gets them. We swear ferociously.

But we can get away with this pompous attitude. At the Washburn tournament earlier this year, Wayzata varsity placed first, second, third, and fourth, and took all of the top speaker awards. Our trophy display outside the room presents glittering plaques and somber-looking busts of George Washington that reminds the world just how good we are. In the tub room – a special closet devoted to old files, discarded tubs and excess awards – debaters have painted and scribbled graffiti on its walls. We’ve tagged our territory. This is our land.

It is impossible for someone outside this tight-knit sphere to fully comprehend why we love it. I tell my friends, with a Chesire cat smile, how I get to debate about Afghanistan citizens and NATO, and they look at me with faces of pity. Long after everyone else has gone home, we are here. We are here because we identify with our teammates and enjoy being part of a semi-cult. We want to read articles late into the night because we want to win. There is always another advantage to research, another philosophy to digest. It is a crazy activity, a cyclone that sucks in most of your time, a blanket that will cover every other component of your life. But what’s of doing anything if there isn’t a little insanity involved?