February: Featuring First Fabulous Forensics Foray

Yesterday was the first forensics competition of 2020.

We got up unsuitably early at 4:45 am so we could be at the school by 5:50 am for the bus to Eastern Michigan University where the competition was being held.

A Regional Invitational tournament, it had about 300 students competing.

We arrived in good time and I got my judge packet.

Yes, based on performance last year, I've been permanently volun-told to be a judge so long as Abby is competing. I don't mind much - it's a lot of work but very worthwhile.

In the morning rounds I had judging for Broadcasting, then Oratory (in a different building) also a separate competitor stream from Abby's as you never judge anyone from your own school), and finally Extemporaneous.

Broadcasting and Extemp are both harder categories to judge as you don't just go to your assigned room for the competition. First, you have to go to those prep rooms right before the round, get the material, understand the material so you can evaluate the competitors when they give it, and then race to the competition room to get there on time, do the round, grade the round, race back to the tabulation room to drop off the scores, and run to your next location.

Having been assigned both Broadcasting and Extemp meant someone in the scheduling department didn't like me, or I had failed to remember to bribe the schedulers appropriately. Come to think of it, I had forgot to do that, so it must have been my fault.

As you might guess, being a judge in these very cerebral competitions does involve a surprising amount of cardio.

For broadcasting the competitors get a packet of news articles and have a limited time to arrange them into a comprehensive 5-minute broadcast, including about a 1 minute editorial. In short, think of these kids as future anchors on the news and some of them really are already better than your current anchor-people. Others not so much but give them time.

Oratory went pretty well, with some being very polished and some still reading off note cards and stumbling over their speeches - they'll get better as the season continues.

Extemp is when they draw a random question from a list then have 30 minutes to prep a 4-7 minute speech answering the question, including research and prep for delivery. It's a very hard category and all the competitors are pretty brave for giving it a shot.

Unfortunately, this rounds question were all political and wowza some students had a bit of ideological blinders on.

One question was: Who will win the Democrat Primary to run for President?

Another was What should Congress do about Russian interference in elections?

Another was how will the impeachment affect Trump?

Talk about hot-button questions.

As a judge you can't let your personal political, or other views for that matter, affect how you rate students in any way. Regardless of how they answered it politically it didn't matter to me and I graded and ranked strictly on the basis of how well they presented their argument and analyzed the questions. Knowing they had no choice in what question to answer and their own politics are their own to develop, it's not my place to argue nor up or downgrade them if they happen to agree or disagree with my own politics.

Lack of decent analysis however was fair game, but the student's pretty typical leftist leaning politics are not (nor are the far fewer students with conservative leaning politics getting any extra points either).

In short, bring your argument, use facts, make an analysis and draw a reasoned conclusion from it in the time allotted.

One student answering the Democrat primary breathlessly declared Bernie Sanders would win the nomination because he offered free tuition, cancellation of student debt, and the Green New Deal which according to her would ensure 400,000 new jobs. This was basically a Bernie! campaign speech as retold by a high school student.

That was it. No other analysis, no support for the claims, no comparison of other candidates positions, or support base, or even polling numbers, and done in 3 minutes. That's 1 minute under minimum time and a complete lack of analysis. As you can imagine she didn't score well as a result of being under time and not analyzing and actually fully answering the question.

On the Trump impeachment one, the student while being openly anti-Trump (knowing most judges there that's actually a pretty safe position to take) did a decent analysis and looked at all sides of the matter mainly from a very liberal perspective and then concluded that while he didn't like Trump, the impeachment wouldn't really harm Trump much. He stated it was basically going to be used politically against him during the election but it hadn't moved his support much among the electorate so would have a neutral overall effect. Decent job of analysis, good use of facts, a reasoned conclusion so yes, got a good ranking out of it.

On the Russian interference the competitor started off well and then went a bit overboard, claiming the Russian hacking caused the popular vote to go for Hilary and the Electoral College to go for Trump. News to me, and no sources to back that claim up, at all. Bit of a whopper there, and competitor lost points on it. Also made quite a few false equivalencies in the argument that cost as well. Was doing pretty well up to that point, but then went on to claim that paper ballots are the problem because paper ballots are easily hacked by Russians - what?

So it was an interesting morning.

Then running off to a quick but decent lunch at EMU's cafeteria where it was all-you can eat for $10 and the food was remarkably good - nice salads, soups, chicken strips or fried chicken sandwiches that while not Chik-Fil-A grade were still very tasty.

Thence hurry up and wait as technical difficulties with the new forensics scoring software caused interminable delays. For hours. And it started snowing.

Finally on to the semi-finals. I got to judge Sales, along with a second judge on the panel, and it went quite well, but now I want to buy a lot of things after being successfully marketed to in the presentations.

Snow continued, as did the technical difficulties and the tournament directors decided to bypass the final round and just use the scores through the semis to come up with the winners. This made sense, as otherwise we would likely still be there this morning given the delays.

So they announced the winners and Abby's school did very well, with first place finishes in Broadcasting, Storytelling and Impromptu and lots of lower placements.

Abby came in sixth for Oratory which was not too shabby at all for her first time out this year, and the very first run of her new speech.

We finally rolled back home at 8pm last night completely exhausted but quite happy with the results. It was a very long day.

It's going to be a great forensics competition year.