Forensics - The YETIE

The Michigan forensics competitive season was cut short by the Wuhan virus.

While the season was cut short with in-person competitions halted and no regionals or state finals to be held.

The Michigan Interscholastic Forensics Association decided to hold for all state competitors The Year End Tournament for Individual Events - The YETIE.

MIFA and its legion of enthusiastic organizing volunteers really did an excellent job organizing the tournament under very short notice and they made it work, as did the many volunteer judges who judged this video competition.

Each contestant submitted their piece via video - one-shot takes only, no video editing allowed, and with the same time constraints as with in-person events.

The videos were then judged by the same standards as if the contestant were there in person.

Some moved on to the Semi-Final round, Abby among them, and then to the final round.

The final results have now been announced and the award ceremony was conducted virtually.

The online video award ceremony began by featuring each of the High School senior competitors - this was their last high school forensics competition.

Then in alphabetical order, each category was announced.

In oratory, Abby took second place in the state!

The kid has got some definite forensic speaking skills.

Saturday 4N6

4N6 being the way Forensics is oft referred to by the participants. Saves space and makes for shorter URLs for accessing schematics and tabulation results.

Yesterday the competition was held at MSU. This made for a long day.

This was especially so as Abby returned from her winter break school Civil Rights History trip to Atlanta and various cities in Alabama at Detroit Metro Airport on Friday at Midnight.

So I picked her up then, then got to Okemos at 1:30 am, checked into a hotel and got a few hours sleep starting at 2am before getting to the tournament at Wells Hall at MSU at 7 am. The question is should I have been charged for a night's stay by the hotel considering we were only there during the morning from 2 am to 6:40 am? The things you think of on a lack of sleep.

Tired or not, Abby gamely pushed on, and I gamely judged the rounds I was assigned. I also helped a first time judge with the process for their first tournament and helped answer questions on scoring, judge preparations, etc. Scary that I actually am regarded as knowing what I'm doing enough to be training another judge and making sure they have their stuff ready to go.

But yet again, someone in judge scheduling hates me.

The tournament was held in Wells Hall with a secondary site at Berkey Hall. Check in and all main ops were in Wells. The MSU organizers assured us it wasn't too far away.

Well, "not too far" is a relative term. It's a solid 15 minute walk away, and wouldn't you know it, my judging schedule had me first in Berkey and then immediately back to Wells Hall. Why this always happens, I don't know. I need to figure out who to bribe or beg forgiveness for unintentionally slighting in scheduling office to get them to stop running me around from building to building for these tournaments.

It was bracingly cold, and I only had a sweater on as Abby didn't have a winter coat with her coming straight from Atlanta, so I had given her my winter coat. Suck it up and walk faster, right?

So I judged those two first rounds, impromptu and storytelling, and I was on standby for the third and not needed, and was scheduled to do extemporaneous for the semi finals.

Impromptu was interesting. The quote competitors received and for which they had to give a 5 minute speech with 1 minute or so of preparation after seeing the quote was from a famous MSU alumni. (All sections used MSU alumni quotes, never the same quote in a different section).

4 out of six competitors missed the main point of the quote. 2 competitors got it.

One of the two was an exchange student from Korea, competing in forensics for the first time, nervous as hell, and competing in her second language, and she got it. Talk about guts - you're in a foreign country, in a language you're not fully comfortable with, and you're competing by getting up to give a speech in that language based on analyzing a quote you just received and you have about one minute to develop. In short, she did amazing and made an excellent personal speech, not a canned response as many competitors do, but based on applying the quote to her own life. That kid should go far in life.

Since Abby's school placed 3 competitors in extemporaneous, and thus had competitors in both semi final sections, I was pulled off judging that category, as you can never judge your own school, which makes a lot of sense. I spent the time talking with some other judges that also had been unassigned those rounds and it was some decent conversation.

Then I wasn't scheduled for finals as all judging assignment except for Duo had come out. I was going to just take it easy and either find a place to nap or go watch a performance when one of the organizers asked if I could judge Dramatic Interpretation finals as they had just lost a judge for it and needed one stat. While I was tired, I was qualified to do it having not judged DI this tournament, had no competitors from my school in the finals, and they needed someone to step in, so I did it.

Glad I did.

The performances were amazing. Fantastic to see how really good these kids can be. Awesome and moving performances, great interpretation of the materials and really hard to say absolutely who was best as the performers really gave it their all.

In a not unusual result, the judges in finals were not in lockstep. It turns out the performer I chose as 1st had been first in all of his previous rounds and semis - he was just that good, and he did take first place at the tournament and deserved it. But, the other judges put him in 2nd and third respectively.

I matched my second choice with the judge that put my number one in third, and matched my third place with the judge that had put him second. Interestingly enough, while we all had different rankings for the fourth, fifth and sixth place all of use had the same performers ranked 4, 5, or 6 by all three of us. Since you're not allowed to discuss the performances with the other judges, it's neat to look over the final rankings when they come out and see how you differ.

Abby made it to Semis but missed making it to finals. Not a bad performance for having about 4 hours of sleep and coming off a week of travel with lack of sleep while having fun and learning, and no time to practice her performance. Proud of her for committing to show up regardless and compete. She refused to let her team down and was there with them the whole day and celebrated a lot of her teammates placing in finals in their respective divisions.

We got home at 8:30 pm, ate dinner, and both passed out at about 9:30 last night after another full day of competition.

Forensics Saturday Summary

Yesterday, Abby and I got up at yet another ungodly early hour to head out for the forensics competition. Of course it was snowing in the morning and streets had not yet been cleared at that hour so getting to her school by 6:00 am to meet the bus for the ride to the competition was fun. On the upside, there's very little traffic that early in the morning on a Saturday.

This time it was to the Birch Run invitational, held at Birch Run High School and Elementary School.

A very well run tournament, they had enough time baked into the rounds so that judges could complete their evaluation sheets and get them back to the Tab room without having to race around like chickens with their heads cut off.

That was nice. I judged Sales, Impromptu, and 9/10 Poetry which surprisingly was not that bad, and far less angsty/angry than previous poetry sessions I've been stuck judging.

In Impromptu, 5 out of 6 competitors missed the point of the quote which was interesting and only 1 got it. Impromptu is hard - they have do an off-the-cuff speech on a quote they get to see only in the room and have 6 minutes total to prep and perform - it's a gutsy bunch of competitors.

Then for Semi-finals I got to judge Dramatic Interpretation, which was 90% dark and 10% comedy. Not too bad.

I then got a pass on judging finals so I went to watch the Duo finals, which is always a great one to see as the kids doing Duo performances have some serious acting chops.

Meanwhile, Abby advanced into the Semi-finals and then the Finals in Oratory.

At the awards ceremony when Oratory was called she went up and was not 6, 5, 4 nor third. We held our breath and then it was announced that she placed 2nd overall. This was a great result.

Her teammates did well too, with various top spots awarded or close seconds and thirds, with an exceptional sweep of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd in 9/10 Impromptu which is pretty impressive.

Then the bus ride home and back in time for dinner. A long but very rewarding day.

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.

Forensics - Missed It By That Much, But Won In Many Other Ways

Unfortunately, Abby didn't make it into finals.

She placed 7th, missing the 6th place required for finals by 3 points - out of 1,100 possible points.

At State Finals the difference in competitor's scores and performances really is measured in millimeters.

7th in oratory in the whole state is nothing to sneeze at. Quite an accomplishment for someone who only started forensics in November and had never done any public speaking before.

She took not advancing to finals well, and it will give her something to work towards next year.

She made lots of new friends, enjoyed the effort required to compete and really came out of her shell, so it was a highly positive experience.

She's sad its done for the year and already misses the friendly competition and how the competitors, while all trying to win, still support each other and almost all have really good camaraderie and sportsmanship.

Judging these competitions is hard. At the state level the talent of the performers is amazing and it does become rather subjective. Most of my assessments through the competition were typically in line with other judge's perspectives of the competitors, and sometimes not so much. You always want to be fair and its hard to always pinpoint exactly what it is about a performance that really is better than another, especially when both are outstanding.

I judged the Duo finals and to say the performances were all stunning would be an understatement. Incredibly well done, and I had to ask all the competitors at the end how the schools all happened to bring in professional actors as ringers. Not kidding, these kids could take these performances to a professional stage and the audience would be well satisfied.

Again, differences in performance came down to millimeters. I was consistent with one of the of the other two judges as to which performance came in first, and that one won the entire state competition on points throughout, so I was at least assessing the performance in line with all the other judges as to how it was really outstanding. I had swapped places for 2nd and 3rd with the other judge, and was pretty consistent on 4th, 5th and 6th place. The third judge was very different in perspective. Note that we don't discus our ranking with the other judges and it is all independently decided on, so it is interesting to see where we all agree and disagree.

After the awards ceremony, the team all went out to a restaurant together and this is a really good bunch of kids - bright, learned, well-mannered and quite a few will be going on to college next year, and the rest returning to compete in forensics again.

The coach, a teacher at the school who does this on a voluntary basis, puts in a ton of work all year to make this happen - talk about a teacher making a real difference for a lot of kids. She did a fantastic job indeed and the team did quite well with many placing in the finals.

And She Breaks into Semis

After the first 4 rounds,the semi final match-ups have just been released.

Abby made it to the semi-finals, so she's now in the top 12 competitors in the state for oratory.

Regardless of whether she breaks into finals or not, as a freshman doing forensics for the fist time, she's come a very long way in a very short time. We'll know soon.

Fun With Forensics - Michigan State Finals

Today I get to put the mental in judgmental.

Abby made it to the state finals for forensics in the category of oratory, so that means I get drafted to judge the state final competition. Happily, its being held at Oakland University so it's close and convenient enough at around 45 minutes or so away in traffic. Luckily I was able to keep y schedule clear today so I could judge, I'm now a certified judge for forensics having passed the certification test, which is nice, I guess.

Downside, today I get two sets of two rounds back-to-back, in different buildings, with a trip to the statistics office and a prep room between each to drop off the evaluations and grab the prep sheets for the second time limited event, with not enough minutes in between the rounds to get it all done. In short, I'm getting some exercise in.

Further downside, it's from 9am to 9pm today and it runs through tomorrow all day as well.

So far I've judged Storytelling and Broadcasting, with some very talented high school kids from all over the state putting their best performance forward. Yep, these kids are all alright.

On a very high upside, the Oakland University Center that is the headquarters for the competition has a food court, and in that food court:

One of only two Chik-Fil-A restaurants in Michigan.

Very, very tasty chicken (spicy chicken sandwich, if you please) and waffle fries makes up for all the inconveniences of running around the campus from building to building. Chik-Fil-A seriously rocks.

The line up for it is super long as its a very popular item indeed, and its worth it.

So I have prose and extemporaneous coming up in a couple hours and going late tonight and then dramatic interpretation and unassigned semi-finals and finals tomorrow. Going to be a very long weekend, but kinda fun.

Somebody Just Made It To State Level For Forensics

Abby had her regional forensics competition on Saturday.

She thought she did well, and it turns out she did indeed do quite well. She came in second, making into the top 5 competitors at the regional competition which means she gets to advance on.

She's advancing to the Michigan State Forensic Competition for oratory, quite an accomplishment for a new freshman competitor with all of 5 months forensics experience.

Her school also did quite well with a lot of competitors from the forensics team advancing to the state championship to be held in May. It really is a great bunch of kids.

Winter Isn’t Giving Up Quite Yet

The past couple days were warm and wet, with rain and snow melting and beginning to feel like spring.

So of course this morning winter decided to get another hit in.

Heading to Abby’s forensics competition the roads are a complete sheet of ice, cars in ditches everywhere and slippery as hell.

Now it’s starting to snow, and heavily.

Traffic has slowed to a crawl and adding stress before even arriving at the competition.

Winter can’t be done soon enough and it’s really worn out it’s welcome if it ever had one.

So Why Is It Called Forensics?

Easily confused with Forensic Science, Forensics the colloquial and standard short-form of "Forensic Speech" is the study and practice of public speaking and debate.

So why the heck isn't it just called a public speaking? Probably because public speaking just isn't fancy enough a term and lacks the history, pomp and circumstance of the word forensics.

Looking at the dictionary its easy to see why these are confused as the word forensic has multiple meanings.

Definition of forensic

(Entry 1 of 2)
1 : belonging to, used in, or suitable to courts of judicature or to public discussion and debate a lawyer's forensic skills
2 : argumentative, rhetorical forensic eloquence
3 : relating to or dealing with the application of scientific knowledge to legal problems forensic medicine forensic science forensic pathologist forensic experts

forensic noun
Definition of forensic (Entry 2 of 2)
1 : an argumentative exercise
2 forensics plural in form but singular or plural in construction : the art or study of argumentative discourse
3 forensics plural in form but singular or plural in construction : the application of scientific knowledge to legal problems especially : scientific analysis of physical evidence (as from a crime scene)

Of course finding out why forensics is the word used for speech and debate and the history of the usage of the word forensics isn't exactly easy or clear.

The word forensics comes from Aristotle's work "The Rhetoric" in which he divided rhetoric int three general categories: epideictic (ceremonial), deliberative (policy), and forensic (legal). Public address and debate skills were important in the Ancient Greek courts and also in public life, and this continues even in modern Western Courts and in public life as well. After all, we tend to like our leaders to be able to speak well and you probably wouldn't want a lawyer who couldn't get a word in on your behalf.

Since we do like our Classical origins and the classics, Universities and other educational institutions applied the term forensics to speech and debate activities.

The word forensics apparently first pops up in English around 1659 being first used in regard to speech in the legal system and by the 1830s seems to have entered the universities as a word for the study of, and competition in, public speaking and debate.

Legal speech and policy debates were very popular in the US (think Lincoln-Douglas debates for example) and the public wanted to be educated andable to speak and argue effectively. Later in the United States a variety of speech, learning and competitive activities beyond just legal and policy got grouped together under the term forensics or forensic speech. Then the categories under the rubric forensics expanded even more to include other oratorical events such as interpretations including poetry recitals, impromptu speaking, and now includes sales presentations, broadcasting, storytelling, Duo, and Multiple events.

So now you know (whether you wanted to or not) why its called a forensics competition without a single person from CSI attending.