Welcome to the second week of Lexington Debate Institute! While this blog will stay updated with the general activities for the day, each lab may have followed a slightly different schedule, as we cater to differences in the strengths of each lab group.
We started the day off with a fun-filled morning of research! Campers worked with their tournament partners to cut more cards and they are now more focused on creating cases for the tournament. A case is a collection of the complete arguments (claim, warrant, and impact) that a team has for one side of the resolution. Each team is working on developing a pro case (that affirms the resolution) and a con case (that negates the resolution) and the goal was to finish at least one case by the end of the day.
After doing research for a bit, we started preparing for another set of mini debates. The topic for this set of mini debates was “Should surveillance cameras be allowed in schools”? Campers worked with their partners to develop mini cases that they would use in these debates. After the round, they were given feedback from their counselors on what they could have improved upon and what they did well.
At noon, we broke for lunch. Unfortunately, the field house was locked today and it was super humid outside, so we opted to eat our lunch in the classrooms.
After lunch, we launched into a philosophical discussion on how we can judge if an action is morally good or not. We talked about two major philosophical frameworks that are seen often in debate: consequentialism (an action is morally good or bad based on whether the consequences were good or bad) and deontology (an action is good or bad based on the qualities of said action i.e. murdering someone is always bad). Students questioned what they would do in certain scenarios under different moral frameworks.
To practice flowing a bit more, we flowed a couple of more songs and then launched back into research, hoping to finish at least one case by today. We are looking forward to finalizing cases tomorrow so that we can focus more on strategy as the week goes on!
