Today was the first day of the Camp Tournament! It’s been great to watch the students progress throughout camp, and now they have the chance to put their skills to use! From today alone, we’ve seen that the campers public speaking skills and confidence have grown tremendously!
In this tournament, there are no winners or losers - instead, the emphasis is on feedback for all so that everyone can improve. Students had four debates during the day, beginning with two in the morning. A Public Forum debate starts with a coin flip, and the winner of the coin flip has two options: either choose the side they want to advocate for or which order they speak in. Both options have advantages. If you have a better case, then you’ll want to choose that side. If that’s not the case, speaking second gives you benefits in terms of preparation time and speeches. After this decision is made by whoever wins the coin flip, the debates begin. When debates were over, judges gave the debaters feedback on speech delivery, argumentation, and strategy, among other things. It’s been clear that throughout the day, from debate to debate, students have been incorporating this feedback. After a break for lunch and some time outside playing four square, the debates continued. We finished up the debates right before the end of the day.
Tomorrow we have two more preliminary debates before the final round. The final round will consist of the top two teams in terms of record and speaker points (metric of how well students speak). Parents are welcome to watch this debate at 2 pm in the science lecture hall in the science building at LHS, followed by time to speak with instructors. We handed out t-shirts at the end of the day today and we invite the students to wear them tomorrow for camp pictures!