I've been thinking about training debaters for about four years now. It's not much, but it's been a very interesting, if at times frustrating, experience. Today I think I've found the answer to a question that has bugged me for the longest time: how do you create a good debater?
I started my coaching stint in 2008, thinking that perhaps the fastest route to scoring debate wins was to teach my kids case creation. This was a bias with how I worked, as a debater: I preferred using clever cases to win debates (sometimes to my own detriment).
But this didn't work out the way I planned. Good case creation requires a degree of creativity, and I was not equipped to teach creativity. A whole bunch of debaters got bored and walked out on me. I was distraught. Unprepared, the Thomians bombed the 2008 Swinburne Debate Championships.
In 2009, Paul and I thought that perhaps if we taught the basics of debate everything else would take care of itself. It was a pretty naive belief, in retrospect. We sat down and designed a basic syllabus for high school debate as we knew it, in Kuching (including, of course, what we thought about certain city-specific debate idiosyncrasies). This took us about a year to get right.
It was at the end of that year that we realized that this simply wasn't enough. As a result of our work, the Thomians became pretty good with the basics of debate. This is still true today (and will likely be true for the next few years, so long as they stick to the debate letters) But, as any experienced debater might tell you, mastery of the basics has very little to do with winning tournaments. Truth be told, the Thomians had a pretty bad run that year.
But — and it behooves me to say this: in 2010 Saravana, one of our juniors, got to be a really good debater, as president of the Thomian debate team. And he did it with no help from us at all. Aha! We thought. Perhaps the secret to becoming a good debater was to teach juniors! Because if you taught other people, the logic went, you'd be so motivated to keep ahead of them that you'd become good in the process.
So we tried that this year. Or at least, we put an experiment to test: there was a new batch of juniors who had to teach the next generation of debaters. Would they become good, too?
The answer: no, they didn't, not really. They were good, good enough to give most teams a fair fight, but they weren't good enough to be in the teams that entered the breakout rounds. Oddly, they didn't get as good as Saravana did.
So that wasn't it. And at this point we were at a loss. What could it be, possibly? I was frustrated beyond belief at this stage. I didn't get it. How could this be?
My frustration was, I must admit, made worse by the fact that we had no idea how we got good. Or, worse, how we got good in the absence of proper debate training. My juniors have, on average, three times as many debates in a single year in 2009 than I did in my entire high-school debating career. And yet I was still better than them. How could this even happen?
When Paul first entered Swinburne debating, he was considered a 'prodigy'. He was a high school debater who was at least the best of his batch, and good enough (and promising enough) to be part of the club's roster. It was only a few months later that Swinburne sent him to the World Championships.
A year or so later, Paul invited me to train with his Swinburne mates. I was rusty, and somewhat bad, but I could at least hold my own against them. This surprised me. I wasn't as bad as I had imagined.
Immediately, a couple of elements presented themselves as possible factors:
- Debate demands maturity. I was older, and therefore better read, and therefore I was better than my juniors.
- I had more 'experience'
- The Thomians aren't intelligent. Other schools had bigger, cleverer pools to choose from
- The Thomians are all male. Only debate teams with females on them had a chance of becoming great
- Good debators need good general knowledge. The Thomians had lousy general knowledge.
A few were quickly proven to be false. 2) was wrong, because in 2009 I simply did not have as much 'experience' as my juniors did, on a debate-for-debate basis. Yet I still thrashed them. 4) was wrong, because at the highest levels of debate, teams are heavily weighted to male debaters. 5) was also false — other teams had equally bad (or perhaps slightly better) general knowledge, yet performed disproportionately better as compared to the Thomians.
So that left 1) maturity, and 3) intelligence.
1) is likely a factor. I've not had the time to devise a test for this, but generally speaking, you need a baseline level of maturity to be a good debater. This we take as common knowledge.
But there is a problem here. In the Junior category in Swinburne, teams compete with more or less the same levels of maturity. And from anecdotal evidence, maturity usually is constant, to a degree that does not explain disproportionate differences in ability. Yet these other teams (like Hui Mei, Malachi and Melanie of Green Road, winners of 2011's Junior Category) have something that I don't see in my Thomians.
Factor 3), intelligence, is harder to argue against. Paul and I sometimes bring it up in the guise of 'talent'. We would say: perhaps our ability is something we both had, and that we can only hope to see in our juniors. I hated this idea — if it were true, it would be crushing: I would have to accept that excellence in debate was nothing more than a series of flukes, determined by the quality of talent that just so happened to join the debate club in a particular year.
"But no!" Paul said, earlier today. "That's not true! When Stephen Obed first joined SDC, he completely sucked! He stuttered, he couldn't speak properly, he had no analysis, he had nothing!"
Stephen Obed is one of the best Swinburne debaters I have ever seen.
He got good by hounding adjudicators. He spent hours arguing with seniors, sometimes to 1am in the morning, in bars after debate meetings. His neighbours thought he was slightly mad, because he rehearsed whole speeches on his balcony, at night, speaking to himself (and rather loudly, at that).
"He's obsessed." I said to Paul, my eyes growing wide. "We're obsessed!"
In high school, I spent days practicing arguments: testing speeches against myself, out loud, while watering the plants or cutting the grass or doing laundry. Paul would obsess over debates long after the fact, thinking through every second, wondering if he could tweak certain bits to favour his team. Saravana went insane teaching debate to his juniors; he also spent hours at night reliving debates he lost.
"Every debater I know to be good," Paul said, slowly, "Obsessed about getting better."
It was obsession. That was the secret sauce. Not everyone had it.
Now of course it's true that debaters have to be matured enough, intelligent enough, experienced enough, and knowledgable enough to be truly good. And it's also true that forcing debators to teach their juniors will make them better, just as it did Saravana and me. And it's also true that getting debaters to adjudicate will accelerate their growth, just as it did Ida and Julie. But I realize now that I had it all backwards: it was not enough to teach debaters to be matured, smart, experienced and knowledgable; nor was it enough to execute a million and one coaching tricks — all this was useless if they weren't obsessed.
A normal debater would be depressed about a debate he/she lost, and get on with his or her life. An obsessed debater would spend the next six months thinking up rebuttals to arguments his opponents made. I still do — in fact just last month I thought of a brilliant case set-up to use in a semi-final debate I had lost over a year ago.
But I think there's another element to this that I had not previously realized: Swinburne, Green Road and Lodge have largely been built around loose, autonomous teams. Teams were free to pursue their own strategies, as they saw fit. St Thomas's keeps its debaters without teams for a good part of the year; most of our organization is at the club-level, not the team-level. By this I mean debaters often have more allegiance to the club than to their own individual teams.
Paul and I became obsessed because we had each other; we would grab a small nook after every debate to analyze what we could have done differently, regardless of the outcome. We egged each other, and got better in the process. Likewise, debaters in teams will tend to get better the same way. Perhaps that is one way we can organize to encourage obsession.
By and large, however, this discovery has made me very happy. It is not my fault that my Thomians have performed badly. It is the result of a trait, one that appears in debaters individually. Getting better is thus no longer a function of training more extensively — it is now a function of finding obsessed individuals, putting them in teams, and then letting them take their training into their own hands.
