Friday, July 28, 2006

Final Round in Progress

The final round of the workshop tournament is just concluding. The four participants are:

Affirmative:

Ovais Inamullah (Chattahoochee High School, GA)
Eli Jacobs (Centerville High School, OH)

Negative:

Chip Stuart (The Heights, MD)
Alex Parkinson (Olathe Northwest High School, KS)

Judges:

Alan Coverstone, Montgomery Bell Academy, TN
Dan Fitzmier, Augustana College, IL
Mike Risen, Montgomery Bell Academy, TN

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Student Demonstration Debate

On Monday night we held a demonstration debate by four students. The debate was about the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy of the armed forces. The affirmative advantage concerned eliminating the officially determined binary identity for GLBT. The negative counterplanned with having state supreme courts upholding same-sex marriages. They also ran a militarism kritik along with a defense of the increasing societal tolerance toward and legal victories of GLBT in society.

The four debaters were: Alex Parkinson (first affirmative), Eli Jacobs (second affirmative), Ivie Okundaye (first negative) and Ovais Inamullah (second negative).

Here are some pictures from the debate























Monday, July 24, 2006

Strategy Sessions





After a day in the library finishing up our research and argument writing, today we are conducting a series of strategy sessions that follow-up on our brainstorming sessions. Students are doing virtually all the coaching today, however, as they take turns discussing the arguments their strategy groups wrote.

Here is the group leading the strategy session on readiness impacts.


This is the group leading on Don't Ask, Don't Tell.








Sunday, July 23, 2006

High-Fives to Tara's Research Group!

The Miami Scholars broke up into work groups of four this week to undertake our "7 Strategies" curriculum. Each group was assigned a major case Aff on this year's topic and worked together as a "squad" to develop a case negative...starting from the brainstorming aspect to file completion.

I just wanted to give a shout-out to the four workers in my group. We put out four off-case positions to the Draft Aff.

Amy Huang - Offshore Balancing CP to solve the terminal impact to readiness
Olivia Lui - 15 Months Enlistment Incentives CP (also a neg frontline to the Aff that uses 15-mos enlistment as their solvency mech as a bonus)
Ivie Okundaye -- Overstretch Good DA - Iran strikes
Mason Marshall-- Overstretch Good DA -- Germany troop pull-out good

The group also put out a draft neg with a tight solvency frontline, readiness adv frontline, social equities adv frontline, and some more politics links.

Way to go!!

Tara