Archive for March 31st, 2010

Today’s the last day of March and the last chance for you to help out the Boston Debate League in its March for Goodness competition. This is an organization that’s near and dear to my heart, and if you’ve enjoyed and/or profited from this blog, a $10 donation is a great way to say thank you. If we secure the most distinct donors of $10 or more, we stand to win $10,000!

Please donate here, right now!

I’ve got another story for you today about the power of debate, this one actually from a similar organization that I worked with in Chicago before I founded the Boston Debate League. I was a junior at the University of Chicago: white, reasonably well-off, over-educated, and sheltered. I grew up in a solidly white, middle-class suburb of Baltimore and, aside from a few summers working at a 7-11 and a year of volunteering in the Chicago Debate League, I had very little experience interacting with people from backgrounds different than my own.

I’d just gotten a job as an assistant coach in the CDL and had been assigned to Orr Academy, an under-performing (to put it mildly) high school in Chicago’s Harlem. As the name suggests, the neighborhood was virtually all black (the only white person I ever saw on the streets there was selling pornographic DVD’s out of a briefcase) and economically depressed.  Read the complete post...