Today was the last day of the BDL’s week-long summer institute, and it really went better than I could have hoped. There were some snags, particularly when the post office lost three weeks worth of my mail including all of the applications, but we rallied and managed to bring together a good bunch of people.
There were 10-12 kids in attendance on any given day and a few coaches as well. I was particularly surprised by the latter, because the coaches are all public high school teachers who already do way too much work for not enough money. Far be it from me to pressure them into giving up a week of their summers to spend even more time on debate, but several chose to do so anyway, and my hat’s off to them. Truthfully I’m in awe of most any teacher, and these incredibly caring, dedicated, hard-working people going above and beyond are nothing short of amazing. I spent most of the institute working with them, and I must say it was a privilege.
The high school students were equally cool, though they spent most of their time working with two volunteers from Harvard’s debate team who were with us for the week. Most of them were taking time off from summer jobs to come to the camp, and after spending the first half of the day doing very demanding and intensive debate preparation, when I was more than ready to be done for the day, they’d have to head off to work.
The other impressive thing was that the vast majority of these students knew nothing about debate. I was expecting to get mostly experienced debaters and maybe a few new people, but it was just the opposite. So basically these kids took time off of work or otherwise gave up a week of their summer vacations and followed my vague directions to show up at some classroom on the UMass Boston campus on nothing more than a whim that debate might be interesting to them.
Fortunately, it seems, most of them were correct. Ralph and Leo, our Harvard volunteers, really went above and beyond to make the camp simultaneously fun, interesting, and rigorous. After just a few days, these students put on a very respectable first debate this morning. Obviously there were tons of mistakes, since they were all novices, but I saw so many glimmers of understanding, flashes of intuition, and all-around good instincts!
A few of them in particular stood out. One was a Somali girl who had immigrated to the US when she was 10 years old. Her school wasn’t actually even in the Boston Debate League, but she had done a rather different form of debate and chose to come to the camp anyway. I’m glad she did, because she was a real delight to have around! Though occasionally nervous, she was smart as a whip and had a very mature intellect. When it came to thinking through some of the more complex arguments we considered, she was usually the first to figure things out, and her contributions were invaluable.
Another was John (not his real name), who was pretty disinterested on the first day. But he’d already made the effort to come, and that was worth a lot. By the end of the institute, he’d won the award for Most Improved. According to Ralph and Leo, something clicked for him during his practice round this morning, and suddenly he just making some highly sophisticated arguments. His coach, who’d been coming to the institute as well, told me that John had done more work this week than he did in a full semester of this coach’s class last school year.
Debate does that sometimes, just hooks kids who have never been interested in or done well at school before. It’s one of the most rewarding things to see someone realize for the first time that he is smart. There are these kids who have just never tried very hard, always gotten bad grades, and for that reason earned probably deserved reputations as lackadaisical students. But debate, which is a much more participatory and student-centered activity, though also an extremely rigorous and intellectual one, seizes them in a way that nothing else has. Sometimes this spills over into their schoolwork, but even if it doesn’t, it’s often enough to keep them coming to school, which in turn is often enough to get them a diploma, and that makes a world of difference.
When we first started the League, I treated the awards we gave out at tournaments as an after-thought. As far as I was concerned, participation and education, not competition, were the important things. But it can be a special moment when a kid who has never won anything, not a sports trophy, not a school award, nothing, suddenly finds herself recognized for being smart. It is often not just the student but her family who are surprised, and that single positivite experience can sell someone on debate for a long time.
It was a great week, for them and for me. I spend so much of my time either dealing with the frustrations of poker or doing tedious/annoying administrative work for the League, work that needs to be done but is not the least bit fulfilling and certainly not the reason I started the League in the first place. But events like this, where I see so much development in such a short period of time and can experience vicariously the thrill that kids get when they are wrapped in debate, recharge my battery and help me power through all the other crap I have to do.
The dedication of volunteers like Ralph and Leo and of the teacher-coaches is inspiring, too. I deal so often with well-meaning people who never come through in the way they tell me they will or people who just want to volunteer to do the fun and rewarding stuff rather than the stuff that really needs to get done, and it is refreshing to spend time with the genuinely committ people who really know what it means to help.
The paradigmatic example of this is Leo, who was brought on board by his friend Ralph, initially just to be a third instructor at the institute. As Ralph started soliciting donations for our meals, however, it became clear that we’d sometimes need someone with a vehicle to pick up and deliver food. Leo ended up being that person, so a lot of his time was not spent talking about an activity he loves with a bunch of fun and dedicated students, but rather sitting in traffic and dealing with all the hassles of food delivery while Ralph and I did the fun stuff. And he was always asking if there was more to be done.
The best question, however, came from a group of students who approached us instructors after we’d said our farewells to ask, “Are we going to do this next summer?”
To which another student added, “Yeah, but for more than a just a week!?!?”