Oookay, so sorry I haven't updated in a long while - stuff has caught up to me (exams, debate competitions, Model UN stuff, school applications, projects and whatever society throws upon the young shoulders of teenagers nowadays) and I was sadly unable to update on what was happening.
In case you're wondering now, "Hey, how come she can finally (FINALLY) update now?", I'm currently in Taiwan teaching English to Taiwanese high school students and in between all the tours we've been on and the whirlwind of teaching that ensued, I've finally got some free time. For 10 minutes.
Kind of sad how even my summer is loaded with activity.
Anyway, I'd love to chronicle all of you with my tales of being lost in Taiwanese alleyways with vendors selling whatever humankind can sell and seeing the Pacific Ocean for the first time but I'll cut it short and just tell you about my first debate in about 1 month.
Dang, it was PAINFUL.
Okay, from the beginning.
So I've been teaching in Taiwan for about a week now (having landed on July 15th) and so far, the past several days has been nonstop - we were swept on a tour of Taiwan the morning (5 a.m!!) we left the airport and were driven first to our dorms in the high school we are teaching at (cannot disclose name, sorry). After about 30 minutes to unpack and settle down, we went on crazy crazy tours to basically everywhere in Taiwan. The Gu Gong (National Palace Museum, one of the top museums in the world), Ningxia Night Market, XiangShan Mountains, Taipei 101, the C.W.S. Memorial, shopping in countless Taiwanese malls (the food is extremely good and cheap but the clothes are pretty expensive) and more. Then there was the teaching. I was teaching about 50 really adorable grade 8 girls from the school (split into 2 classes, one morning and one afternoon) and although I was rather tired at the end of each day due to way too much personal interaction, it was so rewarding to help them and mentor them.
I can gush about my amazing and talented students in another post so I'll just get back onto topic - Debate.
So yes, the past days have been super busy but just two nights ago, I finally got the chance to Skype my long time debate partner HL.
Short introduction on HL.
We're both in the same grade (10 going on to 11 in September), the same age and with the same birthday (which was really freaky when we both found out). He's amazingly talented especially in oratory and speaking style and incredibly driven (he wants to go to University of Pennsylvania and has dedicated basically all his energy towards that goal, including skipping debate meetings at times to my chagrin) and, luckily for me, extremely smart. HL's career goal is to do something in business and finance hence his participation in DECA and his efforts to get me into DECA too (unfortunately I can't due to History Council being on the same day and me being an exec of that club) and his refutation is heavenly. I'll admit that I wouldn't sound half as good nor get the speaks I get without him there to back up my points and shoot down the opponents'. Nor, I'll also admit, that he'd be the level he's at right now without my constructive to build our case. Both times when we went to tournaments with another partner, we both failed miserably. Ugh, bad memories.
But, when we were the PD Team (composed of our last names which cannot be revealed here), we ROCKED. :)
But, when we were the PD Team (composed of our last names which cannot be revealed here), we ROCKED. :)
Oh and did I mention that he just started Debate in September 2013 and that I had a year's debate experience on him? Now we're almost the same level. Pretty damn impressive. I couldn't believe it myself if it wasn't for me who was the one training him through gruelling sessions on Skype over winter break and March break.
Now I know this sounds like some fangirl gushing over her celebrity crush or something but it's not like that. Although he almost literally has his own fangirl club at my school (I don't know how since he rarely talks to girls... must be the looks) and that his fangirl club kind of hated me when we first started becoming debate partners (everyone assumed at first that we were more than debuddies if you know what I mean... they even got a ship name for us and for a few months I had to live with catcalls everytime I started a practice round), we're very much platonic. Like yeah, I'll admit that I had a tiny crush on him in the beginning (c'mon, he looks like a K-Pop star) but that soon stopped when I realized that our personalities just didn't work out in ways other than just a friendship or debate partnership.
For example, he's the quiet type. Like really really quiet type. As in the sit in the corner looking cool and aloof type. As in sit in the corner looking cool, aloof, unapproachable and damn marble statue type DURING periods in between debate rounds during tournaments while I go around buzzing among different groups of people and making connections with other schools while being super hyper even when not on coffee or tea.
Yeah.
Now let's guess who's the one freaking out and having a nervous breakdown before a tough round and who's the one all calm and composed and trying and failing to calm me down.
That pretty much describes our partnership.
That pretty much describes our partnership.
Anyways, back to the debate practice.
Since I'm in Taiwan and he's in Canada, there's a 12 hour time difference between us and we ended up debating at 10 in the morning for him and at night for me. Which works out amazingly since he's a morning bird and I'm a night owl, with both of us on extreme ends of the spectrum. Back in Canada, he'd drag me up at a bloody early time during summer vacation (9 am can you believe it?? I usually wake up at 2 pm during the holidays) to practice with the results of me being high on lack of sleep during the entire round and I'd in return force him to stay up to 11 pm at night to practice with me (he sleeps at 10 on the dot every single day). Practice times didn't really work out otherwise since we had stuff to do during the daytime.
Thankfully in Taiwan it's all working out great except I keep getting late to practices because I often only get back to the school dorms at like 9:30 after a long day of hiking and touring and also have to set up my laptop in another room so I don't disrupt my roommates.
So anyways, for this debate, HL chose two resolutions: THW never have children and THW allow the usage of torture obtain information on terrorist organizations. I personally leaned a bit more to the terrorist resolution mostly due to my MUN background but HL thought it a good idea to start off light and do the Children round. He flipped a coin, I got Opposition and he got Government.
The way we practice when we're practicing with only the two of us is that we go against each other on opposite sides and fulfill all the roles on each side by ourselves while still limiting our prep time to the standard 15 minutes given to partnered pairs. This forces us to think faster and also more independently and to make up for our own shortcomings without having to rely on our partner to patch things up.
It's also a great way to teach HL themes and the whip speech.
So we got prepping and for 15 minutes, it was intense brainpower, constructive material construction (no pun intended) and digging up old news article analysis and facts in my mind. And then, the rounds starts.
As the Prime Minister, HL defined the House as a modern day average American couple with no medical issues or extreme outside circumstances and who didn't wish to have any children - biological or adopted. It's a very fair model considering that he was the one arguing against having children and didn't give me an unfair burden and he defined it so that it was like the gov was the spouse that was against the idea and the opp (my side) was the spouse wanting children.
Kind of flipped in real life though since we both knew that I never wanted kids and that he wanted three and to raise them with a parenting style akin to the Asian tiger mom.
Anyways, with the model down, he proceeded onto elaborating his three main constructives.
Note: the following points are extremely paraphrased and summarized and basically only outlines the basic ideas.
1) Burden
A. Physical - thousands of hours dedicated to taking care of children and thus the lack of a social life or any other life outside of work and taking care of kids. Causes parents to be physically tired and is a detriment to yourself and your health.
B. Emotional - Your life is not about you anymore with so many constraints and furthermore, emotional harm may occur if certain circumstances were to happen to your child and also if the child doesn't love the parents back.
C. Financial - huge expenses for raising a child and more difficulty bringing back student loans of the parents while raising a child. Financial difficulties will hinder healthy childhood development and parental parenting techniques.
A. Physical - thousands of hours dedicated to taking care of children and thus the lack of a social life or any other life outside of work and taking care of kids. Causes parents to be physically tired and is a detriment to yourself and your health.
B. Emotional - Your life is not about you anymore with so many constraints and furthermore, emotional harm may occur if certain circumstances were to happen to your child and also if the child doesn't love the parents back.
C. Financial - huge expenses for raising a child and more difficulty bringing back student loans of the parents while raising a child. Financial difficulties will hinder healthy childhood development and parental parenting techniques.
2) Risk of no payback - children may not love their parents back and may simply just abandon their parents once they're adults thus leading to no payback for all the sacrifices that parents have given their children.
3) Environmental concerns - with 7 billion people and more coming, bringing more humans onto the planet may just cause even more strain on resources.
I was pretty impressed at his use of subpoints for the first constructive since he rarely used them before.
After the PM speech, it was my turn.
Now I'll just say here and now that I rather half-assed my points. Be prepared to cringe.
1) Later regret
A. Elderly care - When in old age, you'll be insecure without children who share strong familial, legal and etc. ties with you. There's the possibility of being stuck in nursing homes and retirement homes which have the risk of being exploited and abused if no one else is on your side. The alternatives to children could be social services or friends and other close family but I also closed that loophole by saying that social services and the government while they do put regulations in, sometimes one needs more personal attention and care. Also, although friends and other family members may also be able to fulfill the child's role, the connections and the debt owed by a child to this parent is unequaled in the case of friends and other relations since friends and other relations may choose to on a whim to drop out of taking care of the elderly while children have a lifelong debt and connection to their parents which often compels them to pay more attention to elderly parents than simply a friend or other relation.
B. Inability to fit in with mainstream society - With middle aged mainstream society mostly focused on family (as shown by all the celebrity tabloids awarding baby bumps, the family sized grocery stocks, family activities which centre largely around kids and basically many venues of social interaction for the middle ages centred around children, never having children will put a social distance between us and the rest of society. There will be less social venues which are no child/family centred, less common ground with others to start a new friendship and also the unfortunate stigma that childless couples face these days.
C. Legacy - everyone wants to leave a legacy to the world and that although many careers just disappear and don't leave much of a personal mark once one leaves the physical world behind, memories of someone as a person - from someone who grew up with one - will definitely stay and become a legacy through memories, family stories and family legend.
A. Elderly care - When in old age, you'll be insecure without children who share strong familial, legal and etc. ties with you. There's the possibility of being stuck in nursing homes and retirement homes which have the risk of being exploited and abused if no one else is on your side. The alternatives to children could be social services or friends and other close family but I also closed that loophole by saying that social services and the government while they do put regulations in, sometimes one needs more personal attention and care. Also, although friends and other family members may also be able to fulfill the child's role, the connections and the debt owed by a child to this parent is unequaled in the case of friends and other relations since friends and other relations may choose to on a whim to drop out of taking care of the elderly while children have a lifelong debt and connection to their parents which often compels them to pay more attention to elderly parents than simply a friend or other relation.
B. Inability to fit in with mainstream society - With middle aged mainstream society mostly focused on family (as shown by all the celebrity tabloids awarding baby bumps, the family sized grocery stocks, family activities which centre largely around kids and basically many venues of social interaction for the middle ages centred around children, never having children will put a social distance between us and the rest of society. There will be less social venues which are no child/family centred, less common ground with others to start a new friendship and also the unfortunate stigma that childless couples face these days.
C. Legacy - everyone wants to leave a legacy to the world and that although many careers just disappear and don't leave much of a personal mark once one leaves the physical world behind, memories of someone as a person - from someone who grew up with one - will definitely stay and become a legacy through memories, family stories and family legend.
2. Emotional fulfillment
I had a third point but since a large portion of my time was refutation, I decided to hold it for my LO speech.
I refuted HL's points with:
1. Burden
A. Physical - instead of making parents less healthy, children can be an incentive for parents to get more healthy by giving adults a reason to buy healthier foods and get exercising more for the sake of their kids, thus refuting the whole physical detriment and tiredness of parents that HL brought up.
B. Emotional - HL said that there was a big emotional toll on parents if children act up, don't love their parents anymore and etc. I refuted that by saying that the reason many couples decided to have children was for the happiness that children brought. Children brought emotional fulfillment to ones life by giving them a reason to keep going on not only for their own sake but also for the children's sake and that some of the greatest joys of life as demonstrated by generations of parents were that of their children being happy. I recognized that the emotional toll might be big during hard times but I stated that the end result of happiness and a sense of purpose in life as well as that of familial love was the worth the tolls. Basically I said "No pain, no gain."
C. HL said it was a financial burden to take care of children but I refuted that with long term investment both emotionally and financially since children could take care of their parents in the parents elderly age and thus save money later on.
A. Physical - instead of making parents less healthy, children can be an incentive for parents to get more healthy by giving adults a reason to buy healthier foods and get exercising more for the sake of their kids, thus refuting the whole physical detriment and tiredness of parents that HL brought up.
B. Emotional - HL said that there was a big emotional toll on parents if children act up, don't love their parents anymore and etc. I refuted that by saying that the reason many couples decided to have children was for the happiness that children brought. Children brought emotional fulfillment to ones life by giving them a reason to keep going on not only for their own sake but also for the children's sake and that some of the greatest joys of life as demonstrated by generations of parents were that of their children being happy. I recognized that the emotional toll might be big during hard times but I stated that the end result of happiness and a sense of purpose in life as well as that of familial love was the worth the tolls. Basically I said "No pain, no gain."
C. HL said it was a financial burden to take care of children but I refuted that with long term investment both emotionally and financially since children could take care of their parents in the parents elderly age and thus save money later on.
2. Risk of no payback - I refuted by saying it was only a risk and all dependent on how the parent parents the children and if they treat their kids well or not. I stated that it was side Government's assumption that all children were ungrateful brats and I said that if the couple raised their kids well, then the risk for no payback was very small indeed while if one didn't have children at all, the payback is even more non-existent.
3. I refuted the environmental detriment argument by saying that if we raise the kids well, then the children could become pro active about social issues the environment included and thus make much more of an impact on the environment on a healthier way than if we simply reduced the number of diapers which land in landfills. I stressed the proactive approach as being more effective than simply the reduction approach but looking back now, I can see that there were huge flaws in my refutation - namely in proving why one cannot be proactive in protecting the environment while childless all the while reducing resource strain by not having kids. Thankfully for me, HL didn't call me out on that since he ran out of time later but if it was a more advanced debater I would have been screwed. Argh. I have to watch out for these loopholes in future debates.
So basically I finished my MO speech and HL started on his MC speech but since I'm rather short on time (I'm off to Taipei 101 in about 10 minutes), I'll just say that his refutation was amazing as always, with plenty of examples and somehow managed to make me sound dumb although he forgot to set his timer again and went over time by about 1 minute. Well, we'll work on that.
Anyways, a basic sum up of my LO speech was ... well... rusty. I haven't debated Opp in a long time and my theme speech was whipped up literally in the last minute of HL's MC speech because I somehow forgot that the LO needed themes so.. basically I was pretty hectic and I don't have the time to recount all of the details.
Basically my themes were Impact on Society (since my third point which I didn't elaborate on here was the positive impact on society) and Selfishness vs. Selflessness both which I did in my standard way of doing themes; state the opponent's side first and refute and then bring about my points as a better alternative. It wasn't my best theme speech either since I ran out of time but it wasn't my worst.
Unfortunately, HL somehow completely forgot how to do themes so instead of ending off with the 3 minute PM speech, he did and redid his theme speech with me giving tips, advice and etc. until he got it pretty much perfect. And then he vowed to keep working on it at home. Yeah that's the perfectionist right there.
With the round over, we just did a few refutation exercises and then I was sooo tired due to the hike on the mountains (3 hour long hike!!) so we ended the practice. Normally debate practices energize me but heck, I was tired after that round. So it was adios until the next time (next practice date and time to be determined) and I signed off.
I have to say, it was a relief to finally talk with HL again after almost a month of no activity (due to exams, projects, Taiwan, busy summer etc.) and it was even more of a relief to find that I didn't lose all my debate ability.
There's still room for improvement though but I'll definitely practice more later. :)
Until next time!
