In my personal opinion, I believe debate is something everyone should get into. It is one of the best extracurriculars you could do. I began debating in Grade 8 for Tom Baines Junior High, and it was an absolutely amazing experience. Debate is something that develops a bunch of your skills: it improves public speaking, note-taking, researching, it helps you learn how to effectively structure a speech, and most importantly, debate
helps you with your logic. In other words, you can win every argument you will ever get into if the other person is a non-debater. I can vouch for that from personal experience.
What I have noticed is that many people don’t seem to know about debate. And the ones who do have huge misconceptions. So, I have set up this mini-series of blogs to help people take their first steps towards debating.
Before anything else, I will give you a profile on my debate background. I started a debate club, with my fellow YAA blogger Sunand at my junior high school. This club was hastily formed and as such, did not enter the official competitions. However, in Grade 9, with much more planning, we were able to set up an officially registered debate club. As a school which had been removed from competition for over five years, we fared incredibly well in our first year back, collecting various medals throughout the season. My team won second place at the Webber tournament while I placed first and we also performed exceptionally well at Calgary regionals. As of now, with no new tournaments having started I am currently the 2nd ranked debater in Calgary in my age category. Now, what I want all of you to keep in mind is that this was my first year in debate. I literally learned the format of the rounds two weeks before I attended my first tournament. But, as I debated I learned and by the end of the year, I could debate as well as anyone. Debate is not hard to learn – the rules are quite simple. As long as you have the confidence to succeed and the drive, you can be great at debate. Don’t get me wrong, you will stumble at the beginning, or like me, fall flat on my face (I placed 46th in my first tournament), but you need to get up and say: “I was not very good that time around; what am I going to do to improve?” Debate is about building on your mistakes. No one, not even prodigies, are able to nail the first debate they attend. It’s simply not possible. So, I hope that through this first blog I have calmed your nerves and has piqued your interest in debate. I will see you next week when I’ll introduce how to establish a new debate club and how to register with the ADSA.