The Debate

I was frustrated with the debate that we did in class.  It was difficult to prepare for the debate because not everyone brought in information on our workday Friday.  We ended up deciding who was going to be working on which part and then discussing in general different points that we could make.  When it came time to debate yesterday, everything kind of fell apart.  We probably did not split up the jobs as well as we could have, but the way we had it, everyone was supposed to have a chance to speak.  Heidi, Sarah, and I were going to give the background information during the first 15 minutes, Andrew, Max, and Kingsley were going to do the 5 minute rebuttal, Sammi and Sonachi had the 2 minute rebuttal, Zach and Ryan had the question/answer session, and Jawanza was going to give the summary.  Everyone came with information to fill their time slot.  When Heidi was not able to come, things got thrown off track.  We had extra time in the first 15 minutes that someone needed to cover.  Max talked through the entire 5 minute rebuttal, giving Andrew and Kingsley no time to speak.  Sonachi did not have time to speak as well.  She did not want to butt in while Sammi was talking.  In order to compensate, Andrew helped answer some of the questions during the question/answer session, as did Sonachi.  Max answered and asked questions there too.  Jawanza was nice enough to split up his one minute of speaking time between himself, Ryan, and Sonachi so that everyone got to say something.  Ryan did not get to speak during the question/answer because everyone else was butting in.

I suppose that my classmates could have spoken up if they had something they wanted to say, its just that I feel like our side of the debate was a bit scattered and random because we were trying to fill in holes the entire time.  In hindsight, we should have assigned more people to talk during the 15 minutes and fewer later on in the debate.  I think we wanted to make sure that there were enough minds working on those parts though to ensure we would have intelligent points to make.  Everyone came into class prepared to say something though.  Unfortunately the way the debate played out, not everyone got to say all they wanted.  That is what frustrated me the most.  The fact that my team members put the time and effort into preparing something and then did not get to say it.

Needless to say, I am glad that the debate is over.  While it was a good experience, I also found it to be stressful and frustrating.  I had never done a debate before, and now that I have, I realize that I would do some things differently for next time.