Winning all those speech tourneys is not easy

 At a recent District 6 School Board meeting, a respected member of our community made the comment that, after looking at the number of speech and debate state championship banners which hang in our gymnasium, it must be easy, this activity that simply involves students talking.

 Well, soon our community will host for the third time in the past decade the State Class A Speech, Debate and Drama Tournament, and I thought for those who are not yet aware of the work that our students put into competing intellectually, and in acquiring the skills necessary to effectively articulate with passion and conviction on subjects relevant to our community and the larger world outside our community, I’d think back to the day where, as their coach, I stole these same kids from their families for nearly six months out of every year.

 Work began each year in August, and by work I mean research and study on subjects as diverse as whether in a just society one’s individual right to free expression was of greater value than the security of the nation itself, or whether our federal government ought to pursue policies promoting cleaner, renewable energies over current policies where we, the taxpayers, provide subsidies for the exploration of carbon fuels, oftentimes on public lands, or whether an individual’s right to privacy supersedes the states compelling interests in providing social order.

Debate isn’t easy and in truth doesn’t begin with the debate. It begins with knowing more and understanding better the issues tied to the academic discussion, which often means knowing even better than your opponent the arguments and circumstances which would support their argument.

Thousands of pages of materials are read, sifted through, compiled and ordered as evidence, briefs are written on both sides of the discussion, cases affirming the resolution are written and rewritten, and our kids travel as far as the University of Montana Mansfield Library for a few days each year to avail themselves with the volume of material our universities provide.

Of course, none of this happens until each debater is taught both the philosophy of debate and case-writing as well as the methodologies and specific rhetorical responsibilities each speaker accepts when they agree to speak intellectually to an issue well over a quarter of a million students across the country are studying at the same time for the same purpose. Easy.

Our speakers begin in August studying, and if you compete in extemporaneous or impromptu speaking, you are studying everything — social, political and economic issues of the day both relevant to our society as well as those societies we associate with around the world.

More simply, they need to know who the combatants in the Sudanese Civil War are, what either side fights for, and which side our government has determined to support and why; and they’d need to be able to speak to whether Jay-Z’s slight of Taylor Swift at the Grammy Awards was emblematic of the divide between hip-hop culture and folk-country and indicative of current racial divides that remain even after the civil rights movement. On that topic, I would teach the kids about Selma, and they would explain to me who Jaz-Z is.

Our students read Time, Newsweek, The Economist and the Christian Science Monitor cover to cover. They study Kant, Maslow, Rousseau, Aquinas, Locke, Mill and any other of the great philosophical thinkers of any age simply to put their own thoughts in a context that allows them to address any relevant values question. Easy.

And once they’ve completed hours of study — I’d describe it as putting in a full day at work and then going to your second job — they work on defining, redefining and developing a clarity of understanding of the issues from every point of view so that they will ultimately speak intelligently to the issues.

Our state champions in memorized public address and original oratory, for example, didn’t simply speak well but championed causes each felt passionately were deserving of our community’s and the larger society’s attention. Speeches on tolerance toward the gay and lesbian community, on the issue of extreme poverty throughout the world and its impact on children, on the responsibilities of an educational system purposely working toward creating academic rigor while at the same time developing socially responsible citizens, on empowering women in Third World countries, on political and social ethics — each of these speeches was effectively researched, appropriately sourced and written by the student themselves. Easy.

Keep in mind, to this point no one’s competed, no medals, no celebrations. Beginning in October, our students practice up to five nights a week and including weekends if they’re working on their own case writing or speeches. They present to one another, their coaches and anyone willing to listen and provide critical feedback, and after nearly four weeks of preparation and refinement in the art of rhetoric, then they get on the bus — sometimes as early as 4 or 5 a.m.

They travel throughout the state to competitions, sometimes two-day competitions, where ultimately they present to judges chosen from those communities and their competition five or six rounds if they’re speaking and up to six rounds of debate a day. Remember that a policy debate lasts an hour and a half and that many of our finest students who compete in two speaking events at each tournament will present up to 12 times in a day, beginning at 8 a.m. and finishing at 6 p.m. or later, against many of the state’s finest. And like our athletes, they’ll compete against the class above, our AA friends around the state, and Missoula Loyola at nearly every tournament. Easy.

What our kids have accomplished beginning long before this school’s first state championship in speech and debate in 1978, a team coached by Harold Tusler, to this date in 2015, as they prepare and aspire to win a 10th consecutive state championship and 17th overall under the guidance of Tara Norick, Kim Gange and Leslie DiMaio, may seem common because it occurs fairly often, but please know just how uncommon their cumulative achievement is.

No Class A program comes close to having ever achieved 10 consecutive state titles. In fact, the only community to come anywhere near — Columbia Falls, which won four consecutive titles from 2000-2003.

No, I wouldn’t want anyone in our community to believe any of this has been easy. We have a great deal to be proud of in our community and in our school system, but I don’t know that anything compares to the number of banners representing student achievement that hang in our high school gymnasium.

And if you count carefully, no program in any high school gymnasium at the Class A level of competition has the number of speech and debate banners as ours. Our kids work hard, remain determined to achieve and honor the work that’s taking place in every classroom in our school district, the contributions of every educator and most emphatically the love and support they receive within their homes and our larger community. Easy.

Michael Christensen is an English teacher at Columbia Falls High School and former speech and debate coach.