The Other Side of the Coin (Flip): Balanced Duties for PF Teams
This article was originally published in the October 2012 edition of the Rostrum.
The coin flip in Public Forum (PF) often becomes a competition between teams vying to be second speaker.
The common belief holds that the second team—the last to speak—has all of the power in the round and can have the added benefit of hindsight regarding what the opponent has discussed in the first Final Focus when selecting issues to extend into their own Final Focus. The wisdom holds that the second team is able to have the final word that a judge considers, the ability to frame the lasting impression of the debate. This common belief is only about half true. Sure, hindsight is quite an ally, but the benefit that being the first team holds is clear: in no other debate event does a rebuttal speaker have the luxury of a 1:1 ratio of time that grants equal speech time between an initial case and the rebuttal that attacks it.
Too often, teams that “lose” the coin flip and end up in the first team slot willfully surrender their amazing time allocation advantage by returning to their own case and reiterating positions that have yet to be attacked, positions that should have been clear the first time they were offered less than ten minutes prior. In the name of addressing “both sides of the flow,” first team debaters don't make use of the significant advantage provided by a four minute rebuttal to an initial four minute speech.
My feelings on the balancing of duties within any debate round are clear: if there is an imbalance in one direction, there must be something to counterbalance it. In Lincoln-Douglas (LD), for example, the affirmative debater speaks first and last and has the advantage of setting the direction of the debate, but the negative debater is given the benefit of the longer rebuttal (six minutes to the affirmative's four). Whether the speaking order arrangement does enough to overcome the negative's advantage in time is an issue for another day, but what's clear is that the speakers' duties are set as they are in an attempt to balance out the potential advantages for one debater over another.
In PF, the same should be true. While the second team has the advantage of hindsight in determining the direction of the last Final Focus, the first team has the counter-advantage of a 1:1 ratio as explained before. In effect, the first team has the ability to dig a hole so deep that the second team has trouble climbing out to put their hindsight advantage to good use.
There is, of course, another part of this equation. Without judges and coaches holding debaters on the second team to the duty of answering every argument made in the round up to the point of the second rebuttal—both the opposing case and opposing rebuttal— then the first team has no unique benefit in their 1:1 speaking ratio as the second team is, in effect, given the same gift. Our students and those we evaluate should be held to the expectation that the second team will use their rebuttal to address all opposing arguments in the debate up to the rebuttals lest the means of winning within the event be significantly based upon which team is fortunate enough to win the coin flip and eagerly declare they are second.
Our competitive debate events have functioned on this level for as long as I've known anything about debate and as I understand, many, many years prior to that time. The expectation is that a debater will discuss and address all issues in a round up to the point of the rebuttals within those speeches, and anything that is not addressed is at its most essential level a conceded argument. In order to balance out the second team's lastword-in-the-debate advantage, judges must hold these debaters to the duty of addressing all opposing arguments in the debate up to the rebuttal.
If we as coaches and judges do not teach our own PF debaters to approach the event in such a fashion, we run the rather unavoidable circumstance of turning PF into an event wherein two proverbial ships pass one another in the night as argumentative clash is essentially eliminated.
There may be opponents to this concept of ideal PF competition due to a perception that this requirement could push PF to become a speed and spread driven activity, that the push for making debaters accountable for every argument made will take PF down the same road that Policy and LD have been taking for years. I feel that the underlying premise of this argument is faulty insofar as PF will still remain an event geared toward the citizen judge.
Because parents, non-debate affiliated teachers, school administrators, bus drivers, and other members of our communities make up a significant portion of our PF judge pools, the kind of rapidity that many believe has harmfully stricken LD and Policy is in the vast majority of cases rendered pointless by judges who find it nothing more than silly. There may, of course, be occasional rounds wherein teams, knowing a certain judge's preferences ahead of time, feel comfortable speaking at lightning speed, but rounds of that nature will certainly be the minority of cases if judges and coaches take the active role that citizen judges certainly will against presentations that do not respect the public friendly, communicative nature of PF.
Of course, this redirection of teams' approaches to the duties of the rebuttal speakers comes as well with new obligations for coaches who would be tasked with teaching students how to cover eight minutes of material in four minutes. To these coaches, I say focus on teaching your students how to make two great arguments instead of one good one and 67 mediocre ones. That's hyperbole, of course, but it feels like every time I judge a tournament, a decent number of second team rebuttal answers begin with some variation of the phrase, “I have six responses.” When I hear those words escape the lips of the second team's rebuttal speaker, I know that most of those answers won't be worth the time that slips away while they're barely explained.
When the coin is in the air, our teams should not loathe any position in the debate. Our teams should be focused instead on what they know they need to do to take advantage of the benefits of either order. By holding second teams to the same duty of argumentative coverage that the second debater/team would face in any other event, PF becomes more fair and more fun for all involved and keeps its own identity in the process.
Aarron Schurevich is the first-year head debate coach at Millard North High School in Omaha, NE. For the last several years, he was the Public Forum assistant at Millard West High School.