Spreading Bad Theory

A.
Interpretation: In the 2014-15 policy debate season, high school competitors

should not spread.
B. Opponent is using excessive speed
C. Standards
1. The standard is accessibility. Using excessive speed is
unfair because not all debaters can understand excessive
speed and so are put at an immediate disadvantage within
the round. If I cant understand and flow your arguments
its impossible for me to respond to them.
2. The standard is exclusion from the debate space. Using
excessive speed is unfair because not all debaters can use
speed to the same ability. If I cant read as fast as you Im
not able to put out the same number of arguments so Im
put at a disadvantage. Additionally I cant respond to all of
you arguments so you can just extend them and win the
round.
3. The standard is the ability to check abuse. If I cant check
abuse there is no possible way we can have a fair debate
because abuse is allowed to run rampant. Using excessive
speed is unfair because judges who dont understand
everything youre saying are forced to accept the
implications you draw from your case in your final speech.
This allows the debater using speed to draw new
implications and warrants out of their cases in their final
speech because if we didnt understand the speech the first
time we have no way of knowing whether those
implications were there initially or not.
4. The standard is strategy skew. I have to write my
affirmative case before I come into the round. I cant
possibly predict how fast the negative debater is going to
deliver their arguments so I cant preempt their use of
speed. If I simply engage in speed from the beginning, I
open myself up to all of these arguments against speed. If I
dont read fast however, I can easily get spread out of the
round by the negative debater. Theres no way for me to
win. This abuse happens before the round even begins.
When they use speed they perpetuate this negative
advantage because if the threat of speed ceases to exist, so

does the advantage. You should reject the debater because
doing so delegitimizes the use of excessive speed in debate
rounds and ensures that debate as an activity is not lead
down a path of intrinsic unfairness.
D. The voter is fairness, which serves as an internal link to education for three
reasons:
a.
Unfairness in the activity will decrease the number of students who do debate, and thus will
decrease the amount of education they gain from debate. Thus fairness comes first because it
is necessary in accessing education in debate. Debaters need to be structurally equal before
other considerations are looked at. Otherwise, they will have no incentive to debate because
people will not engage in a competitive activity if they are structurally disadvantaged.
b. An activity that promotes unfair practices degrades the educational value of that activity and
the skills learned by participating in it. Thus fairness comes before education because unfair
practices are uneducational.
2. Fairness is an objective way to evaluate arguments, because what is fair is
determined by the same factors, but each individual contextualizes what is
educational. Thus education is vague, and leaves more room for judge
intervention and judge bias.
a. Education is influenced by many outside factors such as the amount of
prep one does on an argument, thus determining the level of substance
that we can get from a particular discussion.
b. The value of education is contextualized by the knowledge and skill sets
that will be particularly helpful later, which is vague because individuals do
not know what their future will look like, or if their future will be similar to
that of their opponents.
c. Unfairness in a round has a greater impact on the decision than education,
so prefer impacts back to fairness, over impacts back to education.
The roll of the ballot is to promote debate that advocates real world
policies, the only way to ground our discussion is to remove the
inclusion of speed in Policy. Debate is a unique educational activity that
can teach students to become critical and engaged citizens. Thus, you
as a judge have a pre-fiat duty to vote for the debater who best
challenges oppressive norms.
Giroux 11:
The argument presented here suggests that it is time for educators, community leaders, parents, young people, and others to take a stand and remind
themselves that collective problems deserve collective solutions and that what is at risk is not only a generation of young people, but the very promise of democracy itself. The
Debate Leagues (UDLs) represents a promising, innovative effort to reinforce[s]

substantive democratic education and tradition by fostering rigorous and
passionate discussions about social change and how it is to be
achieved. The Urban Debate League approaches matters of school equity, reform, and agency through the use of academic debate as a way to
help[s] urban public school students learn the skills, disciplines, [and] knowledge, and values that
enable them to become critically literate and effectively engaged citizens. It organizes
National Association of Urban
debate teams in urban public schools, holds competitions among schools all over the country, and supports the ongoing education of urban school teachers helping them to
recognize the political, pedagogical, and civic value of debate leagues while actively learning how to organize and engage students in such debates. What is so important about the
UDL program is that it is not merely interested in teaching debating skills to students though learning how to do library research [skills], electronic retrieval, critical
policy evaluation is not inconsequential, it is simply not [arent] enough. Instead, debating is viewed as a
form of critical literacy that empowers students, especially underrepresented races,
ethnicities, and females, not only with high-powered academic skills but also with the essential critical knowledge and belief necessary to convince them that they can
analysis, and
1 Henry Giroux. Chapter 14: The Urban Debate League and the Politics of Possibility. In America on the Edge. Palgrave Macmillan, April 2006.
become both effective advocates for democracy
and leaders in a world that they must learn how to
to
have a voice students must learn from and construct pedagogical
practices that make knowledge meaningful in order to be critical and critical in order to be
transformative. And the space of the debate provides exactly the public sphere where
students learn how to invest in ideas, engage in dialogue with others, respect the positions of those different from their own, and do so in the
spirit of contributing [contribute] to both a wider public discourse and a more vibrant public life. The
inuence and govern. Operating with the assumption that to be voiceless is to be powerless, the UDL organizes high school debates around the understanding that
UDL believes that excellence cannot be abstracted from equity, and that historically academic debate was largely the province of white, privileged youth from affluent suburban
and private schools. The interscholastic debate experience provided these students with important communicative skills, modes of literacy, research opportunities, and the ability to
travel and meet students from similar privileged backgrounds. Needless to say, such students enjoyed all the privileges debate leagues afforded them, but the benets were
exclusively class-based, and the very notion of the debate as a performative event was viewed as limited to the ranks of the elite. The UDL has attempted to change the class
dynamics of the sphere of high school debating by purposely enlisting working-class youth, minorities of color, and young women into debating leagues in order not only to raise
crucial to engaged
forms of citizenship, [and] public policy, democratic values, and what it might mean to imagine a future that
their possibilities for going on to higher education, but also to connect them to those discourses that [is] are
does not merely imitate the present. The UDL believes that matters of literacy, critical understanding, and intervention in the world are linked to matters of advocacy, which
presupposes that notions of critical consciousness and learning are [is] inextricably connected to social change. I believe in Urban Debate Leagues because their organizers and
participants believe it is not only possible to think against the grain, but crucial to act in ways that demonstrate political conviction, civic courage, and collective responsibility.

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A.

Interpretation: In the 2014-15 policy debate season, high school competitors

advantage because if the threat of speed ceases to exist, so

Debate Leagues (UDLs) represents a promising, innovative effort to reinforce[s]

become both effective advocates for democracy

and leaders in a world that they must learn how to

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