In the Great Debate project we created some debates that we presented in front of parents, friends, and classmates. We got to choose classmates that we would compete against.

My partner and I chose to debate whether High School was properly preparing students for life in the real world. I argued that High School helps students in the real world, because you can’t go anywhere without learning the basics – you won’t be able to fulfil your dreams.

I feel like I learned good debating techniques – some of those include thinking on my feet (helped me because I find it hard to follow a script when I am stressed), conveying an opinion, displaying my ideas, and looking like I’m supposed to be there. I have always struggled with this for some reason. But, i guess it wasn’t too bad in the end.

I have always struggled with stage fright.  I think I got lucky by only having six or seven people watching, and it even lifted my sprits when neither my original partner or the backup partner showed up – it was a distraction from the stress.

I felt like the project helped immensely, because after all of the practice speeches, I could somewhat convey my point.

Here is the script I planned to read. The “script” that I actually used was just me “winging it”. A video of it should be floating around somewhere. If you find it, please don’t show me. I don’t want to see it.

Anyway, during the project prep, we watched The Great Debaters. Good movie. 7/10. It is about a debate team and their road to glory. Defying all odds. It has an expected amount of Hollywood moments (bending of the truth).

Emotion, logic, background preparation, all of the techniques I learned in the project, I also used in this blog post. If they made a movie about me, it might be called the “Not-Too-Bad Debater”.