Public speaking is a weakness for some people and a strength for others. When it comes to myself, I can’t decide if it is either. I’m not afraid of getting up in front of people and giving my opinion, but that can almost be a weakness when I’m not carefully thinking about what I say before it comes out of my mouth. Although, with this specific assignment, that was probably a good thing, because you probably didn’t have to time to think before you spoke anyways.

The way this project was presented made it nearly impossible to prepare like you would for a normal debate. We didn’t know our questions beforehand, and we had to think up all our examples and answers on the spot. Oh, and who won was pretty subjective. It was based on judges who didn’t truly understand the assignment and an audience who just voted for their own kids.

When it comes down to it, these were not debates. They were informal arguments. I’m pretty sure the point of the assignment was to assess our public speaking, and not our debate skills, so the actual project seemed to suffer. Anybody who had any fear of public speaking would not go up and say anything because they didn’t have much time to go off of. It is because of this reason that my group’s first and only debate ended up just being a screaming match between me and Matthew Seed.

I still believe that my team should have won because my arguments were better than his, and he contradicted himself at least three times. However, he took advantage of the audience vote by delivering zingers instead of actual points. This won him the argument because I got caught in a loop of trying to derail all his random points while he just threw out more.

The same issue occurred in the second debate we did. In the “losers” debate, my team again lost because we got attacked by zingers and those debates were decided only by audience vote. What I can say is that the team that won the whole thing did win by actually debating correctly.

My point isn’t that I’m mad that I lost because we didn’t deserve to win those debates in those formats. Although, they were not debates, and I’m pretty aware that being debates was not the point of them. It was for an exhibition, therefore it was designed to be entertaining. However, if the teachers were to do this same assignment again, I would hope they would take these concerns into account. I don’t like the idea of teaching these as debates because they are not. They are not debates in the same way that the 2016 presidential election didn’t hold a single debate.

Although we see it all the time in our class, and on YouTube, and in politics, I am appalled at the fact that anyone would be taught that a roast counts as an intellectual debate. If you want to teach public speaking, teach public speaking, but do not use it to create a world where we are brought up to believe that anything like that should be okay in a formal setting. If we decide we believe in that, we have truly lost our democracy.