The end of the school year has come once again, and we all know what that means, exhibition time. This year, unlike my past two years in the PLP program, we didn’t do any blue sky projects, (which not gonna lie, I’m kind of happy about). Instead as I explained earlier on in the year, we have done different types of projects. We created an immersive experience for our winter exhibition and that was extremely fun to create and present. This time we tried something a little different. A debate battledome.

Recently in class we have been studying a few things. The Canadian government system as well as other government systems, Lord of the Flies, and finally debates. We spent about 3 weeks to a month doing all of this and wow can I just say that it was hectic. All of our class time was spent learning about these topics and preparing for our big debates. We were put into teams of 3, these were the teams that we would debate with. My team was made up of myself, Cashel, and Jackson. Going into it we were all pretty confident we would do well as we all enjoy doing debates.

The night had finally come. Thursday night, our exhibition night. We had spent all of our time in class preparing ourselves for this and we were all ready to do our best and destroy the debates in the battledome. We spent our time after school practicing and preparing as a team for our great debate. We were looking over our concept charts we had made in and out of class and practicing thinking on the spot. Now was the time and the three of us in our group were prepared and ready to battle.

We got the news that we would be the first ones up and debating. That was the most relieving and stressful news all at once. I was glad to be going first so that I wouldn’t be nervous thinking about it later, but at the same time I was dreading going up. I was surprisingly 100% calm right up until the moment we walked up in front of everyone. I don’t think I’ve ever shook that much in any presentation. As prepared as I was I was still extremely nervous. While we were debating I was trying to type notes and points for my team and had to retype everything five times because I was shaking so much. Honestly my only fear at that point was dropping my iPad from shaking so much.

Our team did really well in our debate, despite the fact that the results didn’t show it. We were well spoken, had good points and strong rebuttals. I’m proud of the work we did in our first round. Even if we did get eliminated. Since we technically lost the first round, we then had to fight in the losers bracket a little later on in the night and boy did we kill that one. For this second debate it was all based upon audience votes and we had an almost unanimous vote for us. It was insanely fun to debate that second time because at that point we were all riled up and prepared to take down the other team. I guess the name “debate battledome” was quite appropriate for our exhibition then.

Here’s the winning team, Michael Sutherland, Christopher Ross, and Maria Melhado

Overall I feel this was a new and extremely helpful learning experience for us all. It forced us to think on our feet, use our witty abilities to come back with good rebuts, and create well thought out points quickly. I enjoyed my time at the debates and feel it was a god choice for our exhibition this spring, even if we didn’t win it was still a fun event and project. Although next year I wouldn’t mind trying something different again.