Lewis,+Tim

I debated on the national circuit for Damien High School in La Verne, CA for four years. I graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles this past Spring with a BA in Critical Theory and Social Justice. I am pursuing my Master's degree at the University of La Verne in Social Justice in Higher Education Administration this Fall. I will be coaching with Damien this year. My academic work involves the works of Georges Bataille, the poetic, and post-colonialism (do not assume, though, that if you read these arguments at me I will give you bonus points for playing to my professional sympathies).

I have been judging since the start of the season so I am relatively familiar with the topic.

Please email (tjlewis1919@gmail.com) me all of the speeches before you begin. I won't charge you prep time while you email the speech doc.

I'm not going to do things unless you tell me to do them on the flow (judge kick, theory 'traps' etc.). If you do not give me instructions, I will try to find the most recent instructions that were dropped and use them as my guiding logic. Important note: Speed is not an issue for me BUT the high schoolers that I have seen are not speaking clearly and I will call you out on it.

I have always believed that technical debating beats truthiness debating. However, that means your technical skill should make me believe/be able to determine that your argument is the truth. That means warrants. Explain them, impact them, and don't make me fish for them in the un-underlined portion of the six paragraph card that your coach cut for you at a camp you weren't attending. That said, if you can win a debate with a 30 second or 1 minute speech because something was massively mishandled-- please do so. I will reward you with better speaker points because you are showing me that you actually understand how the debate is going, the arguments involved, and the path to victory.

If you need an accommodation of any kind, please email me before the round starts so that we can try and work something out. I want everyone to feel safe and able to debate- this is my number one priority as a judge.

**CX:**

If you need to continue your cross-x into prep, I will only allow for one final question. Once you receive the answer (satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily) I will cut-off any further questions.

**Notes on Performance Debate:**

If you are going to do performance debate:

1. Be upfront about any equipment/technical needs you have before speaking-- this means test the volume before you start, make sure that the image is visible, etc.

2. Please do not personally insult individuals in the debate. I am not advocating respectability politics, but rather a simple aspect of respect for the people in the round (including myself, the coaches, audience members etc.). I consider there to be a substantial difference between an individual offending/microaggressing/misgendering and an individual behaving in a way that would justify a expletive-based insult. Trust me, I can tell the difference between someone willfully practicing evil upon you and someone who is rude or (un)intentionally unkind. Likewise, I believe that there is cause for in-round violence/damage winning the ballot. If I have been unclear on this section, ask me before the round begins.

3. Don't dodge substance. If someone has a critique of your author that mentions them by name, you need to deal with that beyond saying 'doesn't apply, doesn't assume our advocacy statement.'

If you are debating a performance team:

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">1. I expect you to engage with their argument. They read a case-- maybe not one that you would typically recognize as such, but it is still a case. You have to answer it. State good, policy debate good, etc. are not sufficient answers on their own and without any context. Cards cut fifteen years ago will not grant you victory against even a badly researched/performed non-traditional affirmative.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">2. You need to be considerate of your behavior and language. You should be doing this all of the time anyways and if you are not (even if it is not a performance round) I am more than happy to vote on in-round harms if the argument is dropped/mishandled.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">3. I am less and less convinced by generic framework arguments. I find framework to be a boring/unhelpful/poorly debated style of argument. I want to hear about the ballot-- what is it, what is its role, and what are your warrants for it. I want to know what kind of individual you think the judge is (academic, analyst, intellectual etc.). These are the most salient questions in a framework debate for me. If you are going to go for Fairness, you need a metric. Not just a caselist, not just a hypothetical ground dispensation, but an actual way to measure the impact of fairness in the round/outside the round. I am not sure what that metric is, but my job is not to create the metric for you. A framework debate that talks about competing theories for how fairness should be structured and analyzed will make me very happy. Cross-apply this to Education impacts.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">**The K**

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">I do not expect to see a good K debate. You are in high school and have not read anywhere near enough for you to know what you are talking about. This is not your fault. I do not know of many/any high schools that teach continental philosophy and radical identity scholarship as the main course curriculum (unfortunately).

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">I do expect you to know the body of scholarship that your K revolves around-- for example, if you are reading a capitalism K, you should know who Marx, Engels, and Gramsci are; if you are reading a feminism k, you should know what school of feminism (second wave, psychoanalytic, WOC, etc.) your author belongs too. If you try and make things up (because you don't know it) about the historical aspects/philosophical links of your K, I will reflect my unhappiness in your speaker points and probably not give you much leeway on your link/alt analysis.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">I have noticed that I can be very grumpy about the way in which I respond to how the K is debated. Please do not think that my 'aggressive enthusiasm' after the round is indicative of what I think about you as a person, student, or debater. I really want to help you understand what you are actually reading, but please be patient with me as I am still developing a consistent way to explain this--I know that I have a bad habit or rambling or saying incomprehensible statements (not that I am all knowledgeable but that I can be unclear about what I am specifically referring to since my head is full of K jargon from my academic work that rarely is found in debate rounds). I am still learning, just as you are; difficulty and failure is inevitable, but from failure is also always new growth.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">**Theory and Topicality** <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">If you are just going to read blocks at me, no one is going to have a fun time. You can go for T or theory with me in the back. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Be specific, know your debate history. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">If you want it on the flow, don't be afraid to go slow--otherwise your 30 seconds on the limits debate are just going to read 'overlimit/underlimit good 4 reasons' etc.