Idriss,+Richard

Juan Diego 2012 UC Berkeley 2017

Juan Diego El Cerrito
 * CONFLICTS:**

A brief note for those who feel time pressed: I would suggest you read my philosophy in its entirety as it's not particularly lengthy, but if you truly don't believe you will have the time, skim through and read the bold.


 * The spiel:**

I am the debate coach at El Cerrito, a former assistant debate coach at Juan Diego, and have taught Policy at the Sun Country Forensics Institute.

I did 2 years of LD, and 2 years of Policy in high school. My senior year, in policy debate, I qualified to the TOC and went to both the CPS and Greenhill round robins.

I am a debate coach of all events, and Policy debate of ALL forms was my specialty. As such, I'm familiar with arguments across the spectrum by necessity as I coach a plethora of students with different argumentative preferences. I have read a fair amount of critical literature. I think this "K vs. Policy" or "traditional vs. performance" divide in debate is nonsense - debate is debate, and an argument is an argument.

Parts of this philosophy are several years old, with sprinklings of the new stuff throughout. I'm going to leave this up as I think it still best reflects how I view debate.


 * My position as a judge shouldn't be to tell you what arguments you should and shouldn't make. My purpose is to adjudicate to the best of my ability and vote for whoever did the better debating. Please be funny.**
 * I enjoy watching clear debaters. I enjoy watching debaters whose style makes it clear what arguments they are answering, whether implicitly or explicitly (regardless of if you are 'debating the flow' or just speaking/performing).**

See below for the details!

- Flashing isn't prep unless you're egregious about it. - If your viewer is a 7 inch netbook with a broken scroller, viruses, no battery, or has any of the other "bad-viewer" stereotypical characteristics, PLEASE flash to the other team. After thinking about this issue more, I think each debater is entitled a copy of the evidence presented in the round, meaning if you don't have 2 viewers, please don't be reluctant to flash to the other team - uphold norms you would want your opponents to follow when debating you. - I trust (and generally expect) debaters to keep track of prep and time themselves (I time speeches so I can give comments on time allocation) - y'all are high school students and a few years away from adulthood at most - I expect you to have some amount of integrity.
 * Random tech things:**

- When assigning points, I scale them based on the relative competition at the tournament (i.e. a 29 at the Sophomore Hoe Down does NOT mean that same team would receive a 29 for that performance at the MBA tournament). - **If you don't think you need to use all of your prep time or speech time (we've all had these scenarios, they happen) then don't.** Please. **I'd rather not listen to five minutes of something along the lines of "they dropped T" in the 2NR**, or a 1AR/2AR that deals with substance and dropped condo, extend it and sit down. **Your speaker points will be rewarded.** - I don't understand how an apology for hurtful discourse, (ex. gendered language like "you guys," racist/homophobic/ableist discourse, etc.) followed by multiple defenses of the aforementioned discursive act, is a meaningful apology; however, I also don't feel comfortable intervening to discredit the apology absent an argument being made by the opposing team for why I should. As such, I've decided to instead adopt a policy of penalizing teams by docking them .5 speaker points if they choose to "apologize" (if you can call it that) while defending their language. This is absolutely one of the most asinine practices I've seen in debate and perceptually will make you look like an ass. My hope is with a policy like this debaters realize the importance of being cognizant of their language choices - **if that language really is harmful, perhaps you should just apologize, and make a conscious effort to not use it in the future. If it isn't, you should be able to commit to defending it. Some arguments might require ideological consistency to defeat, rather than the traditional 'every angle' approach we are taught to value so highly in debate.**
 * Speaker points:**


 * Things I've noticed about my judging:**

- **I pay a lot more attention to cross-x than I used to as a debater or judge. Take advantage of this** and establish a basis for your arguments/strategies in it! - **It's harder for me to feel comfortable evaluating 2NR/2AR analysis on evidence/arguments that are extended shallowly** (this is particularly important for 1ARs - tagline extensions make me very uncomfortable evaluating 2AR analysis that isn't explicit in the 1AR, part of this likely stems from me being a 2N.) - This also applies to blippy arguments - an argument consists of a claim and a warrant, a good argument consists of a claim, warrant, and an implication. **When did we get to such a point that we started considering the words "fiat solves the link" a complete argument?** - I try very hard to protect the 2NR, particularly for the same reasons above. - **If you add me to an email chain I will not look at evidence until after the debate** - I want to minimize the amount I am influenced by evidence in ways not specifically articulated by debaters in round. As such... - **I don't call for a lot of** **evidence, and the more evidence I call for the more it feels like I'm intervening by necessity.** It's not my job to reconstruct the debate for you, if I wanted to look at a wall of citations I'd have just read research papers. This is a communicative activity, and if you cannot communicate to me the evidence underlying your argument, you have not successfully made a cogent argument. - **I** **sure as hell won't look at evidence if the only prodict of it in the debate is "call for this card, it's awesome."** - I try my best to write down the last word said in every card marked in the debate - I don't think that means debaters can't cite warrants from parts of the evidence PAST where they mark their cards, but if they do, they need to fully explain the warrant - I hold higher standards for this. Further, **"cut the card there," is not a sufficient means of marking evidence** - **you need to verbally say "mark it at [LAST WORD GOES HERE]" this is so everyone is on the same page as to where evidence is marked**, if they are flowing (providing a marked copy of the speech doc if requested is important as well). - I also think teams should be more willing to challenge each other on the quality of argument marked pieces of evidence make (oftentimes debaters mark evidence WAY too soon and don't actually read the warrant within the card). **Why is nobody doing this?** - **While I do think debaters //should// be held responsible for pointing out when arguments are blatantly new in the 1AR/2NR, even if they don't, I find myself sympathetic to the team dealing with the new arguments.** This may mean I read the evidence supporting the new argument more closely to make sure it follows the argument the team makes, and giving the other team the benefit of the doubt if their explanation comes close to what I think was the appropriate response. If you are making a new argument, please justify it. And to the other team, if you don't think their justification is sufficient, refute it! - **The less framing and impact calculus debaters do, the more I feel like I'm intervening to decide by necessity.** Not only does having to intervene make me feel uncomfortable (YOU are the debater, it's YOUR argument), but it defeats the purpose of debate as a communicative activity. Write my ballot for me, qualifying statements like "even ifs" are helpful, evidence comparison is a must, as is //comparative// impact calculus. - **If I don't understand the argument you are trying to make, the chances of me evaluating it are slim.** Take a second to ask yourself "is this coherent?" before you make an argument. Too many debaters stop the argument creation process at identifying what they need to say, and forget how important it is to find an effective way to say it. - I want to highlight a specific instance regarding intervening since it's now come up in several debates I've judged - the issue of "judge kick," or, if whether or not the judge can kick the advocacy advanced by the negative in the 2nr in the event of them "losing" it and evaluate the aff v. the status quo. Absent this question coming up in the debate itself either through the aff telling me I can't kick the advocacy or the negative saying "the status quo is always an option," since I view intervention as something to avoid as much as possible, I should assume the negative advocates solely the advocacy they go for in the 2NR as in my mind intervening to create a second world (the status quo) never referenced by a team in their final speech is far more egregious than assuming what the negative said was what the negative advocated.

I'm going to include a random line in here to see if debaters actually look at the wiki. If I'm judging you and you tell me before the round that my cat Moe is the most adorable cat in the world, I'll give you an extra .5 speaks the first time I judge you.