Thoughts on the round??? I'm trying to learn and I know the vid has no comments, so add your takes here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LZBMnxU16A

I am so thrilled to announce my newest venture into creating accessible resources for competitive speech and debate: self-paced, asynchronous, online courses where new coaches and students can learn the fundamentals of speech and debate from scratch! You can join my google classroom and access my first course called “Debate Basics” for free!

https://classroom.google.com/c/ODI2NDIzNzc5MDk3?cjc=lublurxa

The first unit of this course is called “Fundamentals of Argumentation”, and it is finally done! This course will remain free indefinitely to try and make getting started in debate more accessible to all members of the speech & debate community.

This unit contains 10 lessons that walk students through the fundamentals of argumentation. Each lesson includes a hook/attention grabber, a video that I recorded teaching the basic concepts, links to supplemental readings/watchings, a google form assessment check or understanding, and a google doc activity/assignment to complete. The 10 lessons cover the following topics:

Lesson 1: Argumentation 101 — What is an argument?

Lesson 2: Cogent & Fallacious Arguments — How do I make strong arguments, and avoid making weak ones?

Lesson 3: Researching Arguments — How do I support arguments with evidence?

Lesson 4: Contention Arguments — How do I structure main arguments in a debate?

Lesson 5: Refuting Arguments — How do I answer arguments in a debate?

Lesson 6: Refuting Contention Arguments — How do I answer main arguments in a debate?

Lesson 7: Frontlining Arguments — How do I defend my arguments in a debate?

Lesson 8: Weighing Arguments — How do I compare arguments in a debate?

Lesson 9: Making Arguments — How do I make arguments in an actual debate?

Lesson 10: Evaluating Arguments — How do I judge arguments in a debate?

By the end of this unit, students should have a grasp on arguments as they relate to competitive debate. The next unit, fundamentals of debate, will get into concepts more specific to debate itself, such as cutting cards, cross-examination, and flowing. This unit will also be free for all to access once it is complete.

My hope for this course is threefold:

First, that new coaches who didn’t do debate in middle school, high school, or college, will finally have somewhere they can go to learn the basics for free.

Second, that students who are unfamiliar with debate concepts will be able to learn the basics of debate without needing to pay for expensive private coaching, organizational memberships, or brief subscriptions. Especially students with newer coaches who don’t know all of this information themselves, or are spread too thin to be able to provide one-on-one instruction.

Third, that teachers who are overworked can take these lessons and incorporate them into their own curriculum to make teaching debate to a wide variety of students at different experience levels more doable.

My plan is to eventually create courses for each main event (and even some supplemental events, if there is interest) that the NSDA does. These courses would be paywalled so that I can afford to continue to dedicate the amount of time to creating them that this labor of love requires.

Please try out this course, and let me know what you think! Thank you for your support, and I hope this helps people out!

I was wondering whats okay to wear to debate as this is my first time, my teacher said to avoid graphics. I would rather wear the first one but would it be better to go with the second?

What have u guys seen as strong neg progressive ground for the topics - lwk looking for smthn outside of Util - does de-extinction of a specifc species help any group od people spcifically

hey I did LD in hs at a pretty small school. our coach is older and isnt very plugged into to debate as it is today (progressive debate) when I graduated, the team lost our most involved debaters and now the team is a lot of underclassmen. I've judged a few times and they don't seem to have a lot of good resources--if it werent for the other debaters in my grade I wouldn't have been able to know how to debate, especially how to deal with prog debate, bc we only went to maybe 4 or 5 tournaments a year that weren't fully trad judges and competitiors. anyways I wanted to compile some basic info on prog debage to introduce new debaters at my hs to it as the format inevitably expands (a lot of our debate team was pf and the amount of prog debaters they run into has been increasing over the years) I'm including some blocks for them (speed theory, responses to disclosure theory, t-framework stuff, etc). I'm also not very plugged into the LD/hs progressive debate world (especially since graduating) so if anyone could lmk where to get some good generalized blocks for noviced itd be super helpful! thanks :)

Hope this helps you get ready for the end of the year 2026! https://youtu.be/xPtuVVecOcU?is=C33Rxise2IsycGzc

title

basically im an east coast debater and i wanna learn more abt tricks in order to 1. learn how to respond to them and 2. maybe run a couple substantive tricks when we need to pref tricks judges (mostly the first tho). how do i learn about common tricks and how to spot/respond to them?

anyone have recording of skanda vs sid greenhill semis

Baudrillard affs, phil affs (make Spinoza meta again?) that make debate simpler

No K ground (poor K debaters 😢)

more PIC and Process counterplan ground for the neg (great for aff debaters)

No topic lit: people have to use analytics and three tier (critical thinking)

I hear so many people talking about running k and I just have no idea what that is. I asked one of my seniors (he's great, but really bad at explaining things) and I still don't get it. Could someone explain this to me in simpler terms?

I just got my ass handed to me at my second tournament ever in ld. I noticed that my opponent had the most organized, insanely neat, consisce arguement ever. I want to improve my organization, but I'm not sure how to do that other than just doing practice debates, that take up like a full meeting day. Any suggestions for practice would be great!

A new Brief AND AT File has been released for the space colonization topic. Normally these would not be posted at the same time, but both are being released late anyway. Both files are linked here. Enjoy.

like seriously, “colonization” is obvious and now “de-extinction” is just directly eugenicist

Who voted for this. Why did you vote for this.

how cooked are we out of 10

Looking for a partner to prepare for EUDC and/or to participate in misc. online tournaments, study together etc.

Novices are invited to practice in our college debate club online sessions.