Debate

During 9th grade, I started by far the most exciting and enjoyable activity for me during high school – policy debate. I was doing make-up work in one of the biology classrooms, which also happened to be the room for the debate team practices. One of my friends on the debate team invited me to join and I ended up debating for four years during high school. I was a good debater, although not very fast. Part of policy debate requires reading snippets of articles at very high speeds, which I was never very good at – I’m a naturally slow speaker. I even went to Spartan Debate Camp, Michigan State’s policy debate camp, for three summers. Sadly, I was never successful, but I’ll delve into that later.

In 10th grade, under pressure from my step-mom, my father switched universities again, from Michigan State to the University of Minnesota. The head of the math department at my new school decided to place me into Calculus, a foolish idea. I was in a class where I tried to learn material that combined the knowledge that I was supposed to have acquired over the last two years. Needless to say, Calculus was hell. To add insult to injury, my new high school did not have a policy debate team. So, I, with the experience of one year of novice debate (debate tournaments have three tiers of difficulty – novice, junior varsity, and varsity) and a summer of debate camp, decided to start one. With the aid of a teacher in lending me a classroom, I started running debate team meetings after school. To make a long story short, I did not succeed in my attempts to start a debate team at Central High School, although I did make some friends.