As the third week winds down

Students have stayed busy the past two days meeting three times per day with their labs and participating in numerous practice rounds. In lab, the students continue to do work on rebuttals. Lab leaders have stressed the importance of clearly articulating voters, crystallization, winning the standard, reading evidence against the opponent's case, beating the spread, and issue selection. Students have also written new cases from the research they collected during lab time in the library and computer lab. Time was spent this morning explaining how to properly cut and cite evidence because of the lack of properly cut evidence even at the highest levels of competition. On Wednesday night, students were shown Arnold Schwarzenegger's first movie from 1970, Hercules in New York, as a break from debate for a few hours. Hopefully, the debate skills learned in the third week will stick with the students as long as Hercules' fight with "the wild zoo bear."