Day two is over and a lot of people are getting ready to go to the party at a local nightclub. I’m going to take the night off to do some relaxing.

Now halfway through the tournament – things are moving smoothly and from my point of view, very fast! As you can see, this is quite a beautiful place, but most of my time is spent inside the hotel thinking abou debates, arguments, and of course, teaching, styles of teaching, and how much teaching is involved in judging competitive debates.

The motions at the tournament are all very interesting, and I think they require careful attention to every term in order to win from the opening proposition. But then I wonder when that’s not the case.

The best thing about today was how many styles of giving decisions and leading discussions in adjudication that I took part in. My thoughts now are that good chairs must balance two distinct tasks that are on a continuum:
1. evaluating competitively vs. teaching (for debaters)
2. normalizing vs. training (for wings)

So depending on what a chair thinks is important, they will lean toward one of these poles on each metric.

It’s a rough idea, but something worth working out later. For now I am going to relax a bit and try to get some sleep!