ODI Concludes
The Oregon Debate Institute debate camp has now concluded.
The much delayed staff list follows, sorted by which lab they taught:
Novice:
Hailey Sheldon
Alex O’Dell
Intermediate (1):
Thomas Moriarty
Matt Rose
Matt Gander
Intermediate (2):
MaryAnn Almeida
Hank Fields
Whitney Wilson
Advanced:
Rob Layne
Aaron Donaldson
Thomas Schally
Michael Belcher
I do feel that ODI was completely worth both the time and the money and I would strongly recommend it to anyone. It is probably the least costly parli camp you can find (to the point that most of the counselors were losing money.) It was $990 for two weeks, housing and 3 meals a day included (though my costs were more as I had to pay for airfare). We all received a lot of individual attention (instructor:camper ratio was 1:2 for us in the advanced lab) and all the instructors were just plain awesome.
The morning issue lectures (Middle East, Healthcare, Global Warming, Latin America, etc.) were geared towards covering the information you’d need to have a basic understanding of the subject and applying that information to debate.
The afternoon lectures were to teach debate theory, if that’s the right term. They were split into Novice and Advanced lectures, though you had the freedom to choose which you wanted to go to. I haven’t listened to the audio recordings my (absolutely fabulous) roommate took for me for the Novice lectures, so I will comment on the Advanced lectures. Generally, we went over the structure, application, and differing views on the legitimacy of certain arguments (e.g. severance perms). Though, I still have to contend that krtiks are hard to understand.
We would generally have two labs after the afternoon lectures, where it would be up to the discretion of the lab leaders to pick what to do. In the Advanced lab, we had start-and-stop debates, full practice rounds, speech redoes, supplemental lectures, and time to work on our briefs or ask for assistance. I was pleasantly surprised at the lack of frustration from the start-and-stops at ODI.
We had voluntary lectures sometimes around 8:30. These were much more informal and weren’t so much lectures as just the instructors talking about stuff they knew a lot about.
The topics we had:
Prison-Industrial Complex: Matt Rose
Nuclear Proliferation: Thomas Moriarty
Space Colonization/Militarization: Aaron Donaldson
Feminism and Identity Politics: Matt Rose
Nuclear Weapons: Jonathan McCabe
The Brain: Aaron Donaldson
We had two camp tournaments – one 4-prelim tourney that broke to semis and one 6-prelim tourney that broke to quarters.
My personal feelings: I’ll be focusing on adapting what we learned there to high school judges. Whereas Rob and MaryAnn are only too happy to vote on a procedural (topicality, theory, spec, etc.), lay judges will only vote on a procedural if it’s explained very clearly to them.
Still, I can honestly say that I believe I’ve developed a better “global awareness,” as Aaron puts it, for how all the arguments interact and connect within the debate – which arguments are crucial on a piece of paper, which pieces of paper are crucial to the entire debate, and how one argument will help or undermine my strategy/stance.
Hailey Sheldon has graciously given POI permission to release audio recordings of the lectures.
If the instructors do not wish to have their lectures released, please feel free to tell me to remove it (and then go yell at Hailey).
The audio files will be up soon, so stay tuned.
Alice Lin
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