Dear Jasmine: Part 2, November 12th, 2021
Dear Jasmine: Part Two, November 12th, 2021
By Jasmine Stidham, Teacher and Coach at Harvard-Westlake and Assistant Coach at Dartmouth College
This is our first installment of Dear Jasmine responses. For this wave, I received ten total questions. Because these questions were so good, I decided to break this post into two parts. I answered the first five questions in last week’s article, and will be answering the remaining questions in this article.
Thank you to everyone who submitted questions. If you would like to ask a question for next time, please visit the Dear Jasmine tab on our website, girlsdebate.org.
The next installment will be published one week from now, November 19th.
Q: What is the difference between post rounding and a student genuinely asking questions? Sometimes I feel like I’m being post rounded but maybe the kids are just actually curious and trying to improve. And when I actually am being post rounded, what should I do about it? What is the best way to respond?
A: This is an excellent question. We have an article about post-rounding here that may be helpful:
https://www.girlsdebate.org/blog/2020/10/17/persisting-post-rounding
My best piece of advice is to not take it too personally if a team post-rounds you. I don't say this to minimize anyone's feelings, but it's also important to recognize where students are coming from. Are there times when a student is genuinely being a butthead? Yes. Are there other times where a student is asking a lot of questions, but with the purest of intentions? Absolutely.
It's totally normal for a student to ask questions after a round. Coaches encourage their students to ask judges questions because it helps the students improve. In many instances, a student asking you questions after a round is a sign of respect. Or at the very least, it demonstrates their desire to improve, which is the goal, right?
I love it when kids ask a million questions because it signals to me that they are excited about debate. Is there anything better than that?
If a student crosses a line, however, you do not have to entertain those questions. I've been in this position plenty of times. Now that I'm older and more experienced, I respond differently to those questions a bit differently than Young Jasmine. If a student is crossing into disrespectful territory, I try to remind myself that these are literally children. This doesn't mean they should be able to get away with any and all behaviors, but it's important to recognize that *we* are the adults. It is our job to keep our cool and to help students navigate these frustrating situations. I also think a lot about my own debate career. I'll be honest, I used to go a liiiittle bit too hard sometimes in the post-round if I thought we genuinely won the debate. My intention was never to disrespect the judge or to make them feel awful; I just cared *so* much about debate and I wanted to win more than anything. If you couldn't tell, I was clearly projecting.
So, this is all to say that these are kids. Sometimes they will be frustrated with you. It's normal and inevitable. Answer their questions as much as you're able, but don't be afraid to hold the line if they are disrespecting you. There's a fine line and no judge should have to tolerate blatant, undeserved disrespect.
Q: I'm a small school debater reading lots of trix right now, but I'm thinking about reading disads..how do I go for disads?
A: Luckily, there are a ton of accessible online resources at your disposal! Here are some instructional Youtube videos you can watch:
Q: I’ve noticed that there’s a toxic “win at all costs” culture in debate, where competitors will sacrifice their mental and/or physical health for the W or make absurd (and often discriminatory) arguments in rounds because they know their opponents can’t formulate an adequate response. I feel like this culture takes away from learning and advocacy opportunities that come from debate and tells competitors they don’t matter unless they win. How can I as a team member start to shift my team’s culture away from this toxic “win at all costs” culture to one that emphasizes advocacy and personal growth?
A: Love this question! This is an eternal struggle for most coaches, myself included.
Here are my tips to build a positive team culture:
1. Start early: the key to creating a healthy team culture is to start as early as possible. I still remember lessons I was taught as a novice many moons ago. When students are young, they are incredibly impressionable. It’s important to instill your core team values with novices so they internalize those messages at an early age. For example, when I first introduce my novices to debate, I explain to them that I do not care about wins or losses during their novice year. I have a few inspirational stories I share, and I try to emphasize the importance of progress, not perfection. I tell my novices they could lose every single round all year, and it does not mean they are a terrible debater. After their debates, I try to ask, “What did you learn?” or “How did it go? Did you have fun?” I try to refrain from asking them if they won or lost because I don’t want them to focus on competitive results.
2. Be consistent: reinforcing a positive team culture takes a lot of consistency. You must do it early and often. Try to create weekly and/or monthly team rituals where you come together to recognize your squad’s progress. This could be a monthly team picnic, a weekly team lunch, a movie night, a game night, etc.
3. Celebrate contributions: this element is a major key and complements the above point about consistency. Sometimes coaches and team leaders make the mistake of focusing too much on commending competitive success, rather than other contributions. One way I try to celebrate my students is by doing weekly shoutouts on our team Slack. For example, after a tournament I will write up my weekly announcements post, and I usually start with a list of shoutouts from our last tournament. While I do give praise to the debaters who did exceptionally well, I also try to celebrate the students in other ways. For example, if someone reached a bubble round for the first time, I’ll give them a shoutout. Other examples include: a debater helping their teammates prepare for elimination rounds, someone going for a Kritik for the first time, a student writing an aff all by themselves, or a debater winning their first ever varsity round, etc. The list goes on. I think it’s important to regularly recognize everyone’s unique contributions to the team, as well as smaller examples of progress.
4. Prioritize team bonding: all teams should find ways to connect with each other outside of regular practices or tournaments. This could include some of the suggestions I mentioned earlier, like a monthly team picnic, a weekly team lunch, a movie night, a game night, etc. Holidays are another opportunity to strengthen bonds on your team. For example, you could do a holiday card/gift exchange in December where everyone is paired up with someone on the team. For Valentine’s Day, you could exchange debate-themed Valentines in a fun, platonic way. For Halloween, you could do team costumes! Engaging in a team bonding activity every once in a while is a great way to establish a long-lasting positive team culture.
5. Encourage mentorship: another way to reinforce a growth mindset on your squad is to establish mentorship roles for older students. In debate, this typically looks like pairing a varsity debater with a novice or JV debater. There are a few ways to organize mentorship roles. If you have a big team, you can create small groups where maybe two older students are responsible for mentoring several younger students. If you have a smaller team, you can pair them 1:1 if you want. You can establish weekly meetings with your mentees over lunch where the older students check in with the novices to see how they are feeling about debate. I’m also a big fan of giving varsity students opportunities to teach younger students. This could be in the form of running a practice after school, doing a demonstration debate, or recording instructional videos for novices on your team. By encouraging mentorship on your team, you are giving everyone a sense of purpose and belonging, which are the key drivers behind a positive team culture.
I also want to give a quick shoutout to W.in Debate, an organization that offers free mentoring services for non-cismen in debate! You can read more about them here: https://www.windebate.org/
Q: Hi Jasmine! I’m trying to reinvigorate my old high school’s LD & Policy team. I’ve found that the students, while bright and hardworking, can’t dedicate as much time to debate as they used to because they’re involved in lots of other activities. Obviously Harvard-Westlake has become absolutely dominant and it’s clear the students are dedicated and hard working. How have you built a culture around the team that enables that level of focus on debate? What sorts of expectations around practice and individual research have you set?
A: That’s so kind of you to say, thank you! I love this question because it’s something I also struggle with every year. Here are my tips:
1. Start early: most of our students start debating in 7th or 8th grade. This is a huge privilege, and I recognize that many schools do not have the ability to start so early. If you can start early, I’d encourage all coaches to take advantage of the opportunity to introduce students to basic debate concepts when they’re young.
2. Emphasize camp: I’ll preface this by saying I totally understand how financially inaccessible debate camp is for so many students. I was only able to attend camp in high school after getting substantial financial aid. But, if you have students who can afford camp, my advice is to encourage them to attend as much camp as possible, especially when they’re young. We tell our students to frontload as many weeks of camp as they can when they are younger so they can afford to do less camp when they’re rising seniors. This strategy has proven to be effective.
3. Establish clear expectations: I think it’s important for coaches to create a set of expectations for all students on the team. These can vary based on factors like grade/experience level, debate format, national circuit versus local competition, student goals, etc. No matter how you decide to weigh certain factors, all students should have clear obligations that they must meet on a regular basis. For example, a new requirement I started this year is related to speaking drills. All varsity students must record 20 minutes worth of speaking drills every week on our team Flipgrid account. They must submit these each week, otherwise they won’t be entered in tournaments. We, like most teams, also require all varsity debaters to do topic research. I assign students to research groups and give them directions and deadlines. If they do not complete those assignments, they won’t compete in the next tournament. For practices, our varsity debaters have three after-school practice opportunities every week. My novices only have practice once a week after school. Our varsity practice schedule is meant to be flexible so the students can attend on the days that work for them.
4. Hold students accountable: I’ll be honest, sometimes I bug my kids a lot. This is more work for me, but it gets the job done. I create weekly to-do lists, I send individual and group reminders, and I always try to follow up if a student isn’t being responsive.
5. Prioritize organization: at Harvard-Westlake, we don’t have an actual debate class. Everything on the team is done after school, which can be incredibly challenging. The single most important thing that enables us to be efficient is our level of organization. Don’t get me wrong- we are certainly not perfect when it comes to organization, but it is something I feel we mostly get right. We have a team Slack account, which is where all team communication happens. We also utilize Dropbox for all team files, which is the best application for file organization, in my opinion.
6. Sharing is caring: as you mentioned in your question, it can be so hard for students to dedicate as much time as they’d like to debate due to balancing other activities. One way to alleviate that burden is to establish a norm of sharing work on the team. Instead of asking students to dedicate a bazillion hours to individually highlighting files or compiling case negs, you can divide up the work to make things easier. This saves the students a substantial amount of time while also encouraging teamwork.
Lastly, I will say that as coaches, we can’t force our students to care. We can move mountains for them in so many ways, but we cannot force them to make time for debate. At the end of the day, if they want to be successful, they must put in the work. It can be useful to have conversations with students and parents at the beginning of the school year about your expectations so they have a clear understanding of what’s ahead.
Q: My coach says I have the yips, which I'm sure you are familiar with, but I didn't even know people got those in debate. The more you know! Anyway, I have been getting very frustrated with myself because I feel like I'm underperforming in my debates and it's difficult to explain to my teammates and my partner who just feel like I'm throwing things at the wall. I know what I need to say, but I guess I'm just having trouble saying it, which has also now led to a speaker point cap every single round even though my average before Greenhill was a 29 at lowest. I know this isn't really one clear question or like super important, but I figured you would have good advice and I am just struggling to figure this out and get back on track.
A: Such a good question! I wasn’t familiar with the term “yips”, but I’ve definitely experienced this as a debater. The short answer is that you have psyched yourself out by overthinking everything. My best advice is to first take a short break from debate to clear your head. Take a week off from practice, research, and tournaments. Go touch grass, watch your favorite shows, and get some extra sleep. Taking a real break will give your brain some time to relax and recover from stress you’ve been feeling. When I researched this earlier, a common theme from athletes was about the importance of taking breaks when you’re getting the yips. So, take a break!
I read some articles about the yips, and I think some of the advice from sports psychologists is applicable to debate. In a 2019 article by Benjamin Snyder, Ph.D., he wrote:
Finally, successful golfers need to have a short memory. Remember, one shot does not affect the next. You can always follow up a bad shot with a great shot. This concept is easy to say, but harder to put into action. Every golfer has had a “bad round” where nothing is going right. It is very easy to just say, “I am just not hitting well today.” However, that mindset only serves to exacerbate the problem. Work to change your self-talk messages to ones that demonstrate confidence. If you have a hard time shaking these negative thoughts, try assigning a place in your pre-shot routine for worrying. During her keynote address at the 2017 National Conference for the Association for Applied Sport Psychology, professional golfer Annika Sorenstam discussed this issue. She described an imaginary box that she would draw on the ground near her ball. She stated that inside of this box was the only place she allowed herself to worry. She stated that if she found herself worrying during her pre-shot routine or while addressing her ball, she would step away and move inside of the box. This kind of process allows the golfer to obtain control over their anxiety and does not allow it cloud their mind during the shot.
https://fampsy.org/yips/
I liked this piece of advice because it can easily be translated to debate speak. We often get in our heads by assuming that one bad round means we’re going to have a terrible tournament, which is not the case. This is why it is so important to focus on the debate in front of you, rather than fixating on everything that could go wrong if you lose one round. I vividly remember my senior year NDT and how much pressure I put on myself. We ended up doing worse in prelims than the previous year, and I figured we were destined to lose in doubles. It was an awful feeling. But, as soon as pairings for elims came out, it was like a light switched and I had forgotten about all of the mistakes we made in prelims. My partner and I (love you Derek) immediately switched gears and put those losses behind us. I know it sounds kind of cheesy, but it’s true. We literally just decided to treat elims as if it were a brand-new tournament, and it worked. Maybe it was the adrenaline, maybe it was the caffeine, who knows. All I know is that after we made the quick, but conscious choice to forget about everything that happened earlier in the tournament, we were back to normal.
Another article I read also had some relevant and timely advice. I have not watched Ted Lasso, but I was still able to follow the article:
While the cause of Dani’s yips is made quite clear in Ted Lasso—it is, after all, a work of fiction—the cause of Biles’s twisties is not exactly known to us at this time. Or, perhaps it is. We’ve all been living through unprecedented times in a deadly pandemic, and things are taking a marked toll on everyone. That includes people who the general public see as untouchable or unsinkable, like Biles.
Maybe it’s the crushing toll of the pressure we put on elite athletes in this country. Maybe it’s a personal issue. Maybe it’s all of the above. It literally could be anything. We can speculate all we want, but we don’t know and, honestly, it’s not our business. What we do know is that Biles experienced a form of the yips and, instead of trying to shove down the negative and accentuate the positive like one of Ted Lasso’s beloved goldfish, she bravely stepped back and identified that something deeper was driving her performance issues.
https://slate.com/culture/2021/07/ted-lasso-simone-biles-yips-twisties-psychology.html
I found this to be a good reminder for all of us to be kind to ourselves. You are working so hard and it’s clear you care immensely about your debate performance. Maybe there’s a chance you’re putting too much pressure on yourself? If this is the case, you should remind yourself of how much you’ve already accomplished. And remember, it’s only November! If you have an “off” month, it’s not the end of the world. So take a break, don’t hold this over your head, and try to approach your next tournament like it’s a fresh start.