The best 2425 Climate/Energy res – the best for novice debate?

[Revelins]

I’m just trying to set up the lanes for discussion here. So – what is the best resolution to choose for novice debaters for the 2024-2025 debate season and why?

[jpoapst]

I wanted to wait to respond to this until I had a conversation with some potential incoming Mason novices. We just had our first interest meeting. I showed them the option 1 resolution and they were very intrigued. I largely was curious if they would be turned off by the transmission part of the resolution. That was actually the part they gravitated discussion to without us explaining what it meant. They did not know what a market based instrument meant at first, but seemed to get it pretty quickly after a short explanation.

I think that the pricing only options might be too small for the novice division. From my experience, novices enjoy when there are more options for affirmatives in order to avoid what feels like the same debate in every round. I think a pricing only-no transmission resolution would become stale very quickly for novices. On the other hand, resolution 6 may be a bit too large. I am of the opinion that resolution 1 is the goldilocks novice resolution. Big enough that it keeps interest, limited enough that novices do not have to answer an unpredictable mechanism, and has a transmission plank that is a bit easier to explain.

• This reply was modified 10 months, 1 week ago by jpoapst.

[DMWoodward]

I’ve just started reading through the topic options myself. My thoughts are that any of the resolutions that are pricing only are going to be too small for a year of debate. I still need to do more reading on the specific wordings and phrasings of the resolution slate, but in my opinion Resolutions 1 and 6 are the best options for Novices.

Both have a simple enough premise to explain to them what the topic means, has a clear statement that can be discussed in casual conversation without being too technical for when novices are doing things outside of debate, AND gives a lot of opportunity for novices to hear a lot of unique arguments in their debates and have the means to research the topic in a fashion that is interesting to them on an individual level once they’ve gotten a hang of the game and are ready to do original research.

I worry that this topic could run into similar issues to last year’s topic where novices ONLY heard NFU affirmatives in novice, outside of them debating a few select schools. And if you didn’t frequently debate in D8 or D7 regional novice debates I think the only affirmatives were NFU. And to me, I worry about retention or education if students get bored of having the same debate 5-9 times a tournament.

Having the transmission plank, or even the incentives debate around fossil fuels gives me more hope that my novices, and novices generally will get to debate more about energy policy than just Carbon Taxes or Cap and Trade for an entire year.

(I also like Res 3 for similar reasons but worry the specific phrasing makes it a bit harder to explain to novices and stranger to use to recruit or discuss.) But any topic that either does not have the transmission portion of the topic or specifies only carbon pricing as the markets mechanism seems bad.

Resolutions 1, 6 and 3 are the only options that will give novices the flexibility to learn debate, enjoy it and get a non-repetitive educational experience. I think the other resolutions will run into the same problems that the 2016-2017 topic, and this past year’s Nukes topic did where the topic was incredibly dull for novices and hurt their education because they debated the exact same arguments the majority of their debates. There are schools that did not read NFU this past year, or Carbon Tax in 2016-2017, but we should not have a topic where in a novice tournament it could be safe to assume 5/6 debates (being generous) will not be the same affirmative area for the entire year even after novices get used to the game.

• This reply was modified 10 months, 1 week ago by DMWoodward.

[PatJF]

I worry that this topic could run into similar issues to last year’s topic where novices ONLY heard NFU affirmatives in novice, outside of them debating a few select schools. And if you didn’t frequently debate in D8 or D7 regional novice debates I think the only affirmatives were NFU. And to me, I worry about retention or education if students get bored of having the same debate 5-9 times a tournament.

-snip-

Resolutions 1, 6 and 3 are the only options that will give novices the flexibility to learn debate, enjoy it and get a non-repetitive educational experience. I think the other resolutions will run into the same problems that the 2016-2017 topic, and this past year’s Nukes topic did where the topic was incredibly dull for novices and hurt their education because they debated the exact same arguments the majority of their debates. There are schools that did not read NFU this past year, or Carbon Tax in 2016-2017, but we should not have a topic where in a novice tournament it could be safe to assume 5/6 debates (being generous) will not be the same affirmative area for the entire year even after novices get used to the game.

As a novice last year (though, admittedly, I was in D7), I would push back on faulting last year’s topic for poor variety of novice debate. While NFU was definitely the plurality of debates I had on the negative it wasn’t even close to the majority of rounds. The New School tournament had one(?) novice team running NFU and at JV/Novice Nats I hit subs twice, two different sub-topical disarms, and single instances of China NFU and blanket NFU to take two examples. (Amusingly, I also didn’t hit NFU once at GMU, but that’s more fairly attributed to freak chance than anything else.) All this is to say that there were plenty of arguments that novices were fully capable of learning and reading on last years topic. The fact that novices weren’t debating those arguments seems to be more of a condemnation of the novices’ lack of imagination than the topic.

That said, the resolution options that constrain affirmatives to carbon taxes and cap-and-trade would likely become stale for novices. Additionally, while the open nature of #6 is compelling, I think that #1 strikes a better balance by creating a reasonable variety of floors and not creating a case list of unknown length like #6. The “at least” especially should allow for a broad variety of cases (if the novices choose to create them).

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