Here Comes The Judge, Judging Everyone
I’m taking it back to the old skool this weekend, as I go up to Virginia to judge a middle school Forensics tournament. My Mom is the forensics lead for Lunenburg Middle School, and it’s their year to host the tournament, so she’s in charge of finding judges.
I’m happy to help – I did forensics all through middle and high schools. My area was “Prose Interpretation” (translation: “readin’”), except for one abortive year in debate that we have all tried to scrub from our memories. I wasn’t too bad, in spite of being the Dan Marino of prose – I made it to the state finals my freshman year but didn’t win, then never made it back again. But it was a ton of fun and helped lay the foundation for me moving out of my introverted shell and into something like improv.
But I’m on the other side of the table this year. Prose is one of the easier things to judge, so Mom was able to fill that slot. Since I’m family and she knows she can still tell me what to do, I’m currently slotted for “Extemporaneous.” The way that works is that there are a bunch of topics pulled from articles that appeared in news magazines within the past 60 days. Students pull three topics at random, pick one, and put the other two back. They then have 30 minutes and a single 3.5“x5” notecard to prepare a speech on that topic.
So it requires a pretty solid grasp of current events. As a judge, I’m supposed to evaluate things like the relevance of their speech to the topic, content, use of details, and the “sincerity of the speaker.” Yes, I’m the Great Pumpkin.
I’m going to have to try to make sure my expectations for the speeches are in line with what I could expect an 11-14 year old to present. I consider myself fairly well-versed in current events, so I should have at least a passing familiarity with whatever topic they pull out. I just need to judge them based on a middle-school level. I’ve judged for Mom once before, and she said that the best thing I did was write a lot of good comments for the students (as they get to see the judges scores and comments after the tournament). I agree – they’re there to learn how to improve their abilities, so judges should be sure to provide guidance and feedback. I know when I was doing it, I wanted to see why I got the scores I did.
So it should be a fun morning. I’ll let you know who wins. And I’ll try really hard not to deduct points from anyone who starts their speech “George W. Bush is a great President because…”