Frustrating Debating

After being plagued with ongoing problems our school was finally able to enter a team in the Russell McVeagh Regional Debating Competition! Patrick, Chen and I represented our school, and basically all of West Auckland as no other West Auckland school bothered to show up including surprise surprise Avondale College!

It was quite interesting though. When we first arrived, one of the organisers greeted us saying that it was good to have some representation from the West. At least she knew where we were from!

When the roll was later called out and the guy called out

RUTHERFORD

This girl a few rows ahead of us turned to her mother and asked

"Where's Rutherford?"

And the mother replied by saying it was probably somewhere in West Auckland. Phew!

When we went up against Takapuna Grammar School, they said to us:

"So you guys from Rutherford? Where's that? Don't think we've heard of that school before. So you guys like Rutherford Grammar, Rutherford High...?"

We replied by saying that we were Rutherford College from out west.

In terms of success we had a bit of it.

1. "This house believes that New Zealand has too much censorship" vs St Kentigens, with us affirmative. We lost by 12 points
2. "This house believes that Maori seats should be abolished" vs Takapuna Grammar, with us negative. We won by 1 point
3. "This house believes that military action should be taken against Iran" vs Westlake Boys, with us negative. We lost by 2 points.

So in the end we didn't make it to the quarterfinals. If only we had won that last debate! In fact we believed we should have won that debate! The adjudicator failed to acknowledge any strong arguments we put forward that countered the affirmative team but instead claimed we didn't counter the affirmative team's argument well enough! He said our points were OK but that the affirmative team were able to reply, but he didn't take into consideration that we dismissed their reply legitimately! OK enough of that I won't go on!

Anyway at least us three gained a lot more experience in the art of debating and will put it to good use in our last upcoming debates in the ISAY Competition. Hopefully both our teams get into the quarterfinals of that competition!