Nationals is over, can summer start, or how i spent my week out of a Birmingham Jail

As a teacher, I have come to have a greater appreciation for summer. For most of us, it starts the minute the last day of school is over, minus any time you spend cleaning classrooms, doing necessary inservices and fininshing the end of the year checklists. For me, however, my summer can never really start until the end of the National Forensics League National tournament, this year in the thriving metropolis of Birmingham, AL. The tournament starts ten days after school is officiallly over, and it is a week long, so my summer doesn't officially start until the day after the National Tournament ends (as you can imagine, being the sole responsible party for kids in another state for a week can be tiring, add the 95+ temperatures and insane humidity, and you can imagine why my first instinct upon return to California was to actually kiss the ground, an instinct i managed to hold myself back from doing. My flight from Birmingham landed in the Bay Area yesterday, so my summer started when I got out of bed...kinda...I still have to close up business for the tournament, which more than anything else will mean I am eventually reimbursed for purchases and meals during the week...this in theory does seem to indicate I would be able to do more blogging, but it is equally likely that I might decide the TV show "Monk" isn't really stupid, it is instead quirky and smart, so i need to watch every episode...

...i had anticipated doing some blogging while i was in Birmingham, but a couple of things prevented me from doing so, and the most important of them was that Birmingham was a sweltering hell hole, and this meant that every place in town I went, I somehow managed to be sweating, even with buildings I knew had air conditioning in them. Hard to get your work on while you're sitting around, miserably hot. Probably produces good novels, but rains on good ideas in a blog format like R Kelly rains on 15 year old girls or like Pac Man Jones makes it rain in the Atlanta strip clubs. I sat around with numerous ideas, things I could have written about, but then something started happening...we started winning...

...The way the tournament functions is there are six rounds with two critics in each round, and in order to advance to elimination debates, teams have to win eight of twelve ballots. Teams that don't win their 8 ballots, they get to enjoy the slendor of the town nationals happens to be in, this year, the Civil Rights hotspot, Birmingham. Teams that win at least 8 ballots start a new, double elimination tournament, and is allowed to advance as long as they have not lost two debates, with the last two teams with one loss (or no losses, possibly) debating in the final round. My team won 10 of their first 12 debates, which allowed us to participate in the elimination rounds. The kids won their first elimination round, and then hit a self induced roadmap in round 8, losing a debate to a team we, quite honestly, should have been able to handle, but didn't take care of business, and were one round down after eight. After the discussion about leaving nothing to chance, they went on a bit of a run, and won every debate until the semifinals...however, this meant that any time i wasn't sweating like I was in a sauna, i was pacing the halls of whatever high school i happened to be. stressfully waiting for decisions for debates- also not the most effective means to faciltiate the writing of a blog....over the course of time writing this, I made reference to one of my debaters, and how her faith in the activity had been rattled, based on our performance at the TOC...it depressed me because I was concerned- I wanted her to have a positive final debate experience, something she could take with her in her post-debate days to place a smile on her face. When we lost that debate on Tuesday, I was a little concerned we could just end up on the wrong side of some luck, and our race could be run. when they debated all day day three, and knew there were but nine teams left in the tourney, I knew they would have an experience to remember...most kids dream of being on stage to receive awards at the National tournament, and at the end of her career, much to her surprise, there she was, with a smile that i can only hope tries to replace the experience in Kentucky....

told you I owed you one, kid...hope this helps...