“I don’t know, he’s been rich for so long no one remembers.”
As soon as the door opens, lively discussions of rich kings and slumdog millionaires blast from Kennedy Middle School’s Portable D. MVHS students arrived at the moment when KMS language arts and social studies teacher Sharon Larson and social studies teacher Shari Baldock are leading a discussion about inherent social hierarchy and its implications. The room stays loud as varsity Lincoln-Douglas Debate captain senior Michelle Jiang and sophomore Ashutosh Jindal begin their lesson.
“A lot of the best debaters got in early [through LD],” Jiang said. “It’s a good way to develop analytical skills that can be used outside of LD as well.”
Baldock believes that exposing students to debate in middle school is helpful to these students. The program is still in its early stages, but both advisers hope to expand the club to include entering competitions.
“[Debate] is so academic,” Baldock said. “But [at the same time], these kids are learning to express themselves — it’s really similar to a social situation.”
The KMS advisers initially started the program by asking students what they wanted in terms of a new club, and were surprised at the interest in creating a debate club. The club currently has 60 members, which eventually led both advisers to seek help from other sources.
“We wanted to cultivate these kids like farmers cultivate prize-winning plants,” Lee said. “By high school, they’ll be used to critical thinking, which is [foundational] to LD.”
Larson believes the middle schoolers have advanced tremendously since the beginning of the club.
“Our topics used to be about [things like] Dora the Explorer,” Larson said. “Now I have kids coming up [and talking to us] about drugs, drones, US troop deployment, [and other] political topics.”
A typical meeting for KMS’s Debate Club includes a 10-minute warm-up with argumentation drills and a review of the previous meeting’s topics followed by newer concepts involving classical philosophical theories. The middle schoolers then break up into smaller groups, each led by an MVHS LD student, to discuss the lecture, which at this meeting was about the different value criteria debated in an actual LD competition. Then the meetings end with a brief summary of the meeting’s lesson with the entire Debate Club.
“So, [today] we had a debate about whether milk chocolate was better than dark chocolate,” a KMS student from the back of the room summarizes. “Dark won.”
And then the room fills with shouting, as the middle schoolers again continue their never-ending debate.
