Jet lag seemed a bit more useful on Saturday morning, when our body clocks were okay with having to wake up in time to leave our hotel at 7 to be at the Binghamton tournament in time fo the early start to debating (Lewis even went for a McDonalds trip at 5am..). Unlike in the UK, the Binghamton tournament has both 'Worlds' format debating (or 'British Parliamentary', the unprepared, 4 team, 8 speaker format of debating used in the UK and for the World Championships) and 'Policy' debating. This tournament was therefore our first taste of policy debating, and so we started the day by watching a bit of a round of policy. Unlike with 'Worlds' format, Policy debaters debate the same topic for a whole year (this year it's Visas), carry literally boxes and boxes of research notes, and speak very very fast to read out their case. Whilst people claim I speak pretty fast, this is a whole new level of speed... It was really interesting to see, and while quite a different activity to the one we're used to, definitely skills and develops things that BP doesn't. Whilst I found the speech part to be pretty incomprehensible, I like did the 'cross examination', where the the speaker gets questioned for 3 minutes by their opponent.
The rest of the day we were judging the first five preliminary rounds of the Worlds debates. We saw some good debates, and at the end of quite a long day, went for dinner with some of the Cornell debaters.
(Photo of us, our tour rival Australian tour member Chris, our British Debate team forefathers Alex and Ali, and our Cornell host Sam)
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