Students from the IHS Debate Team—Jacob Silcoff ’17, Ruth Silcoff ’17, Max Fink ’17, Mrinal Thomas ’17, Khamin Chaorenkajonchai ’18, Ella Mead-Van Cort ’18, Josh Slusar ’17, Richard Gan ’16, and I—attended Cornell’s international debate camp, which started on August 3. We showed up amongst a throng of international students, most of them Chinese, at Cornell’s ILR school. The next five days consisted of three things: debate, college lectures, and cultural exchange.
Ithaca’s debaters learned the World Schools debate style, in which teams of three make four speeches over 40 minutes. Teams face off in one-on-one matches where one team adopts the “government,” or proposition, side of an argument and supports the motion, while the other team is the opposition and attempts to attack it. World Schools is increasingly used in high-school venues worldwide. After learning the style, campers formed teams and began a debate tournament.
Several teams partially made up of IHS debaters fared well while debating motions such as “The house supports the expanded use of civilian nuclear energy” and “The house would pay teachers based on the academic performance of their students,” to name a few. At the end of the tournament, Slusar was on the 6th place team, while teams including myself and Fink took 5th and 3rd places, respectively. More impressively, Jacob and Ruth Silcoff’s team won the tournament with an aggressive style in a close final debate, coming up with a 5–1 record. Jacob said, “Our team won because we worked together well and we had our prep time on a fixed and effective routine.” He emphasized that “if the camp sounds interesting, kids at IHS can get a similar experience in our debate club. … We get the same Cornell coaching and plan on preparing for a World Schools tournament.”
Another aspect of the camp was listening to lectures by some of Cornell’s more popular professors. I recall using data from a lecture about global warming by Professor Bruce Monger in debates about nuclear power and whether or not space travel was justified. Other informational lectures were about how executives were paid and about Cornell’s undergraduate admissions. Additionally, Theo Black, the Cornell Speech and Debate Union’s head speech coach, gave a very interactive lecture about eloquent speaking.
While IHS’s debaters learned all about debate and the topics they might use in it, they also got to know the many Chinese students who were also at the camp and learned about their lives back home. We also taught English to the Chinese students, who were in the process of learning the language. A girl I knew who went by the English name Isabella was very proud of learning to pronounce words with a “v” sound without difficulty. Jacob and Ruth’s partner, Molly, would quietly practice words that were sure to come up in the debate round, repeating them over and over.
I learned that many Chinese students go through similar high-stakes testing stresses that American students experience. College admissions in China use the gaokao as the major exam, much like the SAT. I learned that unlike the SAT, students only get one try to take it per year, so they lose a lot of sleep studying for it. Another difference between the two tests is that college applicants in China aren’t considered holistically like they are in America—just by their gaokao score.
We were all teens of the digital age, so the week concluded with a flurry of selfies and exchanging email addresses. Looking back on it, the main reason we didn’t debate the motion “The house believes that Cornell’s International Debate Camp was fun” was because the opposition teams would have lost.