First Time Debating

I woke up and did my usual thing today,  maybe a little later than usual. I decided not to go to the library and read in my room instead. It was about 11 AM when I decided to join Abe and Amelia for lunch. We were surprised to see that Armands and our professor Sam joined a couple of students of lunch as well.

First thing when we walked in Sam split us up into groups. We got to pick our partners, and then we were assigned affirmative and negative. The topic was that this house would criminally punish parents for their children's crimes. I was on the affirmative side with Amelia. Us and 7 other groups worked on deciding which arguments would work for us. One of our strongest ones was that with this model in place, parents would take more preventative measures to keep children from committing crimes. The most common crime we thought of was drunk-driving that lead to manslaughter. We spent a good thirty-minutes working on our side of the debate.

The negative side came in with Rubin and it was time for us to either stay in the room we were already in or go to another one because we wanted to have 2 debates in each room for time purposes. I went in the first debate as Prime Minister, which is part of the Government side, and that also meant I'd be the first to speak. The speeches are typically 7 minutes but Sam condensed them to 5 because it was our first debate. I wasn't able to speak the whole 5 minutes, as it was very nerve-racking. But, overall the experience was a lot of fun. Especially when people try to stand up for points of information and I got to tell them to sit down. I felt like I did well in not being flustered by them. Although, it was Keenan who stood up for them and he is rather intimidating. I'm hoping to see what I need to improve on, but for sure it includes being more organized with my thoughts.

Rainy path on my way to Donlon

After class, I met up with Paula and we only hung out in her room although we had plans to go to College town instead we took a nap. After we woke up from the nap we went to the Movie Night club in Donlon's TV room. As we walked down the staircase, we noticed it was raining outside. Ithaca's weather is so strange. At Movie Night club we watched Jurassic Park. Originally, we were going to eat somewhere in College Town but since that didn't happen we went on a website called Ithaca to go and ordered Chinese food delivery. When the food arrived, we went back to Balch to eat and watch a movie on Netflix.

Despite it being a Friday, I'm a little bummed that today wasn't as uneventful as the rest of the week has been. On the bright side, I got slightly rid of my fear of debating and got some extra sleep so that's always good.