Just came back from adjudicating my first school debates. The 3rd affirmative speaker of the first debate went AWOL, so the school picked some other random kid to take the missing kid's place. They only just won the debate. I had it scored a draw but gave it to the first team because they had the substance over style, while the other team had style over substance.

The 2nd debate was close too. The negative teams 3rd speaker was super presentable and the star, so she won it for them. She lost her shit, all crazy happy, when I told her she'd won it for them.

The debate question was: "Should the Melbourne Cup be banned?". The teams used arguments like 'It's a rich cultural tradition' vs 'Yeah, but it's a tradition built on animal brutality' and "It gets us so much money and tourism and attention" vs " Yeah, but it's not the sort of image that we want to be sending people, and everyone gets time off work to watch it so that hampers economic productivity".

These kids were 12-13 years old and making better arguments and rebuttals than half of the Toribash Discussion board people.