
Any debater that wants to improve has almost certainly faced their fair share of failure. The first step to deal with failure is to realize that common pitfalls exist that you could be falling into, and work to avoid these pitfalls in the future.
Reflection is necessary to orient the next 4 lessons on matter and debate-specific improvement towards your unique flaws and shortcomings, and is a critical part of avoiding losses in the future.
The first half of direct debate-related improvement is to focus on motions--more specifically, motion dissection. Effective motion dissection sets you up for success early in the debate, and ensures you don't make a small mistake that will have you banging your head against a wall when you think back on the round.
Strategy is almost always the decisive factor that wins or loses debates, but tends to be looked at from many different perspectives and under a large variety of contexts. This lesson specifically focuses on identification of basic strategy and how to orient your research accordingly.
With the unanswered questions established in previous lessons and your reflection in mind, it's time to learn how to gain knowledge that is not only relevant towards future debates, but also focused on deeper and more nuanced understandings over surface-level ones.
Now that the framework has been filled out and all aspects of a debate have been considered, it's time to focus on the argumentative side of debating, and build a stock case to bolster future debate analysis done under this topic.
What can I expect?
This course focuses on the core skills of debate that tend to be taken for granted or not seen as terribly important, but can be critical to making sure a beginner knows how to improve. In essence, this is a course for anyone who feels 'stuck' in terms of debating, and offers a large variety of different prep methods and knowledge sources. This is a course for anyone who wishes to improve at debating, but doesn't know how to.
What's the point of this class?
In my time spent debating, I've been taught a lot about the more glamorous aspects of debate, but much less so about the less 'interesting' aspects, so to speak. Somewhat confusing, given that it's literally impossible give a good argument if you don't have any information or ideas to base it off of, or if you don't know what the motion's about, or if you don't understand the main themes being debated fully . . . just to name a few.
Not all aspects of improving as a debater can be accomplished through what you do in a class - the improvement you do outside of class is just as important, but is barely stressed and never taught. There's also the stuff you're expected to learn (such as prep methods and learning debate-related knowledge) that tends to be a bit of an afterthought in class, but makes debaters unable to build a strong foundation to improve off of.
What will I have learned by the end of this class?
Since classes tend to not work in this type of material, I've made this side class to answer a bunch of questions newer debaters probably have but have been too embarrassed to ask (like what even is nuance?) By the end of this course, you'll have grooved what typically are seen as debating basics, and will be in a much better position for future debates.