Last night in my debate class with the TP2 cohort we had a "practice debate" (they give speeches but with explicit reassurance that I'm not grading them – they actually do better on these speeches than on the graded ones). Our current topic is the space program – trying to decide if the US and/or Korea should end or continue their respective space programs. They seem really interested and engaged in the topic, despite their complaints of it being too hard. Sometimes I have to just pay attention to their level of engagement and ignore the verbal content of their complaining.
Anyway, the class has recently shrunk a lot – half of them were 9th-graders who have "graduated" middle school and will be starting high-school level hagwon in January, which means no debate (god forbid anything resembling a communicative-based curriculum for high-schoolers!). The consequence of this is that I don't have enough students to have an effective "team-style" debate – I had three kids last night.
When this happens, I make the students in the class one team, while I become the other "team" and play the various roles in the opposing team. This can seem monotonous, but I actually enjoy it – it gives me a chance to model all kinds of debate strategies and speech modes to the kids. To make it more interesting, I sometimes allow the various roles in my team to be different "people" or personalities.
Last night, I was a team made up of Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, and Obama. We were tasked with supporting the U.S. space program, while the students were tasked with shutting it down. They did admirably, but I was quite interested in their reactions to my efforts to "channel" the various presidents. I'm sure I'm not actually very good at this, but they seemed pleased with how "different" each of them were, so I was channeling something.
Being Kennedy was hard, because I don't really know him the way I "know" the others – he predates me too much. But I made his rhetoric wide-reaching and inspirational, while I made Reagan slower, more "old" (obviously), but I think my Reagan sounded more like Lee Myeong Bak (if he were speaking English). Or maybe John McCain. Clinton came really easily – I can do the folksy Arkansas accent, passably, too. Obama… I was just my dad – I've observed before in this blog that Obama seems to have the same exact personality as my father (though with less of the dysfunction, perhaps, and more ambition).
The kids said afterward that my Kennedy was best, and Obama was most boring. I think this may be accurate, actually.