This year Alyson Mullee and I started what I hope will be a new tradition for ever speech and forensics meet: commemorative student-crafted buttons. Forensics requires constant practice; the tournaments are always on Saturdays, often a long ways from home. A keepsake helps boost morale, and in a way helps legitimize the effort. My talented students have done an amazing job designing them over the course of the school year…

This button, designed by seniors Andrew Reeder and Millie Morris, commemorated our first meet of the forensics season at Woodrow Wilson High School in D.C. At the last minute the meet was moved across campus to Alice Deal Middle School, but the button order had already been placed with StickerMule, which I was using at the time for production. The change in location didn’t matter to me — I had no intention of abandoning this adorable shrivel-faced caricature of our 28th President. 

We brought fifty of these buttons to the event. Every Champe student got four — one for themselves, and three to give out to friends at the event. Andrew and Millie placed second at the meet. As most of us boarded the bus to go home that evening, Andrew hopped in a car with his grandpa to head across town to attend Game Four of the World Series (he brought me back a rally towel, which I now have in my classroom). 

      

These two were designed by Megan, a first-year forensics student in the current-event heavy category of extemporaneous speech. Without much prior public speaking experience, she quickly began methodically and meaningfully working toward improving her skills, practicing her movements, her pacing, inflection, and intonation. She also committed herself to becoming familiar with as much of the world news as possible.  “I know too much about African rice prices” she muttered one afternoon as she prepared another rehearsal speech. Her skill at extemp has grown measurably over the past six months, and it is a great complement to her artistic and graphic design prowess.

The Stone Bridge buttons were made possible courtesy of my former coworker and current Willard librarian Michelle Yalavarthi, who let me use her button press the Friday before the event and showed me in how to format an image for production on Google Docs.   

We volunteered, relatively at the last minute, to host WACFL IV. The button, designed by Megan, mixes our knight mascot with a few common forensics tropes — students dressed in job-interview-black, and extemp and impromptu kids armed with notecards and pencils for their speeches.

Another button made possible through the generosity of Michelle at Willard, I gave as many of the limited buttons to any Champe student who participated or volunteered at the event. From a fundraising standpoint, my fellow coaches and I learned a lot from the experience (we over-ordered pizzas and under-ordered profit-heavy Cup-O-Noodles). Also memorable was the bleak spectacle of the judges’ lounge. Over a hundred adults — some paid, some volunteering their time, all very unhappy to have made this the focus of their Saturday — spent seemingly every moment they weren’t scoring rounds eating anything we put in front of them. Oh, and complaining. They did a lot of that too. In the morning when the large coffee percolator only was producing hot water, the judges’ room buzzed with anger and injustice, heads shaking, oaths muttered, as if we were about to witness the world’s most pathetic prison riot. At lunch time the judges consumed two dozen pizzas, six sandwich platters from Subway, close to two hundred Indian mimosas, and several containers of brownie bites from Costco. A lot of it was food we didn’t sell to the students at our listed price and didn’t want to waste. The unhappy adults ate anything we brought into the room, a stirring testament to how we often use gluttony to blunt our self loathing.     

Both of these were designed by Megan, and they both make use of the Massaponax High School panther mascot. The Pink Panther button was the first forensics button to be pressed with my own 2 inch button press, made possible by the John Champe PTSA. Also made possible by Elnaz, my wonderful teacher’s assistant who devoted an entire fourth block (and all of her arm strength) to pressing dozens of them as I taught class. 

It was fun giving out the buttons to the kids on my team and students at other schools. Seeing students proudly wearing them as the day progressed reinforced the community nature of forensics, which at its best can be an affirming, enriching experience where students become better speakers and performers through the support of their coaches and peers. 

We placed second in the region, with Megan, Carolina, Angelina, Piper, Jesse, Venkat, Jeremy, and Millie and Andrew all taking individual honors. 

This past weekend at super-regionals, Megan won her way to state competition, as did Carolina, with Piper and Angelina earning alternate spots in their categories.   

This was designed by Millie, I think based on an in-joke with some of the kids from Good Counsel, a private school in Olney, Maryland.  This meet took place the same day as VHSL Super-Regionals. Alyson was with Andrew and Millie at Metros while I was in Fredericksburg with the VHSL crew.

Millie and Andrew took first place in the Arlington region, and they’ll be competing this May at the National Catholic Forensics League tournament in Chicago this May. Plenty of time to practice for the big stage, and plenty of time to start designing and pressing more buttons to bring with us.