R.I.P. Patricia Sawyer
Debate shaped me as a person. I can’t put the term ‘fundamentally’ there because, well, good debate education has nothing to do with fundamental anything. It’s about fluidity and adapting to the audience no matter how uncomfortable it makes you. After all, it’s not about you, your case, your arguments - it is about the audience, the judge.
High School Debate in Texas, just south of Fort Worth was how I found rhetoric years later at Texas A&M. And high school debate came to me through Ms. Sawyer.
She passed away recently and following updates from her family gave me a lot of memories of what early debate was like for me.
I remember her classroom was so strange - there was a stage on one side of it with two tables, and we’d often sit up there and work on debate.
I remember the bright yellow Baylor Briefs - produced by Baylor University debate for the high school topic. I remember the NTC small pamphlets that she had in her room, mostly written by James Unger, about things like Counterplans, Justification, Topicality, and Advantages - all magic words to me. The older students had typed up and printed out a glossary of these terms and I read them all on the school bus on the way home after my first day there. I felt very lucky and special to have access to all of these documents while thinking nobody around me on the bus even knew about them.
A couple of years later I attended the summer Baylor Debate camp and encountered Lee Polk and William English who did not behave like what I imagined a professor would act like. They were very interactive with us, moving around the room, speaking with big booming voices - they made an impression. They were the most dynamic teachers I had ever seen. I returned that fall ready to apply what I had learned to writing cases and arguments and we went to every competition very excited. In my memory we did a lot of them, but in reality maybe 4 or 5 tournaments a year. Maybe less. We were not connected to any larger circuits. I remember chatting with other debaters during lunch many times about whether or not it would be possible to have national debate tournaments, or rankings across the country. We were totally unaware of the then NFL, now NSDA. It really didn’t matter at all to what we were doing. I felt like I was doing real research on important issues. A good narrative for any student, regardless of leagues.
Before I could drive I would convince my mother to take me and a couple of other debaters to the main branch of the Fort Worth Public Library, in downtown Fort Worth. Being there was my first experience in a serious library, a thrill that hasn’t yet gone away no matter how many times I go to research in a university library or, more commonly, when I go to write at the New York Public Library on 6th avenue.
Ms. Sawyer let us do a lot of things that I didn’t think were connected to education or learning. For example, while she worked with some of the Lincoln-Douglas debaters, we would just go with the juniors and seniors to the empty cafeteria and work on arguments. This felt transgressive. I think my attitude in the classroom today was shaped by that. Education must be disruptive or it’s something else - maybe indoctrination or burning time.
She was very religious and sometimes would want to talk with us about Christianity and spirituality. It was always done in an open way, where exchanges and questions and arguments could be made, no problem. I still don’t think I’ve met anyone more convinced in the Christian story of redemption and salvation than she was.
In my office I still have something she gave me. She had these pre-printed flowsheets from NTC from the era of American debating that is called “Need-Plan Theory.” This approach to policy debate believed that each debate was really two debates happening at once. The 1AC would give a speech about the need, addressed by the 1NC. Then the 2AC would present the plan and solvency, responded to by the 2NC. These would be seperate burdens. So there were two different pre-printed flow sheets. I still have one - not sure which one I have there, I’ll have to check. The other I gave to a policy debate student of mine from A&M Consolidated High School when they graduated. I wonder if she still has it!
Ms. Sawyer introduced me to debate as something interesting and open, fun and vital. I hope that I have done the same. There’s nothing that important about it, except for your interaction with it and how it makes you think about yourself. Considering arguments and positions as trying on clothes that you just might be able to pull off in public - that’s the pedagogy of debate that I got from her. At least I think so. The influence of a teacher is tough as it lives right on the edge where the light fails to fully illuminate the space; where shadows could still be things, and vice versa. The power and influence of pedagogy is the set of practices, questions, and approaches one can draw on at the edge of the light, the edge of new understanding.