Teaching an old dog new tricks?
Most people who are not alumni of Speech & Debate don’t realize that competitive debate isn’t just one thing. In fact, there’s more than a dozen categories, and they’re wildly different. It’s like how Track & Field includes everything from shot put to relay races to sprints. Speech & Debate has something for everyone: group debates, one on one debates, acting out scenes, delivering speeches that others have written, delivering a speech that you’ve written, writing a speech on the spot, and so much more.
For the past few years, all of our students at Brooklyn Debate League partner schools have been competing in Student Congress, an event where kids simulate a Congressional chamber with 8-15 other students, proposing, debating, and voting on legislation. Last year, we also had students compete in one-vs-one and two-vs-two debates with the Coolidge Presidential Foundation. In both Congress and Coolidge, we found that our kids were over-relying on their notes and struggling to improvise in the moment off-the-cuff, which is critical for cross examination and rebuttals, because those depend on what your opponent says and you can’t prepare them in advance of the round.
With that in mind, this year, we’re making a big change at Brooklyn Debate League: all of our brand new schools this fall will be starting in Extemporaneous Speaking (or Extemp, for short). In this event, students draw a question related to current events and have 30 minutes to research and prepare a speech in response. A solid Extemp speech should be 7 minutes long and cite at least 6 pieces of evidence, and no, kids aren’t allowed to use notes. (Technically, they’re allowed to use an index card when they first get started but we wean them off of that pretty quickly.)
Extemp is near and dear to my heart because it was my primary category when I competed. At Brooklyn Debate League’s free summer camp this July, we spent a week teaching Extemp, and the staff asked me to do a sample Extemp speech in front of all the kids. I hadn’t given an Extemp speech since graduating high school in 2003, and suffice it to say, I quickly discovered that it’s a whole new ballgame now.
Back in my day, all of the Extempers would walk into the “Prep Room” with big plastic tubs filled with articles that we printed from our home computers and filed into different folders: US Politics, Economics, War on Terror, etc. We’d stuff recent magazines into our school bags and hope that we’d have research on whatever question we were. In other words, we walked into those rounds with a Time Magazine and a prayer. If you drew a question you knew nothing about and you didn’t have any files on, good luck.
This summer, I entered my “Prep Room” with a couple tools that we could only dream of back in 2003: a laptop, access to the internet, and AI embedded into the search engine. I drew the question: “Does the 1973 War Powers Resolution still meaningfully constrain the Presidency?” And I’ll be honest, I knew next to nothing about the 1973 War Powers Resolution. I started my 30 minutes of prep time by doing exactly what I have often scolded my students for doing: I typed the question in a Google search bar. This probably seems obvious now, but I cannot emphasize enough that this would never have happened 25 years ago when I was competing. Everyone relied solely on research we brought into the room, there wasn’t a laptop in sight.
After I typed the question in, the AI-enhanced Google page spat out not just a definition of the War Powers Resolution but a bullet-pointed outline of how to analyze the question, complete with links to evidence.
And that’s when it hit me: this is a whole new ballgame.
I read the summary of the War Powers Resolution but resisted the temptation to just copy the AI’s analysis. Instead, I clicked into the News tab of the search engine and picked a few articles that looked relevant, took 10 minutes to read them while jotting down some notes, and then built my own analytical framework to answer the question, citing the articles that I had read.
In other words, I used the 2026 tools with the 2003 skills. I was rusty, for sure, since it’s been awhile since I’ve done this, but I had time to build in a catchy intro, some witty transitions, a clever last line, and internalize all my three main points and the citations. By the time I stood in front of the camp, I decided to not use the index card I’d written notes on, because I knew I had it all in my head and I didn’t need it. (And let me be honest: it didn’t hurt that the previous activity was running a little overtime, so I had an extra 15 minutes to prep.)
I had a lot of fun giving the speech in front of the campers and learning a lot about that question, but it left me with bigger questions: Who am I to teach kids how to debate in this day and age? In fact, who am I to teach them period? They’re growing up in a completely different world than I did. I have no idea what it feels like having grown up with the internet in your pocket, and I can’t even imagine what their future is going to look like.
In general, I’m opposed to teaching kids to lean heavily on AI for all of the usual reasons (terrible for the environment and impedes their ability to think critically, for example) but this experience humbled me. For better or worse, this genie is out of the bottle and most debate leagues (including the National Speech and Debate Association) allow students to use AI during tournaments. In fact, Brooklyn Debate League’s first student to qualify for the NSDA National Championship this past spring pointed out to his coach after he advanced to semi-finals that every other student who advanced was bent over a laptop writing their speeches using AI.
He didn’t make it to finals, but he was only a few spots away (and he was only a junior, so we’re hoping he’ll be back). I’m proud of him for not taking the easy way out and having AI write his speech for him. Then again, maybe it’s wrong to call it the easy way: relying on AI before a debate round may be easy in some aspects but makes things so much harder in other ways. As one of my debate coach colleagues wrote in his Substack last year, more and more debaters are relying on AI to prepare for their rounds. While it can lead to a high-level analysis, it also leads to cases that the kids can’t pronounce much less understand, which is a problem when they need to answer questions during cross-examination, defend their argument during rebuttals, or weigh the impacts of their case against their opponent’s.
It’s true, I used the AI tools at my disposal this summer to find a quick summary of the context for the question, but analyzing articles on my own enabled me to write a speech that I fully understood. I recognize our students may feel like they are at a disadvantage when their opponents are using AI and they aren’t, but I hope we can convince them that, in the long run, it’s worth it.
