2012 Harvard Debate Tour———于心澄

2012 Harvard Debate Tour

                 ------Rehearsal of dreams

          AP1   Vivienne 于心澄

We may travel the world for a million times, but this tour will forever be tucked neatly inside our mind.

Boston, July 15^th, we were standing under the sunshine outside our dorms. We looked around curiously like explorers, tired but hopeful. When we dressed in Harvard Debate Council T-shirts, we felt like a family. And we spent all the first afternoon chatting with our new mates and playing games with our teachers. We were surprised getting no homesick at all. Staying with friends all over China flew warmth inside our heart. Though the 17 hour endless flight pushed us to settle down and recover from the jetlag, we couldn’t fake our excitement.

Boston is no less than a painted American landscape. While we were having classes in Harvard Law School, we saw squirrels everywhere and the campus was filled of blooming hydrangeas. There couldn’t be better studying atmosphere elsewhere, we thought. There’s a 15 minutes walk to the classroom. We gathered at 8:30 every morning packed with laptops and notepads.

We had 10 days course on public form debate, focusing on researching, rebuttal, crossfire and conclusions. Our teacher cleared our mind about American style debate and helped us to get ready for our debate competition. During these 10 days, we were glad to meet professors from Harvard and other first-class universities. They taught us about China’s nuclear power and tips on studying SAT. We really enjoyed sitting in a hundred people classroom taking notes and clicking on our laptops to keep in pace with the professor. It’s just like a rehearsal of our university life 2 years later. Furthermore, we trained ourselves to speak English and our fluency improved a lot. Because of scanning information in English every single day, we were gradually getting used to it. Debate is a hard work requiring concentration and logical thinking, so it trained us to be quicker and more cautious. In addition, our communication skills enhanced as well. In the last several classes we had extensive practicing debates with different partners. We gained a large amount of speaking skills to express ourselves efficiently, like saying the results first and then go the causes. We forced ourselves to think and communicate in a American way. Surely it was hard, but there’s no way out so we had to adapt to that.

When it came to actual debate, we were all well-prepared and ready for a fight. Each pair would debate 4 times facing various rivals and judges. And each debate would last for about an hour. We all had both positive and negative sides prepared. During that day, we dressed in suits and it felt so formal that we were pretty nervous even facing our familiar partners. Those 4 debates were quit tiring and harsh. We had little time to sum up and recover from the former debates. Through these debates, we won and lost, but ranking was not the most important, isn’t it? We learned a lot from each other, how they caught the judges’ attention, how they plot their questions and how they trapped us with their logic.

Debates are cruel, indeed, especially debating with friends. We are friends after debate, but we are competitors with opposite positions while debating. We had to do everything we could think of to crash their contentions. We should put on the mask of rational and critical. However, it is a valuable class we learned. It is ability to convincing your opponents and behaving properly as situation varies, isn’t it?

Harvard Debate Tour must be a teacher, a chance and a warm company along with my study life. That is why I claim I shall never forget it.