North Harford’s speech and debate team has been a part of the school for the last four years. This year the team has 24 total members, with about 14-15 that travel around to competitions, who have won every one of their competitions since the beginning of the year,
The Speech and Debate team is taught and coached by English teacher, Mrs. Joanna Dallam, who has been running the group since the previous teacher Amanda Miljour left North Harford High.
In order to prepare for events, Dallam claims that the team always prepares. “A lot of schools tell me that their students don’t spend a lot of time prepping or being coached. They just want to go and present and will not put the time in to prepare, like our kids do,” said Dallam.
Between events students will continue to prepare by going to visit their coach “about material they could use and then they will practise on their own with their timings and presentation. Each time we have a meet, we will get together roughly two hours before the meet and everyone will pracise in front of each other, we also rehearse and do our timings,” claims Dallam.
Since the year is already almost reached it’s halfway mark, students on the Speech and Debate team are getting the hang of things in competition and preparing their material. “By this time of the year, students typically know what kind of material they would like to use,” claims Dallam, “occasionally a student can change material that day, but they usually have their material ready to go.”
Every event in a speech and debate competition features a different form of public speaking and requires the speaker to be knowledgeable and have the talent to convey their skill. The speech portion involves a presentation by one or more students that is judged against a similar type of presentation by others in a round of competition. Speech events range from limited preparation events that require extensive knowledge of current events (extemporaneous speaking) to dramatic and humorous interpretation, which challenge students to find powerful moments in literature and recreate them for an audience, according to speechanddebate.org.
In the debate portion, an individual or a team of debaters working to effectively convince a judge that his or her side of a resolution is, as a general principle, more valid.
“I first joined speech and debate my sophomore year and I didn’t really like it at first, so after a year I joined again for senior year with my two friends and we’ve been winning a lot of our competitions so now I really enjoy it. We all have a lot of fun together,”says senior Olivia Brown.
The speech and debate team have been on a winning streak for this whole school year so far, and they are hoping to keep it going.