Ought To & Can (A San Francisco Fable)

Part I: Ought To--Chapter 1

Neil paced up and down the hall at Tamalpais High School, legal pad in hand, talking to himself.

He was careful to not accidentally walk into any of the half-dozen or so others, also pacing up and down the hall, holding legal pads and talking to themselves.

These were the competitors in Extemporaneous Speaking at the Mount Tam Fall Classic, held the Saturday before Thanksgiving in Neil's senior year of high school. A few hundred students representing 23 Bay Area schools had thrown on shirts, ties, dresses, necklaces, jackets and polished shoes and converged on quiet Mill Valley in woodsy Marin County to talk and talk and talk and maybe win a trophy. Two of those schools were Sonoma Valley High School, a small town/suburban school with about 1,300 students, and Sloat-Bushnell Country Day School, a modest-sized, century-old, prestigious K-12 private school housed in a bland 1950s-era building in San Francisco's quaint Noe Valley neighborhood.

The proper term for competitive scholastic speech events is forensics, but when you tell someone that you're going to a forensics tournament on Saturday, it sounds like you're competing to see who can perform autopsies and dust for fingerprints the quickest. So, alongside things like "competitive speaking" or "speech and debate", the word "debate" by itself is used most often. But "debate" covers a huge spectrum of event categories. If you want to engage in mouth-to-mouth combat with others, you have a buffet of choices: to debate one-on-one, there's Lincoln-Douglas (LD) Debate. If you'd rather have a partner and go up against other twosomes, there's Policy Debate (a single topic for all schools for a whole year, with tons of research), Public Forum Debate (the topic changes every few months) or Parliamentary Debate (a different topic each round). Or for larger groups there's Student Congress or Mock Trial.

Then there are the individual events. You can write and memorize a speech (Oratory, Advocacy, Original Prose/Poetry), or perform a piece written by others (Humorous/Dramatic/Thematic/Oratorical/Duo Interpretation).

Then there's the rare breed who have no fear of the uncertainty, spontaneity and sudden changes of life. For this group, there are two choices: Impromptu Speaking and Extemporaneous Speaking.

They have broad similarities: each round a speaker is given a choice of three topics. They then have a limited amount of time to compose a speech that's a few minutes long.

For Impromptu, you get abstract words or quotes or ideas and have two minutes to prepare a speech that can't be any longer than five minutes.

For Extemp (as it's universally called), you get three topics on current newsy things. Thirty minutes afterwards, you must give a coherent, intelligent (or at least a good fake of something intelligent) seven-minute speech, after having consulted news articles, journals, books or other official material. And even then you get your choice: National Extemp (trying to examine the stories you hear in the news every day in a way that seems original), or International Extemp (trying to convince people you're a pimply 16-year-old American who just happens to know a lot about the government situation in Belarus).

Impromptu is always the event with the most competitors, since everyone thinks it's easy. Extemp is the event that attracts a unique bunch: smart, wonkish, eager at a chance for self-expression and confident in their own cleverness.

Neil competed in National Extemp. So did Sabrina.

Extempers are sequestered from the rest of the competition in the "prep room", usually a school's library or cafeteria. At a tournament each school gets its own table. Each school's extempers are a clique, with their own camaraderie, private jokes, and ways of killing time between rounds. There may be some limited interaction between schools, but the tribalism is a fierce obstacle to overcome.