An academic environment is not one where anyone would typically expect to find inciting the ruthless decimation of your foes accepted, much less encouraged, but in Debate Club you’re allowed to do just that. Join now so you can take advantage of the opportunity to let loose and annihilate to your heart’s content.
Previous debate-related experience is not a requirement, and the club can be beneficial for anyone.
“It’s not a specific type of person [who would be interested in this activity], it would be any person who would want to increase any of the skills you get out of it,” Mrs. Theresa Miller, a business teacher at Cary-Grove and the sponsor of Debate Club, said. “If you want to just, you know, have fun and work in a team environment, that too – it doesn’t have to be that you’re going to be a lawyer.”
Located in the collaboration room, the roughly twenty minutes long Debate Club meetings are held once per week each Friday morning.
“What we do is we kind of take the category we work on, like an argument. ‘What does an argument look like’, you know? Each one of these is a day,” Mrs. Miller said. Despite having such a low time commitment, one can still build up valuable skills without needing to sacrifice their other activities.
“Public speaking is the biggest one,” Mrs. Miller said. “There’s critical thinking, communication, research, confidence, leadership, work ethic, active listening, and teamwork. It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you present it. I mean, that’s what’s gonna choose whether you win or lose. It’s the presentation that really, really matters.”
Debate Club was started a few years ago when two juniors asked Mrs. Miller to be the sponsor for it. She said they wanted it to be completely student-driven, so she has kept it true to that ever since.
“I like student-driven clubs, it’s what you want, it’s not what we want. And although you’re getting all these skills out of it, we’re not teaching it to you, you’re doing it yourself.”
Student leaders plan and lead each meeting independently, so not only did students play a significant role in the club’s founding, but any who join now can eventually also work their way up to these leadership roles.
A wide variety of topics, selected by students, are discussed. One can choose whether they’d like to argue for or against a particular topic, and who they’d like to work with.
“We’ve had electric cars versus gas cars, should public college be free, is animal testing ethical, should vaccines be mandatory, can money buy you happiness, is the death penalty ethical, should cellphones be banned in school, and should we have universal health care,” Mrs. Miller said.
In addition to their regular meetings, the club also participates in Law Day at the McHenry County Government Center in April. On this day, students are granted the opportunity to collaborate with a real attorney, who will help them prepare and present their own mock trial case. They will also get to interact with other McHenry County students from different schools participating in the event.
“Law Day at the end is like the showcase of putting on the show and actually using your skills that you learned and performing,” Mrs. Miller said. “So it’s like we do dress rehearsals all these weeks, and then finally in April, we get to go perform, and we’ll be representing Cary-Grove High School, so it’s an opportunity for us to represent our skills.”
With such a low time commitment and a vast array of know-how to acquire through its student-driven activities, Debate Club is the ideal place to begin your journey toward world domination. Well, perhaps that huge of a promise may be a tad bit much, but still, the point stands that this activity is perfectly geared for any student wanting to enhance their skill set, and that’s not up for debate.