I got a great slice of America pie a couple of weekends ago; a look into the heated, passionate, and highly competitive world of Forensics. Now, for those of you who are think that forensics merely means ‘the scientific investigation of criminal events’, then let me tell you, you’re living a sheltered life. There’s lots of people (and I wasn’t one of them) that know and love the ‘competitive speech’ kind of Forensics.
The National Forensics League is a organization which holds and runs events in high schools all across the country. And I saw a national level event for a few hours while my girlfriend’s brother competed in it.
Since I’ve never heard or seen anything like this, I was more than a little apprehensive about the thought of listening to hours of loud mouthed, over achieving kids. But I’ll be the first to say that these guys were pretty impressive.
For ten minutes, these speakers were persuasive, compelling and funny in their pieces. I think I’ve seen a lot of presentations from a lot of professionals in the design business do a lot worse than these guys.
But it wasn’t all gold stars that day. Some were truly terrible. But when you’re 14, a lot of things about you are rubbish. There was this one girl that gave a speech about ‘dancing through life’, where by she would intermittently pepper her talk with a five second dance. She was in need of a better forensics coach. In fact, most high schools that have forensics programmes, have forensics coaches. And yes, there are even forensic camps that you can send your kids too.
There was one part of forensics culture though that completely threw me: everyone wore suits. All the boys and all the girls were dressed as though they were having interviews at Accenture. Little consultants running around, wondering if they’ll “break finals” or whatever these ‘krazy kidz’ like to call it.
Incidentally, I think that this is only the second time I’ve ever been to a real American high school. Thankfully I had my camera.
