Today on the 1st of April, Banen, Salsabeel, Yusra and I (Gamy) attended a friendly debate at East Hills Girl high school. This was the first in-person debate in two years and my first EVER professional debating experience in my life. The overall topic of the debate was; education. The question of the debate was if Mindfulness meditation should be compulsory in school?
For my first debate, I was the first speaker, Salsabeel Second, Banen third and Yusra council. We were the affirmative team. We had an hour to prep, plan and create our argument. this was beneficial for me to really get the gits of debating create my palm cards and helping my team members also write their speeches or arguments.
Once time was up, it was time for us to present our case for mindfulness mediation being compulsory in school. I spoke first and was really nervous and stuttered a lot at first but over time I got used to it. We introduced a module that was similar to the Resilience project that our school participates in, sadly we did not add enough detail in our module which let us down. My point was about suicide rates and the effect covid 19 has to had on the wellbeing of students.
As a whole, we need to have a scoop and the educator said that we needed to have different points for our argument because our second speaker spoke on wellbeing and we realised that we never actually introduced new points as well as link our argument to education.
Overall, for my first debate, I had a lot of fun and got over my nerves as soon as I got comfortable. I feel like as a group we have learnt and bonded as a team and are ready to take on Condell park next term.