Abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia, and the death penalty

A few weekends ago, Dave and I went to Xuzhou to visit Kerrin and Ashley. They are two people we met during orientation week, from West Viriginia and Virginia respectively. Xuzhou is a town in northwestern Jiangsu province, about a seven hour train ride away. Lynn, the girl who accompanied Dave, Danthemanstan, and I skiing, taught with them there last semester. We had a good weekend, mostly hanging out, taking tours around their campus and seeing some of the sites Xuzhou had to offer. We shared stories of teaching and experiences here. They teach at a top 50 university in China, whereas Jiangsu Teacher's University of Technology in somewhere between 450th and 500th, there are about 750 total schools in the ranking. So, some of the activities and conversations they have had with their students are at a much higher level than those I have. Nonetheless, Kerrin had a great idea that I copied and used in my class. He said he had great success and really enjoyed having in class debates.

So, last week I split my students into groups, gave them a handout with instructions and such, and told them to prepare for the debates. This week we had the debates. Each topic had a three person affirmative side, three people on the negative, and two moderators, who also gave introductions and conclusions to the debate. The topics, as indicated by my post title, were abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia, and the death penalty. They all gave prepared short speeches, but after that each side was given some time to discuss and then question (or cross-examine, if you will) the other side. I was quite impressed with almost every single student, and on the whole they really outdid my expectations. I had given them some guidance to good research, and most of their speeches were pretty academic and clear. A few though, were quite humorous, as I could tell they copied them from some not so academic or objective sources. Of course, most of their speeches were essentially copied from a source on the Internet. I don't really think any of my students would come up with phrases like 'ruining the family institution, which is the foundation of American morality' on their own.

The questioning or cross-examining portion was by far the best. A few students really got into it. They really liked throwing a "why not?" at their opponents, which is not appropriate for a real debate, but was really amusing, and added to the competitive environment. One of my class monitors even mentioned the movie Juno in her debate about abortion, a very appropriate cultural reference. The most entertaining moment, and a good display of extemporaneous speaking, was when the girls in one group asked a boy in the other to act as if he had impregnated his girlfriend in high school. He was defiant that this would never happen, and refused to answer the clearly conditional sentence. At last he relented and said if it happened he would quit school and take a job and raise the child because that was his duty as a man and a father. He received a resounding applause from the kids in the class. I didn't intend for my debates to be a way for students to improve their date-ability, but he seems to have done so. I really like this activity, because although these issues may not be as important in China, it gave my students the opportunity to think creatively and critically about issues that have social implications. Needless to say (based on my impressions) this isn't something that they normally have the opportunity to do.