We had another very enjoyable session with our St Andrew's debating and interview club this week.
As ever we began with skills, with a focus on rebuttal and active listening as well as how to tackle an unseen image, text or other source.
In this instance we used Holbein's famous portrait of Henry VIII. In this case the key was to have a go at making point, explaining items/details in the image, without necessarily centering on right/wrong answers. Well done all for making such interesting responses/comments.
We then turned to our warm-up interview style question:
(i) What do you find most challenging at school?
Here our focus was to turn this into a positive, i.e. the challenge of a subject, sport or wider activity is the reason for enjoying it, e.g. problem solving in Mathematics or winning competitions in Sport, or taking on the challenge of the stage for Drama.
Our newsround took in:
Coal power ending in the UK
Hurricane Helene
ISS news with the two stranded astronauts
The US vice-presidential TV debate
The growing conflict in the Middle East
We then turned to our set-piece debates on the motions:
(1) Are ticket prices too high for music/sporting events (e.g. Taylor Swift world tours):
Here the voting remained relatively split throughout. With one side very strongly in favour of market forces, and popularity/demand determining cost, whilst the proposition felt that many could not attend such events because of cost and this should be changed.
(2) Should every town have a bank? (with nearly 3 million in constituencies without banks in the UK)
Overwhelmingly the group felt there should more provision and this was particularly unfair for the elderly, those on smaller incomes and mainly dealing with cash or rural communities with poor public transport systems.
We ended with a discussion on the role of the education secretary and a key priority for each speaker if they were in charge of education. Answers included:
More Sport, more Science, more Mathematics, more Languages, and more Art and Drama.
Looking forward to next week!
コメント