Speech and Debate Team
The Walt Whitman Speech and Debate Team was recognized as one of the top 5 in the nation by both the Catholic Forensics League and the National Forensics League in the spring of 2009. The nationally acclaimed team is composed of over 100 members and was coached by Anjan Choudhury, who announced his resignation from the team in 2010. Choudhury coached at the Hockaday School in Dallas, Texas for a short period before leaving to join another law firm in Los Angeles. Ari Parker has now taken the position of Head Coach, and has led the team to numerous championships including the New York City Invitational, Valley, in Des Moines, Iowa, Columbia Invitational, The Glenbrooks, in Illinois, Greenhill, in Texas, Blake, in Minneapolis, and the prestigious MBA Round Robin. The team has also appeared in the final round at tournaments such as Harvard, Emory, and the prestigious Tournament of Champions. As the largest National Forensics League speech and debate chapter in the state of Maryland, the team strives to set a local and national precedent of top quality in performance, establishing a legacy of merit and distinction. The team attends around 3 local tournaments a month, coupled with around 30 travel tournaments spread all across the country throughout the year. In the 2009 Catholic Forensics League National Championship, a Walt Whitman student team was the runner-up in three different forensics categories. In 2010, Walt Whitman broke historical records by qualifying more than 20 debaters to the prestigious Tournament of Champions.
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Famous quotes containing the words speech and, speech, debate and/or team:
“I thought my razor was dull until I heard his speech and that reminds me of a story that’s so dirty I’m ashamed to think of it myself.”
—S.J. Perelman, U.S. screenwriter, Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, and Norman Z. McLeod. Groucho Marx, Horsefeathers, as a newly-appointed college president commenting on the remarks of Huxley College’s outgoing president (1932)
“Grammar is a tricky, inconsistent thing. Being the backbone of speech and writing, it should, we think, be eminently logical, make perfect sense, like the human skeleton. But, of course, the skeleton is arbitrary, too. Why twelve pairs of ribs rather than eleven or thirteen? Why thirty-two teeth? It has something to do with evolution and functionalism—but only sometimes, not always. So there are aspects of grammar that make good, logical sense, and others that do not.”
—John Simon (b. 1925)
“Abject flattery and indiscriminate assentation degrade, as much as indiscriminate contradiction and noisy debate disgust. But a modest assertion of one’s own opinion, and a complaisant acquiescence in other people’s, preserve dignity.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)