To The Pioneer,
I’m writing in response to Gary Wang’s column “Intolerance of high-school debaters unfair.”
I understand that the high school debate tournament is highlight for the high school students and that it is overall a good thing for our school. However, while living at Whitman I tend to feel like Ankeny is my backyard, Reid is my dining room and classrooms are my study. So having a large group of debaters in my home is not something I immediately welcome.
Now, I have not heard of any Whitman student being particularly rude, refusing to leave a study space or calling for the discontinuation of the tournament, so I wouldn’t say that there’s a huge movement against it. But being a part of a studious group of biology majors preparing for our senior written examination and struggling to find a place with a white board to practice drawing the lac operon on a Friday afternoon: I’d have to say it was annoying to have debaters in every academic building and meeting room. We adapted, it worked out but it would not have been a problem another weekend.
So please, don’t call me intolerant for rolling my eyes when a short, bespectacled young man looks nervously into a room littered with flashcards and gigantic text books and has to call Dave Mathews to ask us (very kindly) to move. Don’t say I’m passively ignorant because I’m annoyed at the 400-odd high schools debaters that spent the weekend in my home: I’m just saying that it’s like an annoying house guest: they come every year, you endure and get to make jokes afterward.
I’ll hold on to my annoyance because it reminds me how much I love this campus and because it makes me appreciate how I get to live here and call it home.
Thanks,
Kali Stoehr
P.S. I would like to applaud the students and staff who put the debate tournament together; they really did make some strides in making it a less invasive weekend.