I believe it is not an exaggeration on my part to say that the debate was much

more challenging than I expected it to be. The challenge began from the first meeting
that we had as a class on what the topic we should choose for our debate. I believe we
were all quite lost on what we should do resulting in a relatively poor or unacceptable
topic that was chosen initially. Thankfully, Sir Eldie and Ms. JM were able to guide us
and address our confusion during the second search for a topic. The challenge however
only continued as we continued to conceptualize the topic into a debate and then
organize the topic into relevant topics that could be debated. The class however was
able to come together in this part of the debate preparation. Another challenge
appeared when we were practicing for the debate. I believe the entire class was
nervous about the debate and as such, this affected how the practices and how the final
debate played out. As mentioned by our panelists, Sir Eldie, and Ms. JM, some
speakers were too focused on reading their parts in terms of the debate to engage in a
more “realistic” presentation of the debate. However, I do understand the fact that
nervousness may have played a role in all of this. It also shows why I said that there
was a challenge that was thrown upon us in every stage of the debate, from the
preparation to the final event itself. There were even challenges in the attendance of
one of the panelists during the debate and that was a big stumbling block at the time it
happened as we did not really have a course of action set to respond to this event.
Overall, I think it boils down to the challenge set before us and whether the class as a
whole responded to the challenge well enough. In my personal opinion, I believe that we
did decent. However, there were definitely opportunities for us to respond to the debate
much better as a whole by perhaps looking for more topics, by preparing for the debate
even earlier than we did, and by perhaps also being much more cognizant about the
potential effect of nervousness on the debate in order to find the necessary steps and
approaches we needed to do in order to overcome this hindrance. In this way, I feel we
would have been able to deliver a better debate as a whole and not only “get past” the
challenges that were before us but truly “overcome” them as a class.