Imagine being across the globe listening to a radio piece in German about the ins and outs of high school debate in America, specifically, Walt Whitman High School’s Speech and Debate program.

The Swiss National Public Broadcasting company (SRF) interviewed students from Whitman’s Speech and Debate club for a segment on high school debate teams.

SRF’s piece focused on how the national presidential debates are influencing more students to participate in their school debate programs.

Eric Wenger, the President of Speech and Debate club’s parent board, and Colin O’Brien, the faculty sponsor and Whitman teacher, organized the interview.

Reporters contacted Wenger about a week and a half before they interviewed students during an after-school practice session Oct.10.

“We knew of the general themes that they were going to touch on and why they were coming,” debate vice president Justin Baker said. “We had a sense of what they were going to ask but he didn’t tell me specifically what he was going to ask me.”

Wenger told the reporters that Whitman students who participate in debate aren’t in it because of the presidential debates.

“I tried to tell them that the students here participating in debate are working on it all of the time,” Wenger said. “For them it’s probably a novelty that there are people across the country thinking about debate, but it’s not new to them.”

Members said questions covered a range of topics, starting with what a typical event and practice was like.

“The questions they asked were mainly about the mechanics of speech and debate,” club president Xavier Roberts-Gaal said. “They asked how the events are structured, what sort of skills we emphasize, how we prepare to compete, and what the events look like in competition.

After getting a general idea about how American high school debate works, the reporters digressed into more general topics.

“They also asked about why we joined the Speech and Debate club, as well as broader questions about how we thought our activity related to the presidential debates going on right now and the wider political process,” Roberts-Gaal said.

Though the show was for a Swiss radio station and aired in German, the reporters that came to the school spoke English.

The reporters also recorded segments of the speech and debate practices which came as a bit of a surprise to Baker.

“The one thing that was kind of off putting the time when they came into the room I was in the middle of running a practice drill with some of the new debaters,” Baker said. “They just sort of recorded us in the middle of doing this drill and I wasn’t ready for that.”

The podcast can be listened to here: http://www.srf.ch/play/radio/popupaudioplayer?id=b97279cd-2746-4d53-9a2a-102d5575e4d.  

Justin Baker is a feature editor for the Black and White