Senior Debating Club
You enjoy debating current issues, finding new challenges and would like to upgrade your English?
Then join our Senior Debating Club!
Meetings take place on Wednesdays 13.15 to 15.05 in A 15.
We are looking for students who speak quite well, ideally grades E and Q, but younger students from grades 9 are very welcome, too!
For more information, please contact Mr Probst.
Back from final Rounds in Würzburg
Latest Results
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end
The HvGG Senior Debating Team comes back from the final rounds in Würzburg with first victory.
The last weekend of February 2015 (Feb. 27th - Mar. 1st) our team participated in the last four rounds of this year's Senior South League Debating Tournament. As before we were opposed by very experienced teams whose members have gone through years of debating as Juniors as well as Seniors.
Appreciating this fact our expectations couldn't be set too high but luckily for us things proved different very soon.
Right on the first evening we set up a convincing Opposition. The Motion in this prepared debate read „This House would introduce Islamic instruction in German schools“. All our speakers, including absolute newbie Antonia Bäcker, gave strong speeches but it came to everybody's surprise that the draw among the judges was finally turned into victory for team Proposition.
Things got worse in the second debate, an impromptu about making vaccination compulsory. Despite better arguments and certainly more intellectual reasoning within the debate our team was denied victory due to technical errors. This left us somewhat depressed and our spirits were quite at a low ebb for the next impromptu of the day, „This House would lower the voting age to 16“. In addition two of our team members had to go back to study for the upcoming Abitur and our replacement Maarten Schreuder was only to arrive in the middle of prep time. Needless to say – we lost again. At least we could easily follow the judges' decision this time.
Then came the moment for our captain, Daniel He, to show commitment and teach his fellow debaters how to deal with setbacks. Extra preparation and motivation on Saturday evening got the right spirit back and we finally won the last round about rejecting Greek debt demands on Sunday morning.
Despite two defeats, the judges congratulated us for one draw and one victory, stressing that it would have been absolutely normal for a newly formed team to lose all debates in their first year.
However, referring back to Seneca, with our first victory this phase is now over and we'll be back to next year's South League with more experience and skill.
A big thanks for their commitment before and at the weekend goes to Antonia Bäcker, Daniel He, Jacob Schiele, Carsten Dehler and Maarten Schreuder.
Next competition rounds: Friendly against Bad Camberg in June.
Motions will be announced a.s.a.p.
New members are welcome!
Bhavesh Agarwal in German National Team at the World Schools Championships in Cape Town, South Africa, January 17-27, 2012!
Read the article about Bhavesh in the Frankfurter Neue Presse here
Read more about World Schools Debating in Germany here .
In 2011, our Senior debaters reached rank 18 of 34 in the German Senior League.
And our team captain Bhavesh Agarwal ranked 5th best individual speaker of over 150 participants!