I've taken charge of the Debate squad over and above the journos this year, in case people don't know it yet. These 2 aspects of my now consolidated CCA are a world of difference from each other. Even I, Master of Compromise, am somewhat at a loss as to how the 2 could possibly work together without me suffering some kind of schizophrenic damage to my psyche.

For the moment, I've got more journos than debaters, though the CCA is generally referred to as 'Debate'. The journos have been putting out more visible, tangible impact on campus due to our weekly updates of campus news in NYconneX, though I don't really know how wide the reach actually is among our student body. NYconneX isn't likely to win any awards 'cos there aren't any awards out there to be won for our product (are there?). God knows, we need some recognition.

On the other hand, Debate takes the lion's share of my annual budget because debate coaches don't come cheap. The coach we've taken on can't come on Wednesday, so a concurrent CCA day is not possible for both segments. We've taken on the coach by faith as currently we don't actually have a debate team yet, while the existing JC1s are in 1st term transition. I don't know what the appeal of Debate is for the new batch, so I have no guarantee that I will recruit a team once term 2 begins.

So, yeah, huge worries for my consolidated yet fractured CCA that I sometimes wonder if anyone else besides myself cares about.

Still, in attending Debate training sessions for the remnants of our JC2 debaters, I've found the debaters to be committed, self-reliant, motivated and organized. And they haven't given up yet. Without a coach today, they trained themselves, and I learned enough to see that debate training can actually be quite good even for the weaker GP students. Debating is systematic, logical and structured, mature and critical (in the critical thinking sense), everything we hope our GP kids to be. Could there be some way to turn this observation into something practical and useful...?