Year 8 Debaters have the final say of the day

Round 1 of the Year 7/8 PDC for 2022

On Tuesday the 31st of May 2022, Fort Street’s Year 7 Debate Team had their first debate against Fort Street’s Year 8 Debate Team for their first round of the Premier’s Debating Challenge. Most of the members of Fort Street’s Year 8 Debate Team had competed in this competition last year.

The topic was “that students should always pick their group members for group work”. The choice of the topic was even debated by the two opposing team but we managed to reach a middle group with a healthy game of rock, scissors, paper between Jason Lim in the Year 7 team and Henry Huang in the Year 8 team thus resulting in year 7 arguing for the affirmative side and year 8 arguing for the negative.

This was Year 7s first taste of high school level debating and they planned and debated admirably, giving it their best shot, even though some were not use to the fast pace and challenges of presenting impromptu arguments and rebuttals. In the Year 7 Team we had Divyan Gnanasivam as first speaker, Ollie Panagakis as second speaker, Jason Lim as third speaker and Tom Mitchell as team advisor. In the Year 8 Team we had Chinmay Dixit as first speaker, Aaditya Venkatraman as second speaker, Henry Huang as third speaker and Aiden Lee as team advisor.

Since this was a live debate, we also managed to recruit an audience from the Year 7 and 8 Debate reserve team.

From Year 7 we had Oliver Wilson, Lucinda Man and Oliver Williams who also served as Debate Chair-Person.

From Year 8 we had Miranda Leighton and Aaron Ji who also served as Time Keeper.

Even though Year 8 were declared the winner, both teams will progress to the second round of the Premiers Debating Challenge against Sydney Boys at the end of term 2! We also had a lot of fun and took a cool photo at Fort Street’s secret Harry Potter stairs!

Ms. Truong

Debating and Public Speaking Coordinator for Fort Street