Affirmative Constructive I would like to first welcome our guests from E-junior today who will be acting as the judges for today’s debate. We the affirmative team and our esteemed classmates on the negative team are pleased to be able to hold this debate with you all today. Now, in the spirit of friendly competition, let us begin. Currently, students here at Miyagi Gakuin are unable to use their smartphones here at school except for very limited occasions when the teachers permit us to do so. Students are provided with iPads, however, their functions and features are restricted by the school, so what we can do with them is limited. Furthermore, many students are dissatisfied with the current smartphone rules. Today’s resolution is Miyagi Gakuin Students should be allowed to use smartphones while at school. We the affirmative team support this resolution and will present to you today our idea for a new smartphone policy for Miyagi Gakuin and arguments why the resolution should be passed. In this debate when we refer to students, we mean both junior high and high school students. For the new school smartphone policy, we recommend is this: First, we would overturn the rule that does not allow students to use smartphones at school and that requires them to be turned off and kept in our bags. Next, we suggest the following new rules: Our policy would allow smartphones to be used between classes and after school, but not during class. Smartphones would also be allowed during special events such as sports day and the culture festival. When the class bell rings phones must be set to silent mode and put into the student’s bag. Students must respect the privacy of their classmates and must not upload pictures or videos to social media. We will now explain the benefits of such a smartphone policy. Arguments 1. Smartphones are an essential tool during natural disasters. By keeping them in our bags and in silent mode we can still get early warnings and news about natural disasters such as earthquakes and typhoons. After it is safe we can use them to contact our families. Right now the school only has one public phone and it would be impossible for all the students to contact family members with just it. 2. Using our smartphones will allow us to make memories of our school life. We can do so by taking pictures with our friends. We were allowed to do so during this year’s Sports Day and no problems happened. The students all followed the rules. In the future, we can look back at these photos and remember these happy memories. 3. Smartphones are a necessary tool for our everyday lives. There are times that we need to contact people outside of school, such as our parents, cram school teachers, and anyone else we might have appointments with. Sometimes our plans change while at school, for example, we may need to meet with a teacher for a while after school. We need to be able to call these people and cancel our plans or have our parents come at a later time. We the affirmative team rest our case as to why we support today’s resolution. We gave 3 arguments to explain our support. Smartphones are essential tools during a natural disaster as well as necessary for our everyday lives. These devices will also allow us to create our own memories of our time here at Miyagi Gakuin. We believe that this resolution should be approved. Thank you. Negative Constructive Judges from e-junior, moderators and guests, and the affirmative team, we the negative team will also do our best to give you a fair and good debate today. Right now we are not allowed to use Smartphones here at school. Many students as well as the affirmative team believe that we should be allowed to use them, but is it really necessary? We, the negative team, think that smartphones will interfere with our school life. We reject today’s resolution and will present 3 arguments today as to why smartphones should not be allowed here at Miyagi Gakuin. Arguments 1. To start with, allowing students to use smartphones will create more work for teachers as well as members of the student council. It will be required of these students and teachers to monitor students using smartphones to ensure they are following the rules and using them appropriately. We are currently in a trial period of allowing students to buy snacks from Seikyo here on campus. This has led to more work for student council members. 2. Secondly, using smartphones at school will create problems among students. Students will choose to play on their phones during break times instead of communicating and interacting with their fellow classmates. This behavior frustrates people and will have a negative effect on friendships. This action even has been given a name now--phubbing, which means “ignoring one's companion in order to pay attention to one's phone.” 3. Lastly, students using smartphones at school will lead to an increase of trouble on social network systems such as Instagram and Twitter. Students will absolutely take pictures of each other at school and some of those pictures will get uploaded online. This makes it difficult to protect students' privacy. Right now, we are not supposed to upload pictures with our faces showing to social media. However, there are some students who don’t follow this rule. Students using smartphones at school will make this situation worse and worse. We, the negative team, have stated our case for why this resolution should not be passed. We explained our opposition with three arguments. Allowing smartphones at Miyagi Gakuin will create more work for teachers and students, it will create more problems between students, and it will cause more students to get into trouble. The negative team believes this resolution should not be approved. Thank you. Negative Rebuttal Today the affirmative team presented three arguments for supporting today’s resolution. They stated that these devices will help students make high school memories as well as being essential to everyday life and during disasters. We will now explain why these ideas are not accurate and would not provide the benefits the affirmative team offers. 1. The affirmative team stated that smartphones would be essential during a natural disaster, however, we believe they would be a distraction and would add chaos to the situation. Yes, we would be able to get emergency information about the disaster on our phones, but we can’t do anything with that information. All decisions on how to act will come from the school. Furthermore, during a disaster smartphone signals can be disrupted, so we wouldn’t be able to use them anyway. This is what happened after the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. 2. Next the affirmative team argued that we could use smartphones to make memories of our school life. First of all, we already have ipads that we can take photos with while at school. If we used smartphones to take photos, that would increase the risk of these photos being uploaded to SNS. Lastly, during special events, there are professional photographers, like Reuben Sensei, who take our photos for us. 3. Lastly is that smartphones are necessary for our everyday lives. This is true, but for the reasons that the affirmative team gave, contacting people outside of the school and our parents, there is already a system in place that works. First, we have a public phone we can use across from the teachers’ office. Also, in special cases, we can use our smartphones to make contact with teacher’s permission. Furthermore, we have iPads and we can send direct messages from them if we need. Today, we the negative team, debated our case for why smartphones should not be allowed in school. We gave three arguments as to why the current policy should remain in place. Allowing them will just create more problems, trouble, and work for everyone. Next, we explained why the arguments made by the affirmative team are inaccurate. Again, the current policy works and outweighs any of the benefits the affirmative team proposed. Therefore, we stand opposed to this resolution and the negative team rests its case. Thank you. Affirmative Rebuttal Earlier the Negative team gave you 3 arguments about why they are against allowing their fellow classmates to use smartphones in school. They claim that it will cause more work for students and teachers, more problems among friends, and more opportunities for us to get into trouble. I will now explain to you why these arguments are unreasonable and not true. 1. First, the negative team said that allowing smartphones will create more work for student council members and teachers. Let us not forget that there will be rules made that will explain how smartphones can be used. These rules will be thoroughly explained to students. If students break these rules they will no longer be able to use their smartphones. Also, if it does create more work for the student council, this is fine. It is work they will be happy to accept because it comes as part of making a better environment for students at school. Furthermore, the negative team failed to mention that the extra work created by the snack trial from Seikyo is done voluntarily. Students volunteer to take on these responsibilities. 2. Second, using smartphones at school will not create any more trouble for students than they do now. And actually, in contrast to the negative team’s argument, smartphones can encourage communication between students. We can share stories and media we find online and discuss these things with each other. On top of this,last year, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology started allowing junior high school students to bring their smartphones to school in Tokyo. We believe that this is the first step in a trend that we will see allowing students to use these devices in educational environments. 3. The last argument the negative team made is that students will get into more trouble online if we use phones at school. This kind of trouble doesn’t only happen at schools, it can happen anywhere. The internet isn’t location specific. We can’t use smartphones at school now, and still some students get into trouble online. The truth is, though, that there are already rules in place that students understand and most are good about following these rules and avoid online trouble. Three years of using iPads in the classroom without issue shows that we can handle these responsibilities. Today we debated our support for today’s resolution. We gave three arguments for allowing smartphone use in school. These devices are necessary in modern society and they could prove lifesaving during a disaster. They also allow us to make high school memories on our own terms. We also explained why the negative team’s arguments against smartphones in school are not as bad as they would like you to believe. We believe that more and more schools will begin allowing students to make use of their phones in school. Miyagi Gakuin has the opportunity to be a leader in this area. Therefore, we the affirmative team support today’s resolution. Thank you.
