About

forensics: n The art or study of formal debate; argumentation.

The Michigan Interscholastic Forensics Association actually covers all the major speech activities that middle and high school students compete in, such as Debate, Individual Events, Theatre, and Legislative Debate.

What we do: Individual Events. This is broken down into two sub-catagories called Public Address and Dramatic. Public Address includes Oratory, TV Broadcasting, Extemporanous, Impromptu, Informative, and Sales. Dramactic includes Poetry, Children’s Storytelling, Dramatic Interpretation, Prose, Duo Interpretation,and Multiple Interpretation.

Students start the season around October when they choose the piece (or pieces) that they wish to compete with in upcoming invitationals. The first tournament we attend is in January. These tournaments are held on Saturdays from roughly 7:30am to 5pm. Students compete in 3 preliminary rounds with semis and finals for the qualifiers. Then in March we have our District competion. The top two students in each event compete at the District level. If they qualify they can then move on to Regionals and from there the State Competition which is a two day event.

Once we have all had a small chance to breath we then have our big Mackinac Island tournament. This event, held around the third weekend in May is held at the Grand Hotel. Students stay and compete in the Grand Hotel itself with all its wonderful amenities. But its not all hard work; students have a whole day to explore the island and there is a huge dance to conclude the gathering. This event is always a highlight of the season.

Overall students are creators of their own fates. They choose their own pieces, do their own cutting to meet time frames, work out their own blocking, decide their practice schedule and ‘costuming’ all within an open scaffolding and with some outside guidence. Coaches are not in the rounds with students “calling plays” or offering advice. Students are their own directors who learn to self-evaluate their performance along with the critique sheets that their judges give to them at the end of the tournament. We, I suppose you could say, are a team of individuals!