North Park’s Debate Society has just finished up with regionals and provincials and now begins preparation to head to Peel Debates on May 19th. Debate Society is run by Mr. Luchak with help from other teachers such as Mr. Sharma and Ms. Dos Santos. They meet every Friday after school with an average attendance of 20 members. Debate Society’s objective is to provide its members with improvement to oral communication, logical reasoning, and listening skills. Debate Society teaches the many different formats of debate, such as British Parliament style, Canadian Parliament style, and cross examination style, which is four on four, two on two, and five minute speech and then three minute rebuttals respectively.
So far, the Debate Society has sent teams to compete in four competitions. They began by sending several teams to the British Parliament Qualifiers which was held at the City of Toronto French School. The first part of the competition was to send teams to regionals at the start of February and the best teams progressed to the Provincials competition in March. Unfortunately, Provincials was the end of the line, as only the top six teams would move on to Nationals, however, our highest scoring team ranked 26th. At the same time, Debate Society sent teams to the Heart House Competition at the University of Toronto in the middle of February.
We sat in on a recent Debate Society meeting in which they prepared for the upcoming tournament: The Peel Debates. Ideas for pros and cons flew across the room and heated arguments arose for both sides. Then we talked to Mr. Luchak about the club and he said, “There’s a team in grade 10 who did extraordinarily well at the provincials, even at the regionals. [They] even surprised the senior debaters, in fact, they beat the senior debaters in terms of their ranking. They didn’t compete against them, but in terms of their rankings. That is Navroop Mondair and Iswathi Cheruvalat, […] they did very well.”
He continued by saying, “The senior team there’s Arya Manjaramkar, who’s probably one of the stronger debaters, […] in the seniors, and he’s often partnered with Samit Dhiman. And there’s Shiv Aurora, and Muhammed Zaheer. One should also mention Aditya Bhardwaj and Ali Aikin, and there’s Kavin Tahvar and Emad Rahman, those tend to be the teams ” “Jasmine Sekhon has been a very strong presence, she’s kind of the president of the club.”
We wish Debate Society all the best as they prepare to not only compete in, but host the Peel Debates on May 19th. With their up and coming Grade 10s and successful senior teams there is no doubt that Debate Society will represent North Park well and do an excellent job!
THE NORTH STAR 