Mr. Berry's Classroom

Old nonfiction essay from 2020 that I rediscovered.

Mr. Berry’s classroom at my high school was one of the strangest rooms in the school. It wasn’t arranged or decorated very aesthetically. Unlike the social studies or math teachers’ rooms, there weren’t many educational resources hung up on the walls. There were, instead, some pieces of ‘art’ that represented Mr. Berry’s personal interests. A poster of the band Nirvana. A painting by Picasso. A white board with the tournament schedule of the debate team with a poop emoji plushie taped on top of a section of the board dedicated to the “bleep list”. A folder with a picture of Taylor Swift saying “Permission slips go in here”? Yeah, this is where it starts to get weird.

Mr. Berry was not just an American Literature and AP Language teacher, but he was also the debate coach. The debate team had their practices every Tuesday and Thursday in his classroom after classes ended. Moments after his last class ended, the debate kids would come rushing into the classroom and start stacking chairs on top of the desks. They would put their laptops on top of the chairs and start opening up word documents, which contained evidence for debate rounds. The assistant coach Mr. Hausman would stand up and say “Speaking drills, 30 seconds” and watch everyone get ready to start reading at the speed of light. In policy debate, you have to read your evidence as fast and clearly as possible to overwhelm the opponent with your arguments. Every practice, they would all read super fast at the same time for 13 minutes straight. The first 8 minutes was a standard speaking drill, and the remaining 5 minutes was for a torturous “clarity drill”. The coaches would pick some sort of punishment to make the debaters’ reading harder, whether that was having a pen in your mouth or having to say the word “watermelon” in between every word. 

It goes without saying that their practices could get very chaotic. Debate kids can be very loud and outspoken. The events and “inside jokes” of debate can get pretty crazy. It gets so crazy that the coaches felt the need to make a “poop list” (but in other words) next to the tournament calendar. Every time a debater makes a tremendous fool of themselves, their name and their fault goes on the list. This included when varsity debaters would accidentally tell freshmen about debate things they weren’t supposed to know about yet, like sneaky argument strategies.