We Need to Radically Rework APOL

It's the start of tournament season, and I am again reminded that APOL is still broken and we need to fix it. 

Last Friday, I spent the day judging at the Mile High Conquest (the first tournament of the season), which included judging one of the semi-final rounds for APOL. 

As I hurtle towards mid-life, I've calmed down as a judge and coach...and person, I suppose. Maybe my latent paternal instincts are softening me up, too, because this year, I just felt sorry for the students. 

APOL students are Struggling and APOL is Failing

For many families, APOL is a faith-formation event that's intended to guide students into clearly articulating their faith. 

The league supports this view by ensuring values alignment from everyone involved in the event. In every other event, the league asks judges to put aside their biases and just judge on presentation. But with APOL, the league has special rules. APOL is the only event where the rules specifically state, “Content is key: greater weight should be given to the speech content, rather than the presentation style”. Beyond that, judges are asked to affirm a statement of faith before they're paneled for a room. 

This means that APOL is one of two, explicitly faith-forward events in Stoa (Mars Hill is the other) and the only content-forward event in the Limited Prep category.

But if you sit in an APOL room, the actual result is far from the goal.

I've graded my share of high school level papers and I'm convinced that if we took the speeches I heard, transcribed them, and then graded them as theology essays, the rooms I have judged would earn a D-average. 

In fact, in a room of eight competitors, I think it was the 5th or 6th student who was the first to not have a glaring factual error in their presentation (like the one dear student who claimed Mormonism is the third largest religion in the United States when it’s actually 1.6% of the US population, ranking it sixth among Christian faiths).

But my teaching philosophy is this: if half a class fails an assignment, the assignment failed, not the students. After much thought and discussion, I've concluded that APOL is so structurally flawed, it's accomplishes the exact opposite of its aim. 

The issues are threefold:

• APOL tries to cover too much material
• APOL asks too many questions
• APOL teaches students to bluff

APOL Covers Too Much Material

We ask APOL students to have a working knowledge of theology, Scripture, soteriology/hamartiology, "worldview" (whatever that means), and comparative religion. That's literally three textbooks' worth of material. Ask me how I know.

It's unreasonable to expect meaningful engagement with such a large body of knowledge. I just finished an Old Testament survey course at seminary and whenever I told people that the class was covering Genesis through Ruth, plus Wisdom and Poetry (a 500-level course) they all looked at me aghast and decried how it was impossible to cover all that material in just one semester. 

Why are we expecting more from a high school student at a speech competition (which is supposed to be an extracurricular activity) than we would from a graduate student specializing in the field?

It’s unreasonable.

“But,” comes the objection, “the breadth covered in the topics reflects the breadth of the material.”

First, no it doesn’t. The topics repetitiously and incoherently cover a narrow slice of the material. Even after multiple attempts at revision, the topics still appear to be a hodgepodge collection with varying levels of quality, making them an inadequate introduction to the material.

Second, every field of study has a million possible questions we could write about it. The point of good pedagogy is that we guide students through the questions at a pace they can ingest. That’s why a single, carefully chosen, entry-level, substantive, guiding question is far greater than blasting students with laundry list of loosely related FAQs about the faith. The topic list is (and always has been) bad pedagogy, making it even worse faith formation. 

If we really believe in this event for faith formation, we need to fix it. As it sits, students are ricocheting off the surface of all this material.

APOL Asks Too Many Questions

It’s not just the breadth of material that causes problems; the sheer volume of questions is overkill. 

Contrary to its category description, APOL is an unlimited prep event: every topic is given to the students at the start of the year and they're expected to be conversant in all of them. This burdens the student with the onerous task of preparing 84, 6-minute platform speeches. That totals to 8.4 hours of material.

Compared to their fellow competitors, an APOL student prepares more than six times the prepared minutes as a student participating in every other speech event combined:

• Duo: 10 minutes
• Humorous: 10 minutes
• Open Interp: 10 minutes
• Dramatic: 10 Minutes
• Expository: 10 minutes
• Original Oratory: 10 minutes
• Persuasive: 10 minutes
• Wildcard: 10 minutes (at most)

TOTAL: 81 prepared minutes

• 6 categories
• 14 questions per category
• 6 minute speeches

TOTAL: 504 prepared minutes 

Now, of course students don't prepare that much material. The smart strategy is to collapse topics into manageable chunks. But even if we cut the workload in half, it's still multiples of all the other speech events.

This expects a level of participation that is far too demanding to the point of potentially being harmful. 

To put it into perspective, in my brief stint an apologetics and worldview speaker, I had a portfolio that maybe reached 10 hours of prepared material–material I could only write after almost seven years of formal education and countless hours studying and teaching. 

In this light, APOL functionally asks high school students to output content at the level of a working professional. Not only is that obviously too much to ask of a student, it's miles above what other competitors are asked to do for their events, creating a lopsided competitive playing field in the speech events, and especially in the Limited Prep category.

This unreasonable assignment will either crush a student under its weight or encourage them to bluff their way through it. And the bluffing is the real problem.

Limited Prep Harms APOL’s mission

I competed in Impromptu as a student and it was my favorite event. IMP taught me I could still be articulate even when I didn't know what I'm talking about. It's a core feature of IMP, but when we give something like faith and theology the limited prep treatment, we are training students to bluff their faith.

Apologetic presentations should never bluff.

We have all seen so-called apologists and skeptics who were exposed for claiming that they were experts when really they just wanted the fights and the fame. Church history is full of charismatic people who bluffed their way into popular ministry. As I’ve sat in APOL rooms, it's clear to me that we're encouraging (and in some cases rewarding) bluffing about the contents of our faith.

That’s not true for all students, but it’s true for enough students that we should acknowledge it. We have created a speech and faith training event that is systemically designed to encourage bluffing.

I'm fine with bluffing in IMP because hearing a kid give an emotional appeal about why colonizing the moon makes more sense than colonizing mars when you know they're making it up on the fly. It's hilarious and very fun (hence the hugely popular Parli debate event). But it's neither of those things when the student is talking about the Dead Sea scrolls. Or the resurrection.

How to Fix It

I see two steps towards a possible resolution (and I'd love to hear yours):

1. Put the Categories on a rotation and send the event back to committee
2. Turn the event into a platform event

Let's look at each.

1. Put the Categories on a rotation and send the event back to committee -

Whatever we do with APOL, we should first rescue the current students. The easiest, least disruptive, instantly implementable option is to run two Categories per season. Year 1, we do Cats. 1 and 2. Year 2, we do Cats. 3 and 4 and so on.

That puts the topics into manageable chunks and still lets the students cover all the topics in a four-year run. It also buys enough "do no harm" time for the Speech committee to reevaluate the event. 

For the committee, it seems to me the key question is this: why are faith-forward speech events limited prep? The bluffing problem is a clear and present threat to faith formation. We should stop this practice as quickly as possible.

My theory (confirmed anecdotally in conversation) is that most of our community thinks "being ready to give a defense" means it's extemporaneous. But in real life, "ready to give a defense" comes from a lifetime of going deep into the material so that you can reach for deeply held beliefs that have been deeply discovered. 

2. Turn the Event into a Platform Event - 

I think if you asked any Platform student to give a 1-minute summary of their speech, they could do it instantly, without any prep time at all. That's how apologetics work in real life. 

Platform speeches give the opportunity for the level of depth and formation we're wanting from the event and does so with a reasonably-scoped thesis selection and research limitations (I mean, what, exactly, are the boundaries on the student's research for the Karl Marx quote? All of communism? Humanism? The influence of the dialect on theology? Good thesis mentoring will guide a student away from rabbit-holing into despair and towards a reasonably achievable research goal). 

We should let the students go deep, one topic at a time, and give them 10-minutes to present their findings.

A platform speech will demonstrate that they have a firm grasp on a handful of their faith’s tenants rather than bluffing for 6-minutes because they got can't possibly take on 84 tangentially related research prompts in the span of a semester.

A narrow, well-researched speech would be a far more satisfying and edifying event experience for everyone, both competitors and audience members.

It's Been Over 20 Years; Let's Fix This

At last week's tournament, the largest speech event was Impromptu with 81 competitors. This was followed by EXTEMP with 72, then APOL and Original Oratory tying for third with 53 competitors. APOL is a big event.

If we're really committed to having apologetics represented, there are lots of ways to do that. But we've settled on a half-Platform, half-Limited Prep event with idiosyncratic judging criteria that fire-hoses students with topics and encourages bluffing. 

That’s not what anybody wanted from this event or for our students. We should fix it.