For ten years or so, I have spent a week in June at the National Speech and Debate Association’s (@speechanddebate) National tournament. Thousands of high school (and now middle school) students converge on a city, usually in middle America, to show off their rhetorical and oratorical skills. The week always seems ripe for tradition, and I relish the chance to help my students feel part of a past and future legacy. But, let’s be honest, the tradition is really for me, and the students just give me license to celebrate some hokey act or weird hobby.
I wonder if I’ve always been obsessed with tradition, or if it might be something that came to me with age–perhaps, the fact of years past strikes us in a moment, and we feel the need to preserve that feeling well into the future? Whatever the cause, I do know teaching and coaching has always been the place where I conjure up these traditions.
Years ago, I would have my sophomore English students write a letter to next year’s students on their manila folder so it could be passed on to those very students when they embark on the journey of taking my class. Some of those letters offered droll stories about reading A Raisin in the Sun aloud in class, while others provided some sage advice about how to read the books rather than SparkNotes or participate in class discussions because their efforts prove worth it! Invariably, students always saw this as an opportunity to take witty jabs at me and my idiosyncrasies, which actually gave future students permission to joke and laugh with me, knowing I would be able to handle it. When I left that school for another one six years ago, I felt a twinge of guilt that I had allowed a sweet tradition to die, but I knew my love for tradition would certainly live.
But you might be asking how this connects with a bunch of speech and debate nerds wandering the halls of a school on their summer break while talking to walls. The NSDA has its own share of tradition, as the organization (once called the National Forensic League) honors coaches for their years of dedication to the activity and their students by awarding “diamonds,” highlights their best practitioners by inducting them into the Hall of Fame, awards finalists with trophies in events named after contributors to the history of speech and debate, and bestows a lei flown in by the Hawaii contingent on each national champion. We hold students who have qualified to the National tournament each of their four high school years in high regard, but I don’t think we do so just because their qualification marks a rare achievement. Instead, I’d like to believe we honor those students because they are the ones who can travel from Nationals in Utah to Alabama to Florida to Texas and carry with them the legacy of the event and pass on our traditions to others.
My favorite tradition from Nationals week, however, is a personal one born out of coincidence in a shared love for the one true thing you will find in all great towns—PIE.
I began coaching at Chaparral High School in 2004 with another head coach who had also grown up and competed in Kansas. In 2005, together we qualified our first competitors to the Bluebonnet Nationals in Dallas, Texas, where we also discovered our common affinity for all kinds of pie. If I remember correctly, we happened upon a small pie shop in Grapevine, Texas, and my high school memories of hanging out at Perkin’s or Tippin’s after a debate tournament, where my friends and I would sit, laugh, razz each other, and eat pie a la mode until the wait staff would kick us out, came flooding back. For me, pie and debate are inextricably linked, something I’d forgotten in the intervening decade since I’d graduated high school…but so thankful to recall in my early years as a coach. Out of that memory, a new tradition was reborn that has followed me through two debate programs, 15 years of coaching, and hundreds of students.
If I could, I would explain to all those students that my love of tradition, my sharing of that tradition, is the way I connect the years from my start to my finish and beyond. With the advent of smartphones, the search for the perfect pie has become much easier but just as enjoyable, as I read Yelp reviews and local journalists’ write-ups of the best pies in town. I have driven 30 minutes out of my way to find the right pies for our team to enjoy. And once we find that perfect pie (or, really, pies since we have to try every flavor!), we sit down as a team and laugh and razz each other, and I get to believe for a brief moment that I’m still in high school. But I quickly snap out of my reveries and realize how great it is to be a teacher and coach who gets to immerse my students in a tradition, that tangible connection between the past and future which reminds us this time, too, will pass and we should hang on to the moments by marking them in some special way because we never know who might inherit our tradition and make it breathe!
Some of our best places for PIE:
Emporium Pies–Dallas, Texas
The Good Pie Company–Miami, Florida
Tippin’s Pies–various locations
Please add your own suggestions for awesome pie shops in the Comments below!