In his 2nd grade class, Jeremy was chosen to represent his side of the room in a debate against the opposing side. He was on the left side of the room and his side consisted of his row of 6 people, plus the two columns of 6 people to his right. The remaining schoolchildren in the right-most three rows were designated the opposing side. This side was represented by Sarah. Sarah and Jeremy were instructed to hold their own in a debate against each other in front of the class. The class would then choose to stand on the side of the room whose stance was seemingly more correct. After a ten minute period of debate, whose ever side had more school children standing in it, would be considered the winner.
The rules to choose the debate topic were simple: The first 5 students from each side of the classroom would vote to elect a single child from their group to represent the room as a counter. The counter would stand at the front of the room and would be barred from any decision making from this point going forward. Their job was simply to count. After the counter was chosen, the teacher passed around a hat to each side of the room, in which the students were to take a piece of paper that they had written down a singular debate topic onto, and place it into the hat. The hats would be passed around the room until each student had placed a topic into their assigned hat. The last student to place their topic into the hat would then choose a representative from the other side of the room to take ownership of their hat. Thusly, the two hats would switch sides. The teacher and Jeremy and Sarah would then leave the room, and were not to come back into the room until the group had each arrived onto a singular topic. The hat owner would then pick out 5 topics from the hat and bring them up to their counter, who were to then write them on the board. The counter would notify them when this had occured. In order to select a topic, the whole class would first vote together whether they would like the counter to switch sides of the room. This vote would occur by having all the school-children in the room place their heads down, close their eyes, and hold up a hand if they wanted a switch. The counters would then work together to decide if there were enough votes for them to switch places. The counters then switched if applicable. Keeping their eyes closed and heads down, the students were then to raise their hands for the topic they preffered most. The counter would say each topic aloud to their group, and would then count the amount of hands in favor of that topic. The topic with the most amount of hands would be the group’s winner. When a winning topic was chosen, the counter would erase the choices on the board and knock on the door and notify the teacher to sent in Jeremy and Sarah. Because the counters could not notify either Jeremy or Sarah of their chosen topics, as to not sway the decision making in their favor, they were to relay the topic secretly to the first person in their group. This student would then turn around and relay the topic they had heard to the person directly behind them, in a secret manner. This would continue until the topic had reached the final school-child of each group, who would then directly relay the topic to the debater of the opposing side. Sarah would hear her topic secretly from the last member of Jeremy’s group, and Jeremy would hear his topic from the last member of Sarah’s group. Through this procedure, the debaters would each have their own topic that were chosen completely fairly with no bias from the students in either group. The teacher could then enter back into the class.
Jeremy and Sarah were to debate over which topic should be chosen.
After ten minutes had passed, Jeremy won the debate fair and square. He was awarded $600 dollars from the pockets of the school-children on the opposing side.
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