Cross-X: The Amazing True Story of How the Most Unlikely Team from the Most Unlikely of Places Overcame Staggering Obstacles at Home and at School to Challenge ... Community on Race, Power, and Education
by Joe Miller
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Book Summary Information
Author: Joe MillerEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2006-10-03
ISBN: 0374131945
Number of pages: 496
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book Reviews of Cross-X: The Amazing True Story of How the Most Unlikely Team from the Most Unlikely of Places Overcame Staggering Obstacles at Home and at School to Challenge ... Community on Race, Power, and Education
Book Review: I wanted to like this book
Summary: 3 Stars
I really wanted to like this book. As a debate coach for an inner city school, I looked forward to having my own problems and complaints validated. To some extent they were. However, the book as a whole left me with more questions than answers, more anger than acceptance, and more frustration than appreciation. Let's start with the obvious: the author is a reporter and the book was an to be an unbiased look at the debate culture and how it affected an inner city school. That the author not only became a part of the story but actually directed the actions of the story is an appalling breach of jounalistic ethics. While I did not expect the writer to remain entirely neutral, and I do give him credit for portraying the debaters honestly, his own leap from neutral observer to debate judge to coach while still writing this book crosses a line.
Secondly, we are introduced to the major characters and confronted with an injustice: these students are prohibited from attending a major national tournament by a set of archaic state rules. Forgive me for being confused, then, when the team attends national tournaments in Washington, DC and Atlanta. The writer never clarifies this point, perhaps because it minimizes the conflict. The book gives short shrift to a comment by James Copeland of the National Forensic League that Central attends major tournaments throughout the year that the majority of competitive teams cannot afford to go to.
It bothered me as well to read about debaters who come to practice late--if at all, work that does not get done, late night partying and yet, and yet, debaters that rise to the top of each tournament. How? Was it too much to ask how the debaters got from point A to point B? I was troubled throughout the book by Mr. Miller's attempt to minimize the role of coach Jane Rinehart. Other than a few exercises she leads new debaters through, her only role in the success of her team appears to be as driver, observer and censor of language. One can't help but wonder if this is deliberately done to make his own debut as an assistant coach who literally takes over more impressive.
That leaves me to deal with the issues of debate style and content. I have, in the past, been a big fan of the Urban Debate League and its quest to bring minorities into what is largely a "white" activity. I am not a fan of programs that tell debaters they cannot succeed in the event as it currently exists because of their skin color or their poverty. Originally debate centered on analysis and persuasion, something that cannot occur in 300 word per minute speeches designed to cram in as many cards of evidence as possible. While both the book and Rinehart reject local tournaments that condemn speed and require debaters to talk to "Suzi's Mom", these tournaments teach students to really understand what they are saying and to be able to explain it coherently to someone who is not an expert in philosophy, who does not understand how simply passing one piece of legislation will lead to nuclear war. Rinehart elects instead to compete on the National level but condemns those tournaments for not rewarding the very things local tournaments would: analysis and persuasion. I find it insulting that the author makes the gigantic assumption that having his debaters turn to hip hop and a rejection of the structure of debate would have magically saved a young man from being a gun shot victim. The message he sends by the end of the book is that he is one of the few visionaries of debate; that the only honorable style of debate is one that rejects debate as currently played. I am not an apologist for many of the abuses in the activity today. I am, however, a firm believer that debate can change lives, regardless of skin color and family income. I am a firm believer that debate teaches students skills that will serve them throughout a lifetime--organization, the ability to structure their arguments and presentations, the composure in unfamiliar situations. If we accept Miller's assertions that the entire activity has to change to accommodate a few, that without these changes minorities can never succeed in this activity, then we are buying into a even more racist mindset and it disturbs me that Miller's book perpetuates this myth.
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Summary of Cross-X: The Amazing True Story of How the Most Unlikely Team from the Most Unlikely of Places Overcame Staggering Obstacles at Home and at School to Challenge ... Community on Race, Power, and Education
In Cross-X, journalist Joe Miller follows the Kansas City Central High School?s debate squad through the 2002 season that ends with a top-ten finish at the national championships in Atlanta.
By almost all measures, Central is just another failing inner-city school. Ninety-nine percent of the students are minorities. Only one in three graduate. Test scores are so low that Missouri bureaucrats have declared the school ?academically deficient.? But week after week, a crew of Central kids heads off to debate tournaments in suburbs across the Midwest and South, where they routinely beat teams from top-ranked schools. In a game of fast-talking, wit, and sheer brilliance, these students close the achievement gap between black and white students?an accomplishment that educators and policy makers across the country have been striving toward for years.
Here is the riveting and poignant story of four debaters and their coach as they battle formidable opponents from elite prep schools, bureaucrats who seem maddeningly determined to hold them back, friends and family who are mired in poverty and drug addiction, and?perhaps most daunting?their own self-destructive choices. In the end, Miller finds himself on a campaign to change debate itself, certain that these students from the Eastside of Kansas City may be the saviors of a game that is intrinsic to American democracy.
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