Debate club

As a secondary project, My partner teacher and I, along with the other PC Volunteer, started an english debate club for our school.

We had been planning since school started, but we had to wait a few weeks until the school schedule became finalized (In Moldova, that's some time during the first month). In telling the students about it, it was clear that many students would be interested, but when the day finally came we had no idea how popular it would be. On our first day (Wednesday) we had more than 20 kids show up. For a school of about 200, that is a significant amount.

For the first meeting, we ran a practice debate in Romanian so they could see how the rules work and to give them a chance to see if they like it. For their first topic, they chose to debate whether God exists, and debate they did. It was really interesting to see the kids get so involved. there were supposed to be only three people to a side, but by the end of the debate the specators couldn't restrain them selves and had to join into the discussion. By the end of the club, the kids wanted to keeping talking.

On an interesting side note, it was suprising to see how the kids decided to argue. In a typical American school, you'd expect to see most of the kids take the negative and debate that God doesn't exist. But here in Moldova, the Soviets did such a good job limiting religion that when they left, they country swung the other way. The progressives in the country embraced religion, while the more conservative types remained atheists. Likewise, most of the kids (being progressive) took the side that God exists and only two boys were willing to argue against.

I am really looking forward to the next debate, but I am not sure what to have them debate next.

any ideas?