About EXL
Experimental Extemp is an innovative program for intermediate and advanced extempers. Designed along the same lines as the nationally recognized NDF LD program and the Interpretive Productions program in Interp, EXL encourages new ideas and approaches in a small, intense setting.
EXL will not teach you current events and what’s happening today; that stuff’s irrelevant when the season starts two months later. EXL’s instructors will not teach you our personal take on headline events. The world can change too quickly, and we can’t be there analyzing events for you all year.
Experimental Extemp instead teaches you how to form your own opinions about today’s news — and tomorrow’s. EXL builds your own analytic toolbox. Our curriculum is based on principles: we teach economics, international relations, political theory, current trends in opinion tracking, comparative study of governments, and political philosophy from Hobbes, Locke and Hegel to Rawls, Nozick, Strauss and Fukuyama.
We then show you how to use this material to understand the world. You’ll learn how to make new ideas based on old ones, and to introduce them with clarity and precision into your speaking. After all, any extemper can just parrot the Economist and hope for the best. Only the best speakers can take use disparate sources and fuse them into a unique answer; only the standouts find answers to the world’s questions without the benefit of pre-packaged articles and explanatory news clippings.
So we don’t teach you how to read articles in Foreign Affairs and the Economist. We teach how to write them. EXL makes you, not your files, your most important analytic tool. Most extempers spend half their prep time figuring out their answer to the question; our extempers know how to answer their question before they even choose it from the draw table.
Experimental Extemp is lead by Chris Palmer and Jonathan Chavez, who have developed many of the new, innovative and successful strategies for extemp taught in our program. In a combined fifteen years of coaching, they have coached students at various schools to over 20 appearances in NFL, CFL, and Harvard final rounds in extemp. Most importantly, they believes in coaching students in ways that will help them beyond forensics; one of the core philosophies of Experimental Extemp is to use forensics to teach things of greater importance to the world.
Are you ready to take the next step? Want to do something innovative? Eager to stand out from the crowd? If you think so, apply now to join us in Boston this summer, and be ready for an experience like no other. Click above to apply now!
