Jun 01, 2023 At 03:03 PM EDT
On any given evening, there is lively chatter around Rachel Bruce's dinner table. But that's to be expected when two former high school debaters get married.
"My poor daughter," Bruce told Newsweek recently. "We just have a dining table with three people. And on the one side, there's her dad, he's a litigation attorney. And on the other side, there's her mom, she's a debate coach."
Bruce currently teaches college-level U.S. government and international relations in addition to coaching debate at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Early College in her hometown of Denver. She was named 2022 Coach of the Year by the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues (NAUDL), of which her school is a member.
Her husband, Bob Bruce, debated at Mullen High School, a Catholic school that was all boys at the time. Rachel attended Thomas Jefferson High School, a Denver public school.
They met decades ago on the high school debate circuit in a typical friends-to-competitors-to-lovers story. Bob Bruce told Newsweek that his wife has always been "really smart" and good at forming arguments.
Their teams shared buses when commuting to debate competitions, which introduced students from the two schools to each other, including Bruce and her future husband.
"We were both probably [on] two of the six best teams in the state," he said, thinking back on their high school days.
"We only [debated] each other once, and it was just a mortifying experience. He beat me pretty soundly," she said.
It's a triumph that Bob still talks about to this day—at cocktail parties, barbecues and even over emails.
"P.S. I hope she told you that I won the only time we debated against each other," he wrote in an email to Newsweek.
Rachel added that after 35 years of marriage, it's the only argument between the two of them that he's won.
"I think we've had to learn over the years that marriage isn't about winning an argument," Bob Bruce said. "Sometimes in debate, you just want to win the argument and that doesn't always apply to having a successful marriage."
Rachel Bruce never had any intention of becoming a high school debate coach. She was a self-described "math nerd" in high school who dreamed of majoring in math in college and becoming a professor. But her participation in debate inspired her to think deeply about politics and international relations.
After graduating high school in 1981, she went on to attend the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and later applied to work for the Foreign Service. But despite being qualified and passing the required tests, she said she received a letter from then-Secretary of State George Shultz that the Foreign Service would not be hiring anyone for the next five years.
Bruce then briefly worked as a teacher at a Denver Catholic school before leaving education for the business world.
While she was drafting remediation proposals for environmental companies in the late 1990s, her husband's alma mater was desperate to fill the position of a teacher who had died suddenly. That position, teaching social studies at Mullen High, turned into an assistant debate coaching job.
The school was a "powerhouse" in debate and had recently become co-ed. Bruce admits that she was the "female end of the coaching team" to usher in good female debaters.
Bruce worked at Mullen from 1997 to 2001, before going back to work in business.
But that only lasted a few years, as she returned to education again in 2010 to help transition MLK Early College to accommodate grades six through 12, just two years after the Denver Urban Debate League (DUDL) formed. And she has stayed on ever since as a teacher and debate coach.
"I realized I missed it," she said of debate. "And even though I only debated for three years, I've now been involved in this since 1979 and it's, frankly, addictive. So I just keep coming back for the high."
She said she made herself valuable as the leader of a winning program that makes the school proud.
"I'm kind of like the football coach here—people just leave me alone because I keep bringing home trophies." She then corrected herself: "I don't bring home trophies. I coach the kids who bring home trophies."
Her school has qualified eight times for NAUDL nationals since 2010. They have won nine season championships in the same period and had four debaters of the year.
Despite her success, Bruce said she still suffers from a bit of imposter syndrome because of her nontraditional route to coaching high school debate.
"When you want to keep your job, you look for something that will make you valuable," she said. "And so here I am, almost two decades later, as a pretty good coach, and I still consider myself accidentally into coaching."
Bob Bruce said his wife is, above all, dedicated to her students.
"She genuinely cares about the students that she's coaching," he said. "She really enjoys seeing progress from somebody who just showed up in high school not knowing anything about debate or argumentation and then seeing where they are a year later with that ability to formulate and support an argument."
Now, working in an urban school, Bruce said she can understand, at some level, the discrimination that students of color face. As a female debater in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Bruce said she faced a lot of sexism from judges, coaches and opponents. She notes that debate has come a long way in diversity and acceptance since then.
But Bruce still must put in work to unlearn the strict traditions of how debate is typically done to adapt the sport for a new generation.
"This is something that I had to hit myself over the head with because I was being the exclusionary person, and I had to realize that and make a big change," she said.
Debate is very technical, and Bruce was used to running arguments a certain way that mimicked her high school debate experience.
When her students were disinterested in or struggling with a topic or form, Bruce and the debaters made adjustments to run more critical arguments that appealed to the students' interests, skills and perspectives.
"I really had to let go and let my students run the arguments they wanted," she said. "And as soon as that happened and I opened it up, and I didn't force them to be, you know, white debaters from the '70s and '80s, it was so much more fun."
She adds that she is "thrilled" that debate has made changes to welcome more critical arguments about race and class.
This not only builds confidence and engagement among the students, but it also fosters greater community within the Urban Debate system.
At the small DUDL tournaments, students from all schools are friendly and eat meals together, where they literally "break bread together."
"That makes a difference in terms of building community," Bruce said. "Community is talked about explicitly, [and] the coaches, the adults, buy into that [idea that] community comes first."
Bruce understands firsthand the power of those connections among debaters. Without it, she may not have ever met her husband. Because of this, she maintains relationships with students well after they graduate, including attending a recent wedding of two former debaters.
Bruce said about 20 percent of her students come back to the league to judge competitions.
"I think there's something about the event, and more importantly, the community, that they like to come back to," she said. "Personally for me, I think that [debate] keeps me young because every year is a new topic."
