Speech Contest

Two and a half weeks ago I had a three day week because of Sports Day and holidays. I had to work a Saturday and Sunday, but it was so much fun to be outside dancing and playing it didn't feel like school. Last week I made up for it by having a six day week. I, along with all the other Kitakyushu JETs, were judges in Kitakyushu's English Speech Contest two days ago (Saturday). Despite working a longer day than I normally do at school, I really enjoyed it!

We have all been preparing out students for this contest since before school started. About one to fifteen students from each middle school participated. They were given three speeches and had to pick one to memorize and recite. The first speech was Martin Luther Kings, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream," the second was Severn Suzuki speaking at the UN about making positive environmental changes and the third was a fictional character Takuya speaking about the history of Kitakyushu. A very small group of students wrote their own speeches, but none of my students did and I was not an original speech judge. The students have been staying after school, sometimes for hours, practicing with me. We worked on everything from how to correctly pronounce words to where to put natural sounding pauses to stressing the correct syllable within a word. All of my students worked incredibly hard and were incredibly nervous when the day finally came.

The JETs got to the convention center early and had breakfast. After breakfast we went in to find our students and do one final practice with them. Many of the English teachers from my schools came to see the students' speeches. We did one final run through of everyone's speech, then I told them how proud I was of all of them for their hard work and wished them luck. They then had to spread out into their respective groups.

The contestants were split into eleven groups in order to help with time and to insure we did not judge our own students. Kris and I were in group A, so we went to the room early to set up the tables, chairs, and podium. We went back downstairs for the opening ceremony, which was pretty quick and not very interesting. We lead our group of students up to our room and helped them find their seats. All the students were quietly mouthing their speeches in one last attempt to practice before we started. The day went by pretty quick, we had 26 speeches in total to listen to.

Our judging criteria was pretty loose. The students could get a total of 30 points over all. 10 points for memorization, 10 for presentation, and 10 for English. Memorization was pretty straight forward and presentation we judged by the volume and eye contact of the speaker. English was a bit more vague. We decided that pronunciation of the harder sounds ('th' and 'v') would be a big part as well as how naturally the students spoke. Afterwards, Kris and I easily came to a decision about the winners. There was one winner in each group and three second place prizes.

We reported our winner and runner ups and went back downstairs to hear the winners announced. All the JETs were finding out who's group their students were in and asking how they did. 前田 (Maeda), one of my students from 二島 (Futajima), won first place in her group! Unfortunately, another of my students who I had stayed late with a lot didn't win. She was a third year, so will be in high school next year and unable to try again. She found me right after the ending ceremony and started to cry. I told her I was really proud of her and knew David, the judge in her room. I told her she did really well and was really close to winning. I told her I was really proud of how hard she worked and we went to go find the other teachers. It was really heartbreaking, but she seemed a bit cheered up after we talked. I had gotten little notebooks for all the students who participated and gave them out before everyone left.

Yesterday (Sunday) I had a low key game day. Dan, Nick, and Jake came over and we played a whole bunch of board games, both in Japanese and English. I had a ton of fun! Today is Patrick's birthday, so I'm going to look for a bakery after school so I can get him a cake. Wednesday we have typhoon warning, so maybe no school! That's all for now, I'm going to get back to cutting out pumpkin cards for a game we're playing in school tomorrow!