peech contests are the bane of students and teachers alike. The topics the students discuss are supposed to be written by the students themselves. Of course, all the journals are graded by the teachers prior to the speech, and I’ve had the hand in personally writing some of them with the students. We went through two or three iterations of the speeches before the students got up to speak today.
We graded them on a sliding scale with nearly everything involved in making a speech included. From the point where they got up, to the point they were sitting down, we had to constantly monitor their speaking ability.
All the students need to do is memorize the speech, show up, and say the lines in front of their peers. Some of the students would memorize their own speeches exactly. A few students would paraphrase something we prepared together, and others would walk up, tell us their names, and sit back down.All of this was noted by five independent evaluators, and we will combine our scores and average them for a grand total to give rewards for the best speakers.
After the speech had ended and the students sat back down, we called them back up one by one to see if they could withstand the “Interview session” in response to their speech. The students had to quickly summarize their speech topic, than answer a series of three questions from the teachers around the room. I ended up asking 90% of the questions to students for some reason. I hate to be a guy asking the question that stumps someone in front of their peers. (No, wait, I love that.)
After the interviews were over, we broke back for regular classes. I’ve got 3 more speech contests to sit through tomorrow. I’ve been preparing my students for a week at the lower level, but my older students all have large examinations eating up most of their time. If they do well, I’d be surprised.
Some of the students have done speeches for their Korean elementary schools, but it has fallen out of favor. In the past, I had to prepare dozens of speeches for students, but these days only a handful of students compete in the school contests. Our school holds their own contest to compensate.
