Speech Contest

So last week was midyear seminar (16-18th of November). My school though, got me out of quite a bit of it since, for one reason, I had a speech contest on Wednesday afternoon at Minerva (a previously rented out place for Thanksgiving dinner, but I passed on it because it wasn't free, and wasn't as nice as the Sukoyaka center).

But, since the seminar started at 10am, and I wasn't supposed to be at Minerva until noon, they asked that I go for the first 45 minutes to see just the key-note speech, then leave. Wow. Well, this may seem annoying, and it was, but let's just say I may have gotten paid to bike 50+km and sit down for fourty minutes (reinbursement for train fees required for round trip, not much though really).

So I went to this last year, and there were a total of 8 judges, 4 foreigners, and 4 Japanese people. This year it was 3 and 3. As usual, it was more of a "recitation contest" than a speech contest since students went on stage and recited the mesmorized speech which they had picked; There were 6 different possible speeches they could give.

The best speech was definitely one which talked about ET, and only one student attempted it. The favorites were the foolish king who bought a magic suit that was really nothing at all and he was naked, and one talking about sign language and how it is useful.

After each of us finished scoring, we retired to pick the winner. I was satisfied with the original winner, but then they realized that they had made a mistake on the order of the participants on the sheet, and the previous winner was in fact second place, and the girl that did ET, who before had been 2nd, was in fact the winner.

Myself and another ALT disagreed completely. Although she had picked the harder speech, her pronounciation (which was supposedly 50% of the final score and more important than attitude and presentation, or so they made sure to tell us specifically in the meeting before the start) was the worst of all of the students. In the meeting before, the organizers emphasized that the person with the best pronounciation should win, not the one who is the loudest and most theatrical.

So, despite myself and another ALT, both native English speakers, giving this girl the worst pronounciation score out of all the participants on our scorecards, this girl somehow managed to win. I was appalled. After all that, after all the emphasis on pronounciation, they allowed her theatrics to take over and get her the win. Foolish Japanese judges, since she had the worst pronounciation score (overall mid-to-low score for us), but due to their appreciation was given 優勝 or top prize (yuushou).

After the speeches and before the prizes, there was a mini-group discussion of sorts, each circle of chairs getting a foreigner to lead the way asking questions and maintaining conversation (i.e. preventing silence).

Here are some pictures from the event:





And the winner, ET speech in mind. I took a video of it actually since I wanted to catch it seeing as I thought it was the strangest speech of them all...