"I love China" This years topic I felt was better than last years to do with Globalisation or Globalization if you happen to follow the American spelling, as the Chinese do. Among the 19 speeches I heard, a lot was mentioned about patriotism, relating China to their own mothers, relating patriotism and nationalism, irrational and rational love, corruption, social problems, and their ancestry relating to the yellow river.
Of the candidates I knew 2 students, I taught both last semester, and neither got into the final. I knew a couple of students involved in the execution of the contest, relating to MCing, counting marks, timing speeches, giving time warnings, and computer/project usage.
My role in this was to judge as a full judge this time, giving a mark out of 100, (minimum mark 85). Most scored in excess of 88 and the highest mark given was 94. The scores were averaged over the 7 judges making up the panel without any communications being made between judges to dicuss how they feel so the maximum I could influence each score was a total of 2 marks.
Another role I had was to announce a question to the candidate, based on a sheet given to me from one of the other teachers. The language on the sheet was on the whole good, with a couple of mistakes. I felt that a couple of the questions however were a bit too long.
After the 19 speeches and related questions and responses, summing up of marks, I had to make a comment to the audience hall of maybe 150 students saying how great it all was, how lucky they all are and what a great opportunity it was. I'm eternally grateful for a period I had between the last speech and my little speechette. They had a couple students come up and sing while the student (I'm assuming volunteers) totted up the marks to see who came first. In this period I managed to write down a few points and compliments I could make relating to how impressed I was, and how scared I would have been to do this in my own university. During the execution of the speech the deputy dean of English nodded away at my comments and I was noting to myself how much my attitude has changed related to public speaking, though I still got nervous before hand, I executed it without problems.
I'm writing this on the bus home on my little Asus EEPC listening to Mozart Piano trios on my ipod, and I would say charging my psp through the usb port and connecting to the internet through my phone bluetooth, but that isn't true. I'll just have to post this via email-to-blogger and hope that they haven't blocked facebook, friendfeed, and gmail in the time I've been out of my house.
I nearly forgot, I also gave the second prize winners their prizes (two students a book each) and have my photo taken with them. I got a laugh from the audience because I didn't know whether I should be having my photo taken with them or not. I hope the photo isn't too bad.
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#1 by tschinkyo on June 3, 2009 - 10:09 pm
Well, I guess you were the judge of grade 2~
As for me, i don’t like the topic quite much, it's too big for us to catch, yet, much better than the globalizsation thing. The teachers had their own reason to give us such a topic. You know, too many disasters happened last year and the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Protest and also the 60th anniversary of the nation this year.
Nah, I really hope that they would launch a much better topic next year, which is not such a realistic expectation~~
#2 by Anonymous on June 7, 2009 - 1:11 pm
For a foreigner, to hear the Chinese speak about their own feelings regarding this topic is quite interesting.