The speech competition

Earlier last week, (short) Ben approached me and asked me if I would be interested in joining him to judge an English speech competition. The college of economics (at the new campus) was holding a speech competition and they wanted to have two foreign teachers as judges. I thought that this would be great fun and immediately agreed to go. Our contact for this event was a boy named Ke, who I first met last year through the Akron-Kaifeng forum that I participated in while back in the states. I have had met him once since arriving in China, but had not kept in contact...
Ke met us at the new campus as he came to join us in our Thursday afternoon game of Frisbee. Afterwords he ordered a cab for us to go to the new campus. I suggested to Ben that we take this thing seriously and put our suits on. (actually it was just an excuse to wear the suit that I had gone through so much trouble to bring, but had no opportunity to wear) Anyway, Ben, Ke, and I go to the new campus to judge this speech competition.

we were ushered into the large classroom where the competition was to occur and we were automatically greeted with a standing ovation. we proceeded to the judging table where a bottle of water, a pen and the evaluation sheets were awaiting us. Having received no instructions for how to actually judge this competition, Ben and I spent the waning minutes leading up to the competition trying to decipher the evaluation sheets that were primarily written in Chinese, but included awkward English translations. Unable to figure it out with complete certainty, we opted to discuss the scores between contestants and try at least to have uniform evaluations.

There were three parts to this competition: The speech, the question section and the talent section. There were a total of 9 contestants, broken into groups of three. Each one of the three would go on the stage and give their speech, then all three would come up and be asked one question each by the judges. (We didn't understand that we were to be the ones asking questions until the microphone was thrust at us in the beginning of this segment) We both managed to ask fairly intelegent, if not extremely difficult, questions. One of the girls gave a speech about the importance of following your dreams and cited Arnold Schwarzenegger as an example. My question, in more or less words, was "given the recent news of a Arnold's long-term affair producing an illegitimate love child, should he still be used as a role model?" I was surprised that she was able to understand it, let alone give a satisfactory answer: "we all make mistakes, but we can use his achievements as an example and not look to model his lifestyle."

This process was repeated two more times for the remaining 6 contestants. The speech portion was worth 40 points and the question section was 20. Finally, the talent section, worth 40 points, was upon us. Being an English competition, I was not actually sure what to expect with this "talent portion" I expected English singing and poetry and the like, but was pleasantly surprised to see a variety of acts including Soprano Sax, Piano, dancing, singing and English story telling!

The winner was a boy who gave a speech on English as the International language and for the talent told a tragic story about how gays are repressed in China. His English was near flawless and his dramatic story telling skills definitely stole the show.

Ben and I were asked to award the prizes and after the competition, we posed for photos and talked with the contestants, teachers and hosts. In all this was another great experience. Afterwords we told Ke that if he heard of any other competitions, that we would be more than happy to judge again