Contest!

Today was the English Speech Contest, for which two students and I had been preparing for the last two weeks or so. I feel kind of bad because despite all our practice, they weren't able to give their speeches in a way that would win them a prize. I feel bad because I translated the girl student's into English for her, which was normal, but I wrote it in fairly high level English, or at least English that was above middle school level, and then with the boy, an English teacher wrote his English version and had me fix it up. In both cases, we ended up with speeches that had pretty complex English and were pretty long. At first I thought this would be a good thing because they would exhibit a better English vocabulary when giving the speech, but as it turned out, I didn't really know what the teachers and judges would be looking for. The students who won the contest gave their speeches with lots of exaggerated hand motions, and everyone seemed to put an inordinate amount of emphasis on memorizing the speech completely. I had pretty much ignored the first one because I remember learning to avoid making distracting hand motions and thought pronunciation, intonation, and rhythm would be more important than complete memorization. I always had the conception that good speech-giving depended more on being able to make it flow and improvise, even if that means looking at notes every now and then.

In any case, I missed the mark completely. The contest winners gave short speeches with simple grammar and vocabulary, without looking at their notes very often. When my kids went up, they ended up getting nervous and reading from their notes, even the boy, who had memorized almost the entirety of his mammoth of a speech! I felt kind of bad for not emphasizing complete memorization enough and making their speeches so long and hard in the first place.

But the school that won, and had both its boy and girl place first and second, really had started practice in earnest earlier than my school. As in, they started practicing as soon as their sports festival ended, which was like...a month ago? And their speeches were very good, so they definitely deserved the places they won. Still, I wonder about the point of this whole contest. About a week ago, I started to get the feeling that it was basically just a competition through which a school, and its adult teacher, could claim a special strength and place in the city to incorporate into their school pride/spirit. A number of the kids didn't really even seem that into it. I also wonder about how a speech contest that emphasizes complete memorization and gesturing to the degree it did would actually benefit students learning the English language. They definitely became more familiar with certain words and phrases, and were able to pronounce and read those phrases in a speech decently, but what are they going to do after that trophy goes up in their school's hallway? The whole things just seemed a little shallow to me, like it was more for the satisfaction of the adults running the whole thing than the educational betterment of their students, most of whom, especially those who lost, are likely to never look at their speeches again.

All in all, I got a very weird feeling from the speech contest, which most of the ALTs (Assistant Language Teachers, people on JET pretty much) seemed to share. I'm happy with my students for working as hard as they did, and hope they are able to draw something, or many things, from this experience. I learned a lot too, though I still haven't sorted it all out yet.

In any case, I got a pretty good amount of Japanese practice since I was hanging out with the principal all day long as we went from school to the contest to a farewell dinner for some exchange program students from Washington. I'm also really freaking tired. I was one of the judges for the speech contest and that took way more out of me than I expected. I think I'm just going to go to bed as soon as I'm done writing this.

It was cool seeing the dorky 14-yr. olds from Sequim (small town), Washington give their performances (one was a cosplay [dressing up like anime or manga characters] skit) and say buy to their families with awkward handshakes and hugs, or really awesome full-on hugs! I was really impressed by their lack of embarassment and seemingly pure desire to just have fun and enjoy their time with their friends. I might do well to approach life a little more from this point of view.

Tomorrow's kindergarten day care.

Oh yeah, I made a song the other day. It was...really good. :)