Speech Contest

About three weeks ago, the city held a Jr. High speech contest for all of the schools in the city. So, for the whole summer prior to us getting here, all of the other English teachers have been preparing their students for this contest. I only helped two students each with only a few sessions a piece, so I didn’t really help them as much as I wanted.

At the contest I realized how intense it really was. There were about 60 speeches with half doing recitation and the other half original speeches. Now the recitation was the painful part. I heard two stories about 8 times each.

“Freddy the Leaf,” a story about life and death, written in an English Textbook. The same textbook that I use to teach the kids. The next story is called “A Mother’s Lullaby” about a tree…which lives in Hiroshima. In this story, it starts out with a mother and child playing by a tree. Then the tree flashes back to when the atomic bomb hit. Two children came to the tree after the blast. The little boy kept crying for his mother, but the young girl kept saying “Mother’s here, stop crying” and started singing a lullaby. The boy stopped crying and died, but the girl kept singing. “Morning came and the sun rose, but the girl never moved again.”…AWKWARD. Not only because it was repeated 8 times, but because I had to read it to my classes. But that’s another story.