You might be interested to know that the meeting of Sept 20th is a special meeting not like our usual weekly meetings. We will be holding a club contest (i.e. humorous speech contests and evaluation contests).

Although it won’t be in the standard weekly meeting format, it’s still quite interesting to check out. For example, this is how the evaluation contest usually unfolds:

There will be a target speaker (i.e. someone presents a speech, and this person has been selected secretly beforehand to prepare a target speech to give for the purposes of the contest). All of the audience will get to hear and appreciate the speech. The evaluators will all be evaluating the same speech.

Then the contestants (the evaluators) will be asked to leave the room and take a few minutes to prepare their evaluation notes.

The Sergeant-at-Arms then collects all the notes, which will be handed back to each evaluator as he/she comes back into the room to present his evaluation. (The order of evaluation will have been been previously determined by drawing straws.)

The each evaluator has a chance to give an evaluation, making sure to provide constructive feedback to the target speaker and making sure to speak within the allotted time.

Finally, what makes it quite interesting for the audience members is that we get to have a sense of the different evaluation styles and we notice what the evaluators pick out in common as well as any special points that each individual evaluator may have noticed that the other evaluators have not mentioned. Finally, we compare to what we would have said ourselves had we been asked to evaluate the target speaker. This is a great learning experience because it allows us to, in a sort of way, “learn through osmosis”.

Here is the program for the evening of September 20.  Good luck to all the contestants!