Speech Day

The 9th was National Sports Day. Every year there's an official National Sports Meet, and it changes prefectures every year. Dozens of sports are featured, so almost every city [think county] gets one. Wadayama's sport was handball. But instead of watching, I was off at...

The Senior High School English Speech Contest! All the SHSs in Tajima sent at least one student to compete. Matsuda, my favorite JTE, was in charge this year, so we'd been practicing since August. While English ability seems like the most important thing, you actually want to choose someone with performing ability. As in, someone who doesn't shy away from attention. Luckily, we had no troubles finding such a student. Shiho is incredibly loud, not shy at all, and is fairly decent at English. Um, well, at writing, reading, and understanding English. Shiho has an incredibly lazy tongue. See, Japanese sounds don't require nearly as much tongue/lip movement as English. Seriously, half the old guys here just mumble, yet everyone understands them easily.

Since the Speech Contest winner last year had some god-awful pronunciation, we figured we were ok. Shiho was lively, she had a good amount of gestures [gestures were HUGE last year], and her speech wasn't about her dream or interaction with a foreigner [these get done to death]. Instead, her speech was about her broken leg. Namely, how helpful friends and family were, and that despite the frustrations, she was thankful to realize how many kind people were in her life. Not the most important speech topic, but we thought it was fairly interesting.

Since the speech contest fell on a national holiday, many ALTs didn't attend. I was told that I wouldn't get a replacement holiday, so I wasn't required to go. Come on! I've been working on this since August-- there was no way I wouldn't show!

Well, sad to say, Shiho didn't win. This year the judges were more persnickety about pronunciation. And the Japanese love of mediocrity- Oops! I meant to say middle ground- gave 1st place to a speech about a girl's dream to be... a flight attendant.