Last Friday and Saturday another debate tournament took place at Flower Mound High School and I presented my informative speech for the first time. Besides debate, the «debate» class also offers speech events. There’s interp events, oratory, impromptu and informative. Every student in debate has to compete in a speech competition at least once a year and informative speech sounded the best to me.
For speech events, we have a coach, Vaughn, who graduated a few years ago from Wylie High School and now teaches students how pick topics, cut speeches and present the pieces. About 2 weeks ago I had signed up for the tournament at Flower Mound, or how we call it, Flomo. I hadn’t had a piece at all, but I really wanted to go to that specific tournament, since it was a 2 day tournament and the last before natquals (national qualifications). So after school, with the help of Vaughn, I had decided to do an informative speech about studying abroad and the coming weekend I would spend day and night, finishing my 10 minute speech, memorizing it and creating the visuals (boards).
So on Friday before lunch, we left Wylie High School early and went to the tournament. We had a typical American school bus driving us to our destination and on the way there, we stopped for a quick lunch. Me and Deborah, who has helped me soooo much with my info, went to Chick fil a, my favorite fast food chain in the US. After eating, we spent another 2 hours in the bus. We actually had a great time; we talked about music, hobbies and goat yoga (yes, yoga with goats). After about one and a half hours, we finally arrived at Flomo and gathered in the cafeteria. My round started at 9 pm, so I had about 6 hours left before it was my turn. I was really glad about that, since I hadn‘t had it fully memorized and it gave me a few hours to do so. I mostly sat in the cafeteria and practiced, taking little breaks talking to others tell them to „break a leg“ before they went to their rounds.
The time actually passed really quickly and I started heading to my room. Thank god that Deborah had her round at the same time in the room right next to me, so we could wait together, and that helped me a lot to calm down.
I was last speaker in my round. This means I presented my info as the last of 6 people competing in the room. The first speaker was a girl talking about vaccinations. She had a voice that reminded me of a broadcaster, which really intimidated me, but she was very nice and her title „let‘s do shots“ made me like her even move 😉 The next speaker was a Chinese girl informing us about learning Mandarin. She was really good and at that point I got even more scared. Third was another Asian, talking about automation in jobs, who was ALSO really GOOD. So after the third speaker I knew I was doomed because I was expected to make third place in that room, but the three first speakers were all clearly better. But it got better, since speaker 4 was a filler and didn‘t have a fully speech, and speaker 5 had a speech that was too short to place. I was speaker 6 and it was the first time I actually performed my speech in front of people other than my friends. I accidentally skipped a part of the speech, but I think the judge didn‘t realize since she was a so-called „mom-judge“, meaning a random mom judging the speeches because the tournament didn‘t have enough experienced judges. After I finished I saw that Deborah was right in front of my door. Her round had ended sooner and she was watching me through the little window in the door. She helped me carry the stand and the boards and told me that we only had one round today and that the next round would be on Saturday. I was pretty happy with my first round, but definitely wanted to do better the next day.
After all the kids from my school were out of their rounds, we gathered outside to find our bus. As always, one girl was missing and we spent another 30 minutes on looking for her. After finally getting everybody on the bus, we drove back to Wylie High School, where my host dad picked me up. I got home at around midnight, so I went straight to bed to have energy for the second part of the tournament on Saturday.
The next morning, we left Wylie High School at 7 am and went back to the tournament. My second INFO round started at 9 am already, so after arriving at Flomo, I had to find the room immediately. This time, I was third speaker. When the judge unlocked to the room, I directly saw that she was a college student, which was good news for me. My speech contains a swear word, so depending on the judge I should skip that part, but a college student is typically more open to that and will not subtract points for that. The first speaker was the Chinese girl again, the one that was already in my first round. So I knew that she would beat me, but the other speakers weren‘t as much competition. There was a guy doing his INFO about accents, which I thought was really interesting. He was British in my opinion very likable. There was another girl talking about manspreading, which I personally thought was a very unnecessary topic and I really didn‘t like her performance. Some guy talked about gentrification and another one about the roman empire. My speech went a loooooooot better than the last one and I felt really accomplished afterwards.
I was done by the time it was 10 am, so I had a lot of time to spend at that school before we would go home. I went back to the cafeteria and sat down at our table. After a while we got our ballots back, which showed how the judge voted in each round. In Friday‘s round I got 4th, as expected. In Saturday‘s round on the other hand, I got third. It made me really happy and the other speech kids said that the judge of this round was very experienced and gave me some great tips on the ballots. So obviously, the Asian girl beat me again, but what made me kinda upset was that the girl talking about manspreading had also beat me…..
I didn‘t have anything to do the rest of the day, since I didn‘t break (being first or second in a round and getting to semi-finals). So I went to watch a round of HI = humorous interpretation. It‘s a speech event where the participants act out a funny sketch, lasting 10 minutes. When I entered the room and saw all the people doing that event I saw two of them that I thought looked like funny people, and as I watched all the performances, I was exactly right. The two people I had expected to be funny were the only ones having a good piece and presenting it in a funny way. One of them were about a guy bringing sperm to school after the teacher had asked the students to bring a living organism for biology class. The other funny sketch was about a Russian teacher and the girl doing that sketch was spot-on with her accent.
After that, I met up with Michelle, Christie, Madison etc from the debate team and we spent some time on the couches they have at the school. Flower Mound is a really rich school, so the campus was awesome! We met some people from other schools, one of them Conner, who quite caught Madison‘s eye 😂. So later when Deborah, who as always, had made it to finals had her round, I went to watch it for support and also so I wouldn‘t have to witness Madison making a move on that debate guy, haha.
Deborah won the finals and everybody was so happy for her. On our way back to Wylie, note it was already 10pm, most of us took a nap and decided where to go for team dinner. After every tournament we go to a fast food restaurant and have dinner together. We decided to go to Panda Express. Once we arrived at Wylie High School, everybody was looking for a ride to the location, so my host dad agreed to drive 3 other girls to Panda Express also. Team dinner was pretty torpor, many left early and the remaining people were really tired. To top it off, the food wasn‘t that good in my opinion. But at the end of the day, this tournament was a really good experience and I‘m glad I participated.