Last night Joe led us through a mysterious, murky and magnificent Toastmasters meeting. Joe was our Toastmaster and his theme was Mystery! Our Table Topics leader CK, did a great job of making us think creatively and quickly with such topics as: if you could have one superpower which would it be?; if you had a million dollars, how would you spend it? if you could go back in history and meet anyone who would you want to meet? CK also gave us some murky descriptions of the questions, making it even more mysterious. Still it was a fun session.
Our Quotemaster was William, a guest from Shanghai. He share with us,
“Life is a long lesson in humility.”
Being humble, humility and humiliation have a lot in common. At Toastmasters we learn a lot about this lesson of humility.
We had 3 wonderful speakers: Yoly (CC3), Hong (CC1), and Sue Jiang (CC3). Now usually we always start with the less experienced speakers, but in this case Yoly went first, as she had to run to a mysterious rendezvous (actually she had to go to a birthday party).
CLUB ANNOUNCEMENTS:
- Area Competition – (Apr5th) Joe Deveto and Nancy Tang will be representing our club in the Prepared Speech competition and the Evaluation Competition respectively. If you can, please come out to support our great members as they compete against other clubs. (Location – to be determined, I believe it’s the Avic Hotel near Guo Mao),
- Shanghai Spring Conference is coming May 30 to June 1. Put it in your schedule. Start thinking about prices, tickets and hotel arrangements. Here is the site talking about tickets and prices. Shanghai Conference . You will want to buy tickets before April 15th to get the best deal. Early bird. So start planning it now. For more information about the conference, I’ve attached Amy’s original email.
To learn more about the speech content and for more details on the meeting please read below. Read more »
Today, I am too impatient to wait to tell all of you the enjoyments in table topic session on March 20, 2008. This time, our TTM Yoly asked us “If you don’t have something you ever had in your life, what’s your feeling and what do you do then?” An imaginative but cruel topic! Joe was the first challenger. In his 2 min speech, all of us appreciated the charm of body language. For poor Joe, who lost his hands, tried to make faces or kick his feet to express some of his meanings. The ridiculous actions helped his speech fill with laugh and instructiveness, but not sadness or emptiness. In the following part, Kitty lost her job, guest Xiaolu’s money was disappearing, Becky’s friends went away from her and so on. It was joyful to see the participants spread the wings of their imagination to overcome the difficulties. But what’s more important, their optimistic attitudes towards life conquered the audience. Read more »
“It felt a lot different giving a speech in a competition. It was more nerve racking than normal. But it was great.” Quote taken from our Prepared Speech competition champion Joe Deveto.
Tessa and Joe Deveto
Last meeting was packed with excitement as it was our Prepared Speeches Competition. It was lead by our confident TM/Chairperson Yoly. Our Chief judge was Liu Bing. This great team explained clearly and confidently the rules of the match and helped us have a great competition.
To find out more please read on…
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Last night we enjoyed a hopefully “catchy” idea, that reading is great, vital, lovely, and can even make ones heart calm. Our meeting was lead by our Toastmaster Becky. Her theme was Reading… Becky is passionate about reading and she inspired us to read more and to think about the reasons we read. Our Table Topics Master, Grace, followed the theme having us tell a story about certain reading related topics – like paper books versus electronic books. There were six well-read speakers: Joe, Susan, Allen, Jason Jiao, Liu Bing and Tessa.
Lydia shared an inspiring quote that she read (?) or heard about from her work.
Those people who do all the talking, but none of the hard work are cheaters.
Those people who do all the hard work, but none of the talking are fools.
You need to do the work and be able to communicate well to be effective.
I’m not sure the exact source, I think it was the head of her company who said this (Lydia?). I think you also need to listen well, which clearly, is something I can improve on.
We were fortunate to have three interesting and well prepared speeches. Daisy’s CC1. Tina gave her CC (?) and Tessa gave her CC6.
For more information on the speeches and the details of the meeting please read on.
CLUB ANNOUNCEMENTS:
- Next week, wed Mar12 is our prepared speeches competition. So if you are a speaker or have a role, especially Chief Judge, Judges, TM/Chairperson and speakers please make sure to arrive early 6:45pm so you can explain the rules and procedure to your team.
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Word of the day: Flowery (adj) It was a flowery meeting.
Quote: Never forget where you are from——-Said by Rwendy
Maybe affected by the word “flowery” brought by our wordsmith, the activity in this evening was very colorful and interesting. In the table topics section, our Table Topics Master Angela brought us a golden opportunity to tell tall tales. Rwendy became superman, who could dive into fires, or take food to hungry people; Allen took a mind reading machine invented by himself to date with his Miss. Dreamy; Becky found herself to be a mixed-blood, because of her grand mother, she got a special ability to fly at night……What fabulous imaginations!
In the prepared speech section, Allen Shen and Forrest Deng gave us wonderful speeches. Studied the Chinese history, Allen got his conclusion “If a woman wants to be a king, she must become the wife of a king first.” His evaluator Becky corrected his opinion “the woman can be the mother of a king”. Surely, the brilliant idea got high praise from all of us.
Matt gave us an educational speech, some helpful views may help you to prepare your speech next time—size up your audience and change the delivery of your speech depending on the size of the audience (20 listeners = speech, 40+ listeners = a performance, 100+ = The Show). For the bigger audiences you should pay attention to your gestures and make them bigger and think of yourself as a well-rehearsed actor. The most important hint is to practice, practice, practice and time yourself with a stopwatch before hand. This will help you to give better prepared speeches.
Finally, our VP Education Liu Bing announced, our club is going to hold our prepared speech competition on March 12, anyone who has passed CC6 has the chance to participate. So, everybody, don’t lose the good chance to enjoy it!
For more details of the meeting please read on…
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