Smarter than a brain pie...?

In Japan there is such a thing as the speech contest. As if school itself wasn't stressful enough. To my knowledge I don’t think we do speech contests in the UK, although I vaguely remember being involved in a debate contest held by a rotary club when I was in high school. The All Toyama High School Speech Contest 2006 was held last Sunday – for some a nerve-wracking hell of excitement, for other an annoying intrusion into my, er, their weekend. One silver lining for the ALTs is that after two painful months of coaching students, mainly girls, in the subtleties of speechifying the day had finally arrived when we would be relieved of our burdens and set free back into our world of free-wheelin’ English speakin’. No longer will we be subjected to the butchering of ‘She Walks in Beauty’ by Lord Byron. No more will ‘The Great Gatsby’ be reduced three times a week merely to ‘Gatsby.’ No more will my student’s impressions of Stephen Hawking stalk my dreams.

More of a celebration will be when we will get the chance to return to our schools, trophy-less, to be able to say to our JTEs in a loud clear voice “If you hadn’t waltzed in and interfered on the last day of practice we would all be dancing right now.” Because we would. A common theme of the contest, so I hear from my fellow ALTs is that for weeks the ALTs trained and coached the students to speak near comprehensible English only to have the JTE appear for the final session and change everything:

JTE: ...Lots of Japanese that only Geoff can't understand...
Student: ...More Japanese...Geoff-sensei...Japanese Japanese
Geoff: Sumimasen? What?
JTE: Geoff-sensei, I think maybe she does not have to raise the inflection at the end of that sentence.
Geoff: But it is a question
JTE: No, the question was before
Geoff: It’s a multipart question that’s quite long. You have to raise the inflection at the end to make sure the audience knows that you are still posing the question.
JTE: Maybe (Japanese for “no”)
Geoff: Uhh, OK.
JTE: ...Japanese Japanese Japanese... annger, not anger
Geoff: What? There’s a ‘g’ in anger, ang-guh! Oh, whatever…..

And the session continued with the JTE changing everything, even adding ridiculous gestures worthy of the Thunderbirds puppets. I started to doodle on my pad…

Come Sunday I turned up to watch my four girls. Not only had the JTEs changed the pronunciations but they also thought it best to turn the speech into a vaudeville act. Yuka, a first-grader, threw her arms up in the air at the slightest words – like ‘and’ and ‘it’.

The eventual winners of the contest turned out to be half-Brazilian Super-English School students with English-speaking parents. I saw one of their performances, and performance it was – I could’ve taken some bread and made sandwiches with all that ham flying around…