That "Yellow minute"

I went to Temasek Poly for the Toastmasters Chapter meeting yesterday, and I would never forget this experience.

With a dream to be an educator in the future, I always look at things from an educator's perspective. And for those teenagers, I feel that the education should be something specially designed for them.

Take the example of pause fillers. In Toastmasters, the Ah-counter counts the pause fillers such as em, er, ah ect for each speaker, reasons being that pause fillers harm the fluency of the speech, and can affect the credibility of the speakers if there are too many. In SMU Toastmasters, we have good examples of people who had over 100 pause fillers during a single meeting, and managed to overcome them in just a few meetings' time. In Temasek Poly, the members are still so young. Even though they are charged by 10cents per pause filler, they can't feel the "pain", and they keep saying the pause fillers. How to convey the message to them?

I remember an article posted on Nathaniel's blog, which was his president's opening address when he was serving as the President of Tampines Changkat Toastmasters Club. In that speech, he shared about his visions in life, and i feel that, that speech would be the right talk for Temasek Poly Toastmasters.

In Temasek Poly Toastmasters, the atmosphere is great; everyone laughs, everyone can relax throughout the whole chapter meeting. That's fantasic, which is something that not every Toastmasters club can achieve! In the mean time, points to ponder, how can they improve, how can they realise that they can be better speakers if they could put in more efforts?

All those teenagers are nice and extremly polite people; they are so young and so energtic. Yet, something is lacking, MOTIVATION & INSPIRATION! People are motivated to become better speakers when they really see someone who can motivate them; people are inspired to learn when they actually meet someone who can inspire them to learn the great things they are capable to learn as long as they are determined to do so.

As a project evaluator, I'm not that good enough to give an evaluation to inspire all of them, because English is not my first language, and sometimes, I still have difficulties organising my thoughts fluently. However, I'm trying to improve all the time; I'm putting my efforts to do a better job. Maybe, some day, I would be able to talk like John, like Nathaniel, like Gurion. And in Temasek Poly Toastmasters, those are the people they need. They need thos people to inspire them, to show them the great value of Toastmaters. They need to experience a really fun yet beneficial meeting, and they need to meet experienced and motivitional speakers! And then, they can learn that, Toastmasters is not only about fun, the fun in speeches, but also about knowledge, about education, about improvement!

Still, the memory about the yellow minute will last for a long time!

TME: Now, let's have the timer to read out the timing sequence.
Timer: At 8th minute, the green card will be shown;
(Disrupted by the audience, because he had some pause fillers, and the grammar was wrong in a way I couldn't really recall)
OK! At yellow minute...(BOOMZ! Laughters from the audience filled the room!)
And at 10th minute, you will get a red card.
(The language evaluator literally took the red card at the 10th minute! HAHA! Well done!)