Acrobatics... - regular meeting 24th September

Dear all

One of our smaller meetings this year. But nevertheless full of energy, fun, and learning!

Let me remind you first about the announcements we made.

Base Camp Outage

There will be a Base Camp outage beginning on October 9, 2024, that is expected to last through October 25, 2024.

If you’re working on a project you may want to reference in that time frame, we recommend you download the project PDF by using the Print My Project link on the Your Evaluation page of your project. Plan to download any needed materials or wrap up any loose ends before Base Camp is inaccessible.
Completion certificates – While progress and credit will be transferred to the new system, certificates will not. If you would like copies of certificates you have earned, download and save them.
Additionally, to ensure your education progress is up-to-date and accurate when you log into the new system, ask your club officer to approve any pending Level completions and submit them on Club Central before October 9.

Contests

International Speech Contest will be held on 14 January 2025. All members, who have completed Level 2 are eligible to compete in this contest.
Table Topics and Evaluation Contests will be held on 11 February 2025. All members are eligible to compete it these contests.
The District will also hold an Online speech contest this year. We’ll figure out the details in due course and arrange a contest evening for this event.

Judging Workshop

Due to disruption caused by Covid, clubs, areas, divisions, and districts turned to online / hybrid judging models. The downside of this is that judging experience in clubs suffered. Roland and I will present a judging workshop in November to prepare our members for judging contests at the club and beyond. I hope to fill all judging slots from within our club, to give our members the necessary experience to also be able to judge outside the club in future. Date will be announced in next few days.

Grammarian Pietro explaining the word of the day

Reflections on our meeting

Toastmaster of the Evening, Joran conducted the meeting. He introduced each participant with an intro reflective of the theme of the evening: acrobatic. And each participant had their own interesting take on the question he posed them.

We listened to three excellent speeches. Gabriel’s ‘My wife ate the whole jar of Nutella’, dealing with don’t believe everything you hear. Anna spoke about her experiences as both a mentee and mentor in ‘Unexpected Learnings’. And, finally, Ishan proposed that God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence is being challenged in ‘God has competition’. Our three evaluators, Nicola, Tatyana, and Etienne, provided constructive and useful feedback to our speakers. Topicsmaster, Roberta, challenged us with acrobatic themed topics, resulting in some interesting and humorous presentations.

Timekeeper, Zsolt, Ah-counter, Samira, and Grammarian, Pietro all did great jobs to keep us on time, and have us watch our ums, ahs, and p’s and q’s. In perhaps a first for the club, General Evaluator, Fereshteh, had opportunity to criticise herself. Having forgotten to turn her phone on silent, it started ringing midway through Gabriel’s speech… Gabriel, handled it like a pro. A reminder perhaps to all to ensure that phones are either switched off or in silent mode when we have speakers on stage.