TBSHS Public Speaking Teams Come Close

As usual, the school entered two teams in each section of the local Rotary Club’s “Youth Speaks” competition. The Senior section, for students in Years 10 to 13, also featured two trios from our hosts, Bishop’s Stortford College and one from the Herts & Essex High School. The TBSHS Year 10 team, expertly coached by Mr Patterson, was the fourth to perform. As Chairman, Josh got their presentation off to a confident start, introducing the subject “Do you feel lucky?” and informing the audience that main speaker Noah is both intelligent and lucky, and the vote of thanks would be given by Felix, whose name means ‘lucky’.

Year 10 team; (l to r) Felix, Joshua, Noah

Noah’s extremely well-structured speech reflected a great deal of research, covering ‘life luck’ (being born in the right place at the right time) and ‘social luck’ (derived from relationships with people whom you meet). He made very good use of statistics to illustrate his arguments and spoke very convincingly and knowledgeably. The team’s accomplished performance was rounded off by a very good vote of thanks from its ‘resident mathematical genius’ Felix.

Next up was our team of Year 12 students, two of whom only joined the school in September and were making their public speaking debuts. One of them, Fletcher, proved to be a welcoming Chair who made telling use of humour to engage with his listeners. Experienced speaker Fin produced an excellent speech about the pursuit of happiness. Making very good use of his vocal talents, he argued that John Stuart Mill was correct to state that happiness is not achieved by making it one’s goal, but by caring about higher aims and caring for people other than ourselves. He also described various psychological studies that supported his arguments. Ada then rightly praised Fin’s impressive speech in a very well measured vote of thanks, pointing out that this must be the first time that Aristotle and the comedian Ken Dodd had been mentioned in the same Youth Speaks presentation.

 Year 12 team; (l to r) Fin, Fletcher, Ada

I felt that both our teams were in with a chance of winning. After lengthy deliberations, the judges praised the high overall standard of the competition and awarded the victory, by a very narrow margin, to the team from Herts and Essex, who had told us “The Truth about Lying”.

A week later, we returned to the College for the Intermediate Section (Years 7 to 9), contested by seven teams, including representatives from St Mary’s Catholic Secondary School and Hockerill Anglo-European College. This time the teams from TBSHS were the first two to take the floor. Leading the way was the Year 9 team, mentored by Mr Wagstaff. Chairman Stan, who had spoken last year, produced a well-rounded performance, explaining that their title “Hue do you think you are?” referred to the significance of different colours and cleverly described the personalities of his team mates in these terms. Main speaker Leo, belying the fact that this was his first foray into interschool competition, spoke extremely persuasively, delivering a great range of colour-related facts and criticising the notion of ‘blue for a boy, pink for a girl’. Finlay drew on his previous Youth Speaks experience to give a lively speech, thanking Leo for entertaining and informing his audience.

Year 9 team; (l to r) Felix (reserve), Finlay, Leo, Stan

All three students in our Year 8 team were new to public speaking. Indeed, two of them had been recruited only days before the competition when original team members had fallen ill, which meant that they had to rely on notes more than would usually be the case. Nevertheless, substitute Chair Alex made a good job of introducing the topic “The Forgotten Sense”, engaging the audience’s attention and tantalising them by refusing to reveal which of the five human senses it was. Main speaker Tom gave a superb performance, explaining the importance of the sense of smell, lamenting the modern ideal of odourless environments and introducing his listeners to the process of smell training. He made excellent use of gesture, vocal variation and timing. Only three days after being recruited, Oscar produced a pleasing Vote of Thanks, mixing telling references to Tom’s words with observations about his own sense of smell.

Year 8 team; (l to r) Tom, Oscar, Alex

A team from Herts and Essex High School that considered “What is Success?” was clearly the best of the night and was duly declared the winners, with TBSHS Year 8 placed second.

Although we did not win either of the trophies this year, I was pleased with the levels of performance achieved by all our teams, who had given up a lot of their time to research and practise their speeches. Thanks must also go to their families and fellow students, who turned out in large numbers to support them

A.D.Fraser