Today I had agreed to be a judge for a speaking English competition. I had to get the subway at 10am to Wukesong, the other side of the city which took me an hour and 45 minutes to get to. I met the other 9 judges and David from TTC and we then drove to the school that it was held at. We were given criteria of how to judge the contestants (voice, body language, grammar, eye contact) and were split into pairs. I was judging the seniors (16 years old) and I was with another guy from TTC called James and with us we had a Chinese University student graduating in English with us.
It was a bit of a shambles as we hadn’t really been told what to do or what the contestants would be doing and it appeared that the contestants hadn’t been told what to do either. We were told under no circumstances were we to laugh when the contestant was in the room, but for some of them it was really hard not to! The contestants had 3 minutes to give an introduction and to then do a talent show and we had all sorts, from singing Westlife to readings, rapping and even break dancing. It was good fun and the Chinese students English was really good so we had fun with him too, his name was Mike and he laughed at every contestant, he got the giggles so much that he was constantly having to leave the room! This made me and James want to laugh but I felt bad for the contestants as they could see and hear him laughing at them, it must of put some of them off! We had to mark the contestants out of 5 and it was quite hard sometimes as some of them had a really bad introduction but their talent was really good, or vice versa. There was one girl who had a really good introduction and then said she was going to sing for us and had we heard of “Dohrayme”? James and I looked at each other, “Dohrayme”? No we hadn’t heard of that! The girl put her headphones in so she could hear the music from her Ipod and sang us Doh Ray Me from the sound of music! She was awful though as she didn’t know the words and kept only singing the bit she knew so she didn’t get a good score! There was also a guy who came in and kept talking about his passion for “bricking” which we had no idea what he was talking about, then he said he was going to “brick” for us, he was talking about break dancing! He was actually really good though and was spinning on his head and everything.
The second round was the contestants were given a picture before they came into the judging room that they had been given 1 minute to prepare for then they had to speak for 2 minutes about that picture. Each round we were to mark them out of 5.
We were there until 6pm and then we were driven back to Wukesong subway station where I got the subway to Sanlitun to meet up with Doreenda and Kristen, then we got a taxi to a bar where 3 of the teachers are part of a band and everyone had gone to see them play. The food was ok but it was quite expensive and I had had enough by 11pm and came home.
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