Kyle's World

Every year, in October, all junior high schools in the former Shimomashiki Gun, hold their English Recitation Contest. For me, it's a huge event, perhaps the biggest in the school calendar. It's bigger than the Sports and Cultural festivals even. I think this is because I have more responsibility than anywhere else since I'm the coach. I get to pick the students, and the programs of the text that they will recite. And mostly, I would practice with them, mornings, lunchtimes, after school.

There are 12 junior high schools in my Gun, all competing for 6 prizes: 3 bronze prizes, 2 silvers and a gold. If you get the gold prize, you get to compete in the Kumamoto English recitation contest against the other winning schools.

The contest this year was held on Friday. Since this was to be my third and last English Recitation contest, I felt that all students, especially the grade 2's (grade 8 back home), were really giving their all for a shot at the Kumamoto competition. This year we started practicing like 3 months ago, about the start of the summer vacation. I love having support from the other English teachers, Mr Izuno or Mr Sudo, but they were often too busy to attend the practices, so I was often left alone to coach the students and help them improve before the contest. Try doing that when the kids go off and play, don't really listen to you, and when your words of advice just aren't enough when spoken in Japanese.

Still we chugged along. There were certainly rough stretches, like morning practices from 7:30AM and so on. Gradually the students improved. Call it "blinded by the pride of your school" if you want, but I really felt we were great this year. We were certainly in a good position to improve upon last year's showing when the grade 1's and 2's won a bronze prize. 2 girls on the grade 2 team were members of the grade 1 team last year.

As far as predictions and/or expectations go, I thought the grade 1's might grab a bronze, but I wasn't sure since it's always so wide open with the grade 1's. There's not much to distinguish them from the other competitors. I thought the grade 2's would grab the silver if not the gold. They were so sure of themselves, so full of confidence that I went with it. Also the grade 2 ace-in-the-hole spoke a very long, important part of the text last. As for the grade 3's, I unfortunately didn't think they would get anything. I kept thinking their pronounciation was off in places during practice. Also the girl I chose has a soft voice, I wasn't sure it would reach the judging table.

The grade 1's got a raw deal as far as their order of presentation was concerned- they got the lead off slot. Since the order is grade 1's, 2's then 3's, my grade 1's presented right after the opening ceremony. Not that they weren't already nervous enough. Their presentation was flawless, as far as it going the way we'd been practicing. After looking at the other 11 schools, I thought we were definitely in the top 6 so that meant a getting a prize.

The grade 2's had a bad placement too, being the last grade 2 team to present. Going last is good in the sense that you can see how good the other teams have presented (although I guess that's bad too since you might start to think too much), but it's bad in the sense that, at least as far as I'm concerned, the judges have basically already finalized the best 6 teams by the time they get to see the twelfth team. But the presentation went really well, I thought they'd nailed the performance and there was a strong chance they'd get a shiny colour prize. Bronze isn't that shiny after all.