Sept 18 - Fall Club Contest 2017

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This week we had a special kind of meeting: our fall speech contest! The theme was "Around the World", so our contest master got us in the mood by talking about the daft punk song of the same name and talking about how international our club membership is.

We started with the evaluations portion of the contest. Our guest speaker, Heidi, gave a very entertaining speech about how stubbornness has played a role throughout her life. Each contestant had to give a spoken evaluation of her speech, similar to the evaluations portion of our usual meetings. Although evaluations can feel a little bit formulaic, Eric, Uthara, and Ven each brought their own speaking style to the evaluations, and commented on the things they enjoyed about Heidi's speech and some improvements for her future speeches.

Our second competition was the humorous speech contest. The two speakers in this contest, Eric and Ven, did double duty by participating in both the evaluation and humorous contests. Eric's speech fit well with the theme in that it was about culture shock. He talked about the ways in which his hometown is drastically different from American culture, like that they only have 3 colors. In Ven's speech, we learned that he apparently doesn't float. He told us a story about how he was not able to water ski, and how that inspired him to get healthier.

Unlike our usual meetings, we had official judges vote for the winners of each contest. So, at the end of the meeting, we got to hear the results. Ven won first place for the evaluation contest, and Eric won first place in the humorous speech competition. These two will go on to represent Preston Persuaders and compete with Toastmasters from other clubs at our area contest. Perhaps these two will even make it all the way to the district-wide competition. Good luck Eric and Ven!

Sept 11, 2017

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We had another exciting, educational and enriching meeting this Monday. Faruq opened the meeting leading the recital of our Toastmasters club mission, “We provide a supportive and positive learning experience in which members are empowered to develop communication and leadership skills, resulting in greater self-confidence and personal growth.” This is a ritual that is done every week, and is always a reminder of the reason we get together each Monday evening.

Aug 28th, 2017

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Each meeting held by Preston Persuaders Toastmasters club (PPTM) is unique and has a distinctive “flavor”. Last Monday’s meeting was run with the timely precision that the PPTM club is famous for. The General evaluator for the day Ravi Meganathan stepped up to the podium one minute shy of the time that the program stipulated.