March Madness

Hi, You know it's going to be hard blogging when you write and delete the word Hi, three times before you finally go with it.


I went to see Jeff Butler, my nephew, compete in the Forensics version of March Madness. Forensics, is competitive speech. The contestants give short speeches in a classroom, one following the other. There are two categories of speeches-sales and informational. The categories are not mixed. So we watched about six informational speeches. A judge and a timekeeper are the officials. There are no fouls called or penalties. The results are posted all at once about an hour after the competition then you see who makes it into the next round.





There are rules to be followed by the contestants and part of the fun is trying to infer the rules based on what you see in the speeches. Everyone had three easels with poster-board display-boards with graphics. It seems at least one of these had magnetic elements to be added or removed. All contestants were well dressed and groomed. Jeff's topic was crying. What is it? Why does it happen? How is it perceived in society? He did a great job and moved on to the semi-finals. There were two speeches on Make-up. Interesting to compare the two. One was about Saturday Night Live. Another was on Smokey the Bear. The girl who was speaking about cheese was quite engaging, but she lost points(I assume) for forgetting part of her speech.



It's nice to see all these kids. They are all mingling, talking, eating lunch, occasionally chasing each other(regressing?). When the results were posted one of Robin's proteges had advanced and I could see how great she felt about herself. That was nice.



This is good training and experience for these kids like acting is. I didn't have any say in who was best but, no offense Jeff, I liked the girl with the big boobs.

Gotta go, Gabe is coming "home" and we must clean. I really do appreciate your stopping by.