Two months of torture of my students and me finally came to an end this afternoon! Today was the final of English speech contest in our school. For these three weeks before the contest, I had been tortured by these preparations for the speeches, and the students suffered no less than I. They were forced to use their limited vocabulary to write their own speech scripts. And when they handed in their scripts for me to revise, they had to face the fact that their scripts were not good enough to be presented as a speech, and so, they had to modify their contents again and again until they had almost lost their confidence. This work of writing the scripts had already taken them a large amount of time but this was just the first step. Then, when their scripts were finally done, they had to memorize the speech and practice it over and over. Besides all this, they had to prepare for the impromptu speech at the same time. Impromptu speech is usually the most feared by the contestants. Few students can feel at ease with this kind of speech, because it easily reveals students' English proficiency. "Practice makes perfect" can't be applied to this kind of speech. What they only can do is practice not being too nervous while doing the impromptu. And during the training, I didn't know what constructive suggestions I could give to my students in terms of impromptu speech, because I couldn't do that, either.
Anyway, everything is over now. I have also learned something from this experience of training my students for this contest. I know I still have to work hard to sharpen up my English; I still have to overcome my fear of speaking English; I still have to give myself some challenges once in a while. As my students like to quote most in their essays, "Life isn't a bed of roses." When one challenge is over, there will be others soon. I think I'd better start to prepare for next contests.
