End of Fall Contest Sets High Expectations for Spring
The Fall 2020 Speech Contest was special. Our two FSTM contestants, Jeanne Resen in Humor and Karen Alexander in Evaluation, represented us very well. Jeanne is a humorist extraordinaire. She'd set the bar high back in the late summer with her stage shenanigans in a Pathways speech. She'd incorporated feedback and came back with an even more entertaining speech. Jeanne continued to refine and never gave a revision by rote; it always seemed fresh and aglow with new ways to engage laughter. Her main two stories were wonderfully told. Her opening, too, was inviting and funny. Her ending was easily the most dramatic and laugh-inducing of any I've ever seen (and I've seen lots of humorous contest speeches over the past seven years). One difficulty with Zoom is that there is no laugh meter for the audience. A judge cannot truly measure the speech's fullest rating in two important areas: audience response and effectiveness. A judge is subject to influence only