On the 12th of
December 2019, AIA Toastmasters Club and Tampines Changkat Toastmasters Club
held a joint meeting. I served as
Project Evaluator. Evaluating one speech
well requires attention. Evaluating an
entire meeting, across two clubs, with the full spread of speakers, timers, and
table topics on display, requires a different order of discipline entirely.
The Appointment
Holders
Liang Ye served as
Sergeant-at-Arms. Linda Lee served as
Toastmaster of the Day. Angela Lansbury
and Amina Boumediene served as Timers. Tiffany
Choo served as Ah Counter. Iris Lim
served as Table Topics Master. Hyder Taufik
served as Language Evaluator. Joy Chow
served as Creative Director. Eric Tan, DTM,
served as Photographer. Linda Lee, Zhuo
Shu Zhen, DTM, and Kin Ng, DTM, facilitated a special song and
dance segment, a genuinely welcome departure from the standard meeting format.
The Speeches
Loh Hao Yi delivered a
humorous speech built around the different iterations of windows, assembled as
a last-minute replacement. This detail
matters more than a passing mention suggests.
A speaker forced to construct material under genuine time pressure has
no room for the padding that over-rehearsed speeches often carry. What arrives instead is closer to the speaker's
actual instinct for structure and timing, which is why the result
impressed as much as it did.
Sayed Hamzah Alhabshe spoke
about his experience under a bad mentor, a subject with more universal
application than most audiences care to admit.
Technical competence and the ability to transfer that competence to another
person are not the same skill, and plenty of highly capable professionals never
develop the second one. He addressed
that gap directly, and walked the room through the difficult process of
rebuilding confidence after institutional knowledge was withheld rather than
shared.
Cindy Gan spoke on her charity
project, framed as a journey from mission impossible to mission possible,
centred on the genuinely difficult task of managing a range of character
archetypes toward a shared outcome.
Anyone who has attempted to coordinate volunteers with conflicting
temperaments toward a single deadline will recognise exactly how much
diplomatic labour that framing understates.
The Evaluators
Anand Ariyarathinam, DTM,
Kin Ng, DTM, and I served as the evaluation panel. Evaluation is the most undervalued discipline
in the entire Toastmasters framework.
Delivering a speech well earns applause.
Telling a speaker, precisely and constructively, what worked and what
did not, in front of the room, without either flattery or cruelty, is a
considerably harder skill to execute cleanly, and one that improves every
subsequent speech the evaluated speaker gives.
The Results
Best Speaker went to Cindy Gan. Best Evaluator went to Kin Ng, DTM. Best Table Topics Speaker went to Diane
Lin. A joint meeting between two clubs
is not simply two audiences sharing a room.
It is a genuine test of whether a club's standards travel, and on this
occasion, they clearly did.
Terence Nunis, DTM
| Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters |
Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters
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