What do you do when your agenda’s gone to the pack? You carry right on! You find people for missing roles, invent a Bard or two and cook-up an instant Educational! Congratulations Dave Y on hauling it all together tonight – you were exuberant!
And that was our word of the night, introduced in full-effect by our Grammarian Ade. “I know you all wanted to use it” retorted Ade in her closing address, but it seemed this word was a bit of a struggle for the group, well that is until Timer Sam used the word four times in one sentence!
Sergie’s Bard came from the book “In times of fading light” by Eugen Ruge. The particular passage from this cold war classic focused on the time when the Berlin Wall first came down, re-unifying Berlin after 28 years standing. Sergie’s reading came with an impressive introduction and background and evaluator Tim paid reference to his use of pauses, inflection and eye contact during this speech.
JP had the floor next with a phenomenal reading from Shane Koyczan titled “To this day“. This moving and intense poem began with a satirical account of mis-diagnosed bruises on a school-child, before it delved into the deep trauma and damage that bullying inflicts on children in schools. Powerful. JP did a great job of this reading, using the character and voice of the author, flowing with the rhyme and maintaining eye contact with his audience. Well done!
In a moment of Toastmasters inspiration, Dave Y delivered a fitting educational based on the Communications and Leadership tracks – “The building blocks of Toastmasters”. Dave explained in detail how the tracks work, including some very handy tricks for cross-crediting various projects of the two tracks. Then to wrap it all up, Dave revealed how beginning later this year, Toastmasters International will be rolling out a completely re-vamped achievement system in order to simplify the current. Thank you Dave for taking the opportunity to present this information. For those who remember Dave’s reference to the “Daffodil Effect”, check out this link.
David K’s tabletopics had a more serious bent to them tonight, with a great line-up of thought-proving topics ranging from whether people can really change, whether you can truly achieve more than you believe and the age-old question of whether fools and their money are easily parted. Well done David on picking this more traditional approach and congratulations to Tim, Ade & JP for giving it a go.
See you all next time!