Happy Songyuan English Speaking Contest

My school has partnered with the government of Songyuan and a local tv station to hold the first Happy Songyuan English Speaking Contest. The contest will run for about three months and is open to Chinese of all ages, from primary school up through adults, separated in age based brackets. We'd all heard rumblings about the contest at school, but no one really gave us any details, until the first round of the contest began on Monday. And turns out us foreign teachers are all judges.

The contest sounded like a really cool idea at first to promote social growth and English speaking/awareness in Songyuan. Upon further consideration, it's totally just a way for my school to recruit more students and make more money, but props to my school owner for having the connections and wherewithal to pull it off. The first round has around 6,000 contestants from what I've heard. Each contestant will receive a follow up call from my school trying to enroll them based on judge comments (so comments from the foreign teachers at my school).

We actually had to bring in some teachers from a nearby city that work for a friend of my school's owner to judge the first round because there are so many contestants; the other teachers are essentially on loan to us. We also brought my replacement in Tianjin and another teacher from out there in to help judge as well.

The materials for the contest, including the signup sheets, have photos and bios of some of us teachers I was surprised to find. I can't read my bio and haven't had the whole thing translated, but someone told me it mentions that I was the head of the school in Tianjin. Helllloooooo resume builder, lol! Oh, and they made us all business cards, with just our first names, and none of our contact information, just the school's.

On Monday, we had to be at school at 6am to take a one and a half hour bus ride to the location of one of the first rounds of judging on the outskirts of Songyuan. There will be three rounds of the contest, each about a months long.

For judging, they put each foreign teacher/judge in a classroom with a Chinese tabulator. Contestants come in one by one, the tabulator asks their Chinese name, matches to their registration forms and cards (complete with photos), and asks if they are ready. Then they give their speech. For the first round each contestant is supposed to have written a five minute speech about basically anything (topic is "My..."). After the speech, we ask them a few questions. We judge based on grammar, pronunciation, fluency, accuracy and stage presence and then give comments. They are not penalized for being under time. No one has come close to going over yet.

The first day of round one judging, we had mostly middle schoolers from a rural area of Songyuan, and the speeches were just discouraging. In total I think we judged about 900 students that day, and there were two speeches that we heard over and over again, almost verbatim.

"My family. We are a happy family. There are three people in my family. My mother, my father and me. My mother is a teacher. She is a very good teacher. My father is a doctor. He is very busy. I am a student..." etc.

"My friend. I have a friend named _______. She is very cute. She has long, straight, black hair. She has big eyes, a small nose and a small mouth. She likes the sing and dance..." etc.

Of course there were variations and some standout students, but for the most part, they all read almost the exact same speech and has slim to zero idea what they were saying. We would ask questions like, "What does your mother teach?" and get, "Yes" as an answer. For some of us, the Chinese teachers from the school would stand in the room and it became obvious that they were coaching the students on what question we might ask and telling them how to respond. Ugh.

There was a reporter from the tv station at the first day of judging and she interviewed me, so I might be on the Chinese news (yay CCTV!). She asked how students in that area were performing and I felt bad being honest, but they told me to, so I tried to put a positive spin on it and say that many students needed a lot of work but there were a few excellent contestants.

I didn't take part in the second day of judging, but I did in the third, and we had all high school students. They were more in the center of the city and much, much better. I did get many speeches on the same topic ("My dream..."), but all were obviousl written by the students. Except the one contestant I had that got up and just read the lyrics to Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On." My first question was, "What is your favorite movie?" Made me laugh.

This week has been my first time in Chinese public schools and first time for a new bathroom experience. Girls bathrooms have trough-ish toilets! There are no flushing systems, just maybe a hose at one end. Luckily the teachers' bathrooms usually have stalls, but the students' bathrooms are just rooms with troughs around the edges and you do all your business out in the open with everyone watching. It feels like you shouldn't be going to the bathroom there. If you teach at a public school without a teachers' bathroom, you can literally be having a face to face chat with your students while you take a poop. In general though, the schools are just pretty gross. And the whole building always smells like bathrooms.