...................We just polished up our speeches 10 minutes before the real thing and all 3 debaters were feeling the pressure. Sha Lynn kept disturbing the Belians, our opponents. "What if our points are all wrong???" I kept saying. Well, it wasn't that wrong.
Preparation
"Mr" Jeffrey Goh, the school's target of harassment, was amazingly chosen by the host to be the Chairperson. He kept pronouncing my name wrongly until I felt that he should go back to kindergarten to learn how to differentiate between a "U" and an "I". Heck, my name wasn't even written in cursive. The Timekeeper was Sze Teng. Unfortunately for her (and us), a timer wasn't prepared. So, she had to use someone's watch and bang the table to signal that time's up.
Proposition's speakers were Kean Lyn, Zi Ying, Emily and Thiam Joo. Man, Thiam Joo was freaky. Apparently, he was smiling throughout the whole debate at the "ghost in the middle". Maybe he knew something we didn't.....or maybe we Oppositions were just too comical. Or he just couldn't contain his evil grin when we all stammered and broke down.......
Opposition speakers were me, Natasha, Cassandra and Sha Lynn. You can call us clowns because we're last minute workers. We didn't bother memorizing our speeches and our hand movements were too vigourous and violent. Someone could've died of a lame karate chop if they stood within our vicinity. Our "advantages" include having nervous breakdowns, terrible eyesight and no understanding of what our opponent says. Very good.
Natasha once told me : "Whatever happens, we must not get Pn Magdalene. She's really strict..........". Introduction; she's the teacher in charge of our school's national champion debating team. This disturbing trend has been going on for more then 10 years. TEN years of coaching the national champions. CONSECUTIVE champions, let me add. (Yes, our school is the school of debating nerds). Heh, we got her to judge us. D-day.
The debate
Our motion was "Science stream guarantees a better future" (That might explain the stupid poll some of you answered). My team opposed the motion. The points we got were quite "normal". But putting all those points into a thought-provoking speech was really difficult. We kept deviating from the topic. My final point came up 30 minutes before the actual debate and I was going nuts trying to put the sentences together to make some sense. Luckily, my nutcase head thought that much, because our team managed to put off the point that "science contributes to the world and our comfort". Thinking about it, every progression we make is destroying our planet as well.
I actually lost my head when I started off my rebutt speech because the Proposition's points were quite ambiguous. Worst thing was that I couldn't read neither Natasha's nor my own handwriting!! So, I just rebutted one teeny point which didn't really have much influence on the outcome of the debate. Luckily, there were no other memory lapses when I presented my points. Points are the most important (to me, that is).
Natasha nearly lost herself halfway in the middle of her speech. But she was great because her pauses weren't that abrupt and jerky. She was overtime, however. The Timekeeper didn't bang the table one minute before the time limit!!! Crap. It would be so interesting to see someone banging tables during a debate. This was our only chance--wasted!
Cassandra was expected to end the debate with a big bang. She started off well. Very well indeed. 3rd speaker of the Proposition, Emily (Chye) had finally made the statement my team wanted to hear.
"Science stream students have a wider range of jobs to choose from. We can
always drop to the Arts stream anytime......................."
Joy, oh joy. We stared smugly at each other and let Cas do the honours.
"If you say Science stream guarantees a better future, then why on earth would
you want to drop to the Arts stream?"
Kudos to you, my sadistic brain, for thinking up of this sadistic remark. This is clearly the Proposition's strongest point (the rest weren't really threatening our intelligence). And we rebutted it with our strongest rebutt!! Yay!!
Unfortunately, Cas had a nervous breakdown halfway. Luckily, she had already shaken the Proposition before she immersed her head in total oblivion.
Nothing much about the Reply speech except the fact that only our team knew about the summary speech. As the first speaker, I had to do a shaky reply speech. Proposition, unaware of the speech, made 3rd speaker their hope. The judge said she didn't mind, since it was our first time.
After we finished everything, we guessed we were so screwed. All 3 of our speakers had nervous breakdowns whereas the Proposition was very steady. Pn Magdalene then gave her not-so-good comments about us.
First of all, both teams didn't have the structure of a debate. I refuse to elucidate on this matter lest some sneaky folks copy this out of this blog.
All in all, the ?????? goes to Batai.
The WHAT???? Suddenly, everyone had mixed reactions. Natasha punched the air, Cas and Sha Lynn buried their faces in their hands. Whether they did that out of joy or sadness, I could not tell. The Proposition's faces were stoning.
...........And the best speaker goes to *my name*.
WHO?????? Then, I had to ask around to confirm what I heard and who won the debate.
I'm not rubbing salt into anyone's wounds, but
It took me a long time to realise that. But now, I'm going crazy again. We're up against Cengal now. And our hopeless topic isn't helping us much. No ideas came to flood our thoughts. All our creative juices leaked out of our ears. Sigh.
One good thing that happened in this mess is the fact that Science and Maths exams are on my birthday. 2 favourite subjects.....what could be better? Not having any exams on your birthday.
What a good future we all have. (By the way, I'm taking the Science stream because it guarantees me a better future!)
