I wrote this entry several weeks ago to post up when I’m too busy to write current entries. So here it goes.:)
A student blogger on the other blog I write for was noting how quickly time has passed in his course, and how in the matter of a few months he won’t be seeing his classmates, lecturers, and school anymore. His whole cohort will be starting on their 4 – 8 month industry internship program.
Truth to tell, it’s the student experiences when I was in school that provided the most memorable moments. Ok, so I don’t remember every nugget, but my memory is still reasonably fresh of my bachelor degree days at NTU onwards. So, following up from an earlier entry, one of the activities I was heavily involved in was debating. I went from being on the reserve list as a freshman to captain for the faculty team in my second year, then captain for the university team in my final year, and adjudicator just before I convocated.
The first competition I adjudicated in was the Australasians Intervarsity Debating Championships, which was hosted by Monash University in Melbourne, June 1995. NTU sent two teams of three student-speakers each, and being older and just finished my final year examinations, I was the trainer-mentor-chaperon aka Mother Hen during the trip.
At that point 13 years ago, adjudicators while still students like myself were very uncommon even though they are the norm in current competitions today. In fact, adjudicators then were University teaching staff. So, to get selected and then represent NTU as a adjudicator while still a student was a bit of an achievement. The tournament didn’t use adjudicator panels in the preliminary rounds then (and that’s also changed for some of the international tournaments too), so I was all alone to have to listen to six persons debate extempore style for each of the seven prelim rounds.
The debaters themselves spanned quite the range. I remember that the Philippine teams were always passionate. Many also had an attractive timbre in their debating voices. The local i.e. Aussie teams all spoke the language fluently and exhibited comfort levels in employing quips and humor that weren’t common in other teams. The Malaysian and NUS-Singapore teams were hard to differentiate given how similarly we speak English. And there was that running joke about the NTU teams – whether we were a Singaporean or really an Indian national contingent given how dominant was Indian scholar representation on the NTU teams.
I was blessed enough too to emerge relatively unscathed in the rounds I adjudicated too. And boy, do complaints fly like wild during these tournaments. How so? Well, bear in mind there is always a winner and a loser in a debate, the loser does not like losing, and the losers still comprise each University’s brightest and most eloquent students to have made it this far. Put it together and you get complaints galore. So, maybe I took meticulous notes. Or I was just persuasive. Or more likely I was just super loh-soh i.e. long-winded in my verbal assessments that teams readily accepted my verdict just so I’d shut up and they’d be able to move onto the next round.
And all that is just the debating part of it. We had time during our 9 day trip to hit the sights, and that was where the fun really began. The 1995 trip was my first to Australia, though at that juncture I of course had no idea I would be a frequent traveler to Australia 8 years later during my doctoral studies. We went on day trips up and down the coast. We walked. We hit their local cuisine.
And that wasn’t the end of it. Because on the very last day, the NTU team checked out late from the hotel despite my stern reminders the night before that we would be paying an extra night’s stay if they weren’t timely. They got a terrific earful from me, especially because I was the one footing the additional hotel bill for their slovenly attitude. The Student Affairs Office at NTU promised to reimbursed me for the bill, but I never got round to it – bleh.
But all these are memories, and great wonderful ones at that. The two photos here; one is with my other fellow adjudicators. Notice how old and wizen they look compared to my youthful appearance. The other is with the University of the Philippines that I’d adjudicated and became friends with thereafter. I started work about 5 months after the trip- I had to return to national service to fulfill three months of training that I’d deferred. And while there’s been many great memories at work over the 13 years I’ve worked, it’s been student memories that’ll brighten my day.
So, yep, I know how Ling felt during her recent Venice trip mother-hening her choir girls.:)
Recent comments