Poetry Slam getting under way

Audrey, Mr. Kane, and I finally met again last Thursday.

Last month, in order to take stock of our position, and how to move forward, I conducted a survey of the school, as best as I could, by emailing a google spreadsheet form to the whole school.

(screenshot of the live form)

The results were not encouraging, but we forged ahead anyway.
We've basically finalised the rules, the prizes, and the structure of the competition (copy-paste from the document) :

SIS Poetry Slam

Name suggestions: Slam!  ... SIS Poetry Slam ... When Words Take Flight ...

Annual Event. Two heats and a finals day, spread over three weeks: Heat 1, Heat 2, Finals. Heats after school, OR just have scheduled auditions for each entrant at lunch times. Finals day on a Friday afternoon, April 1, in Hall.

As the event gains prestige and competitors year by year, it can perhaps be allocated an evening, like the Winter and Spring concerts, school plays, Innovation, and International Evening.

Rules and Judging
    •    Each poem must be of the poet's own construction.
    •    Any genre of poetry
    •    No props, costumes or musical instruments.
    •    3 minutes (+ 10-sec grace period) to read 1 poem. If the poet goes over time, points shall be deducted from the total score.
    •    Judged by 5 members of the audience, pre-selected by the organizer.
    •    Judges give scores from 0 to 10 based on content and performance. 5 for content, 5 for performance.
    •    Lowest and highest scores dropped, middle 3 added to give a total out of 30.
    •    Audience encouraged to respond to the poets or the judges in any way they see fit. Gives the event a much more sport-like atmosphere and encourages more energy and enthusiasm. No poet is beyond critique; all are at the mercy of the audience.

Awards and Prizes
    •    Trophy and Certificate for Winner. Certificate for runner up.
    •    SIS Poetry Slam Hall of Fame (where? display-board space around school is limited...)
    •    Congratulated in a Whole School Assembly
    •    House Points
    •    ???

Raise Awareness
    •    The revived Piggybank magazine, pending renaming (Audrey and Kenneth are both among the editors)
    •    Bulletin notices
    •    English classes
    •    House Assemblies (Spread the message to other House Captains to talk about it in the House Assembly) (contact Mrs. McKee about making it a house event)
    •    Whole School Assembly (introduction of the event)
    •    Posters around school (outsource design - Victor Kwan)
    •    Start an afterschool activity? (will have to be next year; Kenneth is unavailable this year due to unavoidable schedule clashes)

How well will it be received?
Probably not very enthusiastically; the lack of interest in poetry at SIS, after all, was one of the things that inspired the idea of starting an SIS Poetry Slam event.

Hopefully, the idea of "glory" in the proposed hall of fame will attract people. And CAS hours, of course. And as something to put into one's college app.

The word "poetry" tends to arouse a lot of bad feeling in SIS students. How can we overcome this?
 -> Make it mandatory for a particular year group.
 -> Prepare students in English classes
 -> After-school activity?
 -> Maybe simply by initially removing the word "poetry" from the name of the event: instead of SIS Poetry Slam, call it, "SLAM! - SIS Poetry Slam" or something like that.

If it's really not well received in SIS, perhaps we can do it within ESF so that there's a larger pool of competitors?
Are there any poetry slams in Hong Kong? Perhaps an SIS team can be formed.

We also decided to begin an after-school activity next term, so I'm pretty excited.

IH Athletics Finals

Yesterday was the Inter-House Athletics Finals.

All in all, not exactly the best Athletics days ever. I didn't run, for one. Well, for all. It just doesn't feel like Athletics day when I don't run.

That aside, the Movember and 70s theme wasn't as bad as I'd expected.

Selling silicone wrist bands wasn't particularly good or bad.

And there weren't so many House Captain duty things to do as I'd expected.

This year's Athletics Final s were very different from previous ones. This year, the finals lineups were draw up to have 1 finalist from each house. Personally, I don't think that's fair at all to any fast runners or powerful jumpers or throwers who may not be the best in their house but are better than most others. Maybe set a maximum of finalists per house, like many international meets, but not 1 per house.

The results are coming out next week. I hope Schweitzer has done well.

ATCL Piano Exam

Officially dead. I have a gut feeling that I failed again. I was so unbelievably nervous, though less so than the first time. The examiner was this massive German (I think) guy. Seemed quite friendly, but, as I told my piano teacher, that's not an accurate measure of how strict his marking is.

As I played my recital, I, like, screwed up A LOT. Last time, I actually got stuck and forgot a part and ended up just sitting dumbly for a few seconds before continuing; this time, I didn't have any one incident like that, but I can't help but feel that my screw-ups this time add up to more. As I made more mistakes, I got more and more nervous, and that in turn caused me to make more mistakes, and so on and so on...

I do believe, however, that i was far more well-versed with the technical side of the pieces this time. (Technique is where I historically suck...) Hopefully that's enough.


UPDATE Jan 18, 2011: I passed! Yay for me!

Focus Week: Hakka trip

Simply the best focus week EVER.

The biking experience was perhaps the best part. Around 80km in total over 4 days, through the beautiful countryside. The rush from the physical exertion fit perfectly with the freedom of the scenery.

We stayed at one of those "tulou" (土楼）, the cylindrical ancient Hakka fortress-come-apartment-complex structures, and we visited a whole bunch of them around the area.

We learned about tea-leaf manufacture.

We taught English at a local school. The performance, however, wasted almost half of the time we had available. Why did we have to teach the kids a song to perform?

In our free time, we played cards.

I and the boys who I shared a dorm with, Derek and Calvin Lee, woke early every morning, before 6am. I don't like not being up before the other people.

We watched a puppet show.

For the entire 6 days of the trip, my mind was pleasantly blank, relaxed, taking a break from routine life. Pure bliss.

Now, let my just copy-paste what I put in my CAS self-evaluation, 'cause I can't be bothered thinking of it all again:

I discovered that I have to take a little bit of time to think before I speak in Putonghua.

My biking ability was beyond what I expected, though I believe I made up for lack of technical control with brute strength.

I was, however, unable to do the writing and homework I intended to do on the trip. Instead, my mind was in a state of perpetual relaxation and calmness. I also, unfortunately, got homesick after the first 4 days.

Nonetheless, I still count the trip a success in increasing my awareness of my own boundaries.

I have never in my life biked for 50km in a day. That was definitely a new challenge, and an exciting one.

Teaching the children English didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped, though. For one, there pre-existing English levels were much lower than what I and my fellow group members had expected. Yet, that is but a testament to our inexperience at this new challenege.

Because we had overestimated the students abilities, our group had to replan our lessons from scratch. Although we sometimes got distracted from planning by invitations to play cards, we were able to recover from the initial setback and plan successful lessons that taught the kids a little bit of basic English.

I worked with Matt Tung, Derek, and Calvin Lee. Although the teaching was initially awkward, we worked well together.

Indeed, nobody there knew an int of English, not even the school headmaster.

I don't think our short stay contributed to any sort of dilution of local culture. In fact, it was more of a learning experience for them, since the students had never before met anyone from outside the area, as well as a learning experience for us.

I learned that teaching English as a second language is much more difficult than I thought; first language students inevitably pick up the material much faster as it is natural to them.

Picking tea leaves was one of the high points of the trip. We learned to find newly opened leaves and pick cuttings from these leaves to three leaves beneath them for the best maturity and thus taste.

Edit (March 25, 2011): Damn, those were good times...

Back to the Library

I should confess that I missed library duty the previous week.

I had just been well enough to attend school, and completely forgot about library duty. Although that is no excuse, it is only right that I provide an explanation for my action - or inaction.

Now yesterday, I remembered to go. Luckily, I still remembered how to loan and return books. But because of my multiple absences (the previous time was because I had to represent SIS at HKSSF Swimming), the Librarian, Ms Ow, hadn't had a chance to explain the online catalogue system to me, so she did so yesterday.

It was embarrassing, the whole thing.