Speech! Speech!

Our school has an annual speech contest. I've helped kids prepare for speeches before, and they are a different animal than they are in the US. Here, you have to memorize the entire speech, and include lots of emotion and a gesture for pretty much every other word. Props are encouraged too.

And instead of a speech about, you know, facts, it's about a time machine or aliens coming to earth or something. (This isn't just my school- it seems to be a Taiwan thing.)

We've started to write them, and some of them are surprisingly good. Some aren't of course.

There's a girl who really tries hard and just isn't smart. Her goal is always not to get the lowest grade in the class. Her topic is "My Dream House" and it's so cute how she writes it- like she wrote, "It's the size of 2 normal-sized houses." Then she says, "Can I write that? Is it too much?" I said, that boy over there has a house that's bigger than Taipei 101 with an amusement park inside! Yes, you can make yours twice the size of a normal house. Later she wrote "There is a small garden in the back." The girl next to her said, "Not a small garden, a big one!" I told her that her dream house probably isn't as nice as her normal house!