ADVANCED TOASTMASTERS COURSE
Written by Mia van Rooyen Grade 7Z
According to Forbes-magazine, the number one fear for the average person is public speaking. This fear is called glossophobia. The second most common fear is death. This means that most people would rather die than speak in front of a crowd!
Luckily for the Wouwtjies, we are blessed to be involved with Toastmasters International. Last year many Grade 6 children completed the Basic Toasmasters Course with great success.
This year, the very distinguished and knowledgeable Mr. Ian Flint, presented the Advanced Toastmasters Course to several grade 7 learners, who chose to participate. He has been involved at our school for many years. We are thankful to Mrs Bowker and Miss Naudé who organise this special opportunity and encourage the participants throughout the course of 6 weeks.
This course is described as an Honours degree and is named “Linguistic Life Lessons”. Only those who successfully completed the first course may be included. I can assure you that we all learned many valuable life lessons and had a lot of good laughs along the way.
We were taught to present many different speeches, including birthday toasts, presenting an award and even performing as Master of Ceremonies at a function. One of the favourite categories was the “roasting speech” in which you are required to speak about a close and long-time friend. You relate your experiences and the personal information about your good friend, but in a very humorous and often sarcastic manner.
At our beautiful and elegant Toastmasters banquet, Zoë Louw presented a very funny and enjoyable roasting speech, poking fun at certain members of the school staff. The audience loved it!
All of us are so grateful for the opportunity we had to complete this course and will always be thankful for acquiring the life skill of public speaking. At least we won’t have to choose between speaking or death!