Small but fun
This meeting had a small number of attendees, twelve in all with ten members and two guests. Though we are not sure what causes this, there seem to be tendencies for members to get busier at the turn of the program year. (This happened last year as well.) Anyway, we enjoyed this meeting.
One member, who was scheduled to deliver a prepared speech, had to cancel her attendance due to a business trip to the Tohoku region, making the number of prepared speeches down to two. That's when Hideo pitched in, or it might be better described as taking advantage of the opportunity. He changed his project from Pathways to "Prepare to Speak Professionally," which requires a member to deliver an 18- to 22-minute speech. This is usually not easy to schedule because our meetings are only 100 minutes long and the time that could be allocated to prepared speeches is about 40 minutes at best. It is not really fair for one member to take more than half the time allocated to the Prepared Speech Session, and we normally schedule a special meeting to accommodate those who want to deliver an extremely long speech. This time, however, it was a perfect occasion to deliver a lengthy speech because it would have otherwise meant that we only had two 5- to 7-minute speeches and a dauntingly long Table Topics Session. In his speech, he shared his tips on "how to 'sound' compelling focusing on how we can use vocal variety as well as paying attention to reduce our accent. It was funny to see other participants practicing the tips shared in their Zoom panes.
Though it was unfortunate that we had to cancel venue attendance due to the low staff available to set up the equipment necessary to support the hybrid environment, it was a small but fun online meeting with two guests. Hopefully, members will be less busy with their work and more members can join our meetings on a regular basis moving forward.
Comments