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East Kilbride Rotary Club

2012

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2017

Youth Speaks

2015-16

It was a highly entertaining evening at the East Kilbride Group Training Association, the venue for Schools Youth Speaks competition, organised and run by the Rotary Club of East Kilbride. The auditorium in EKGTA is an ideal venue with Tom McBrearty, the general manager and his assistant Lesley Keenan ardent supporters of school projects. Topics selected by the teams were Is School fit for purpose, Life through a lens, Are we playing fair - drugs in sport, The faceless monster, The line of Beauty: ideas of perfection, Are you my type, Disney matter, The Marvel of mums and Is being young all it's cracked up to be Irvine chairing the evening and calling up the teams. With little trace of nerves each team stepped onto the stage for eleven minutes on their chosen topic with the speaker requiring answering a question from one of the audience.

Each year there is an obvious increase in the standards of speakers however this year it was an exponential increase in the standard, recognition of the skills and application by both teachers and pupils.

Ross Hammond summed up the evening with experienced and valuable advice to the teams and teachers commenting on the difficulty with selecting the winning teams.

Nine teams entered for this year's competition, two from St Andrews and St Brides, two from Calderglen High and 5 from Duncanrig Secondary School. Each team comprised 3 members, a chairperson, speaker and the proposer of vote of thanks. The competition is run under strict speaker rules where the chairperson and proposer are allocated 2 minutes each with 6 minutes for the speaker. Penalty points are deducted from their scores for being time short or an overrun on their allocated time.

Adjudicating the competitors were 4 members of East Kilbride Speakers Club, Ross Hammond, Chief adjudicator, Alastair Fraser and Peter Kerr with Paul Munday operating the timing lights.

Rotarians

John Murphy on left organised the event with Leslie on right

Above on the right is are the intermediate winning team St Andrews and St Brides comprising Aoife Houghton, Adam Khanna and Aaron Gilbride on the topic of The Marvel of Mums. This was a very humorous talk from Aoife, "was called a mummy's boy by Adam Kannah chairing the meeting with the speaker requiring to answer. He talked, with deep affection, about his all-knowing, all seeing mum with the Death stare.

Senior winners Duncanrig Secondary team of Greg Hughes, Megan Sutherland and Alison Balmer and there topic was "Are you my type". Like many of the other topics it was not what you expected. This was about stereotyping with Megan opening her six minute talk discussing her long blond her and the instant judgement made on her appearance. As with the other speakers she marched through her talk with little use of notes and handled with ease the question from the audience.