This weekend saw the annual Second Form Public Speaking Competition take place in the Big Schoolroom. This provides an opportunity for Second Formers who have recently completed their oral Classroom Based Assessments to present them in front of an audience beyond their class sets.
The topics this year were extremely varied, as the compère Mr Girdham said, often jumping from one subject to an utterly different one with a very different tone. First up was Max Morrissey, who talked about wages in professional sport, and he was followed by Fiona Zhong (Could aliens be real?), Sam Butler and Oscar Duggan Geary as a pair (tennis), Ella Girdham (a cold case in crime), Yonette Nel (Irish weather), Alex O’Herlihy (living with cystic fibrosis), Alisha Corrigan (Irish mythology), Henri Rose (‘waking up tiny’), Lucy Branagan (why pigeons are secret government spies) and finally Esmonde Durdin Robertson (why young people are leaving rural Ireland).
Ms Kent-Sutton and Mr G. Clarke were the judges, and they emphasised how much they learned, how often they were entertained, how well all the speakers did on conquering their nerves, and the way all engage the audience with a clearly sequences structure of information. They announced that Fiona had come third, Yonette second, and the winner was Lucy Branagan with her quirky conspiracy-type piece on alien pigeons.
Many thanks to the pupils’ English teachers, Mr Canning, Mr Kirwan and Ms Tyerman, who prepared these pupils and many more over the last three weeks.
