Poetry Competition

Two weeks ago, my school had an English poetry competition between all of the eighth grade classes. Back in September and October, they had asked me to come up with applicable poems for the children to recite. I was not given any guidelines, such as did they prefer funny or serious, the classics or fun poems for children. All they gave me was a time limit of five minutes. After I compiled a short list of sample poems, they inform me that the poems will be recited by the entire class. Well, a class of 38 students would recite a very different type of poem than a single student, which was what I had originally thought was happening. So again I came up with a short list, though I was a still rather confused. This time, my list had a whole range of poems, because I hoped they would tell me which type they liked, and then I would find more in that vein. Instead, they decided they liked the list as it was, from Robert Frost to Edward Lear, and everything in between.


The end of December finally came, and with it, the poetry competition. By this point, the rules had changed so that only eight students from each class had to perform each selection. Students kept trying to bribe me, though I repeatedly stated that I was not a judge. Instead, I offered to help them practice and to give them feedback. I was not sure how much help I was being, since I had no idea what the judges would be looking for or what particular standards the groups would be judged upon.


I really should not have been surprised when, the evening before the competition, Tsuili asked me to be a judge. My school loves to spring things on me. Or maybe they just assume I already know things, or that certain things should be obvious (such as, that the one native English speaker in the school should clearly be one of the judges for an English poetry recitation)? At any rate, I suddenly found myself as one of the four judges. I was more nervous than if I had been asked to recite my own piece of poetry. I am not the biggest fan of being placed into situations in which I have no clue what is expected of me - though truly, living in Taiwan has made me much better at this than I used to be.


All of the classes were so cute and did a great job. I was quite proud of how hard they had all worked. Oddly enough, the two most popular pieces were "The Owl and the Pussycat" and "Oh Captain, My Captain" (life in Taiwan offers many such dichotomies...). All 19 classes performed, and with so much overlap in the pieces, it was rather difficult trying to fairly assess all of them. Add to this the fact that few of them used proper pronunciation and some groups had bizarre interpretations. I witnessed a humorous version of "Oh Captain, My Captain"... Very funny and creative, but not at all what one would expect.

After the groups had all finished, the four of us judges stayed behind to deliberate. This was probably the most frustrating part of the whole process. Despite the fact that the other three are all English teachers, they spent the whole time discussing the groups in Chinese. I could not keep up with their conversation, though I could tell that their opinions differed from my own. However, all of my rankings were up for debate - I was not extremely attached to any of them - but I could not figure out enough of what the other teachers were saying to interject with pertinent comments. In the end, I gave up and just let them do all of the talking. The outcome was that they decided no consensus could be reached and that we would just have to turn in all of our numbers for someone else to compile. Oh well. I tried.