Since I'm in the midst of AS and life's been relatively dull, I might as well write down a more detailed post of PTEK's journey in the
13th Brunei Darussalam Interschool Senior Level English Debating Competition.
But before that, I'd like to apologize for the poor picture quality. Twas taken by my phone's camera haha.
Anyways...
I remember our very first meeting/training session when we found out that we were in Group2, apparently the group-of-death. At that very instant, we thought we were screwed. We had the defending champions MD, MS and the host school SMSA in our group. We knew we had a problem. I mean, we're a new sixth form centre venturing into our very first national competition and here's what we got.
For the prelims, we basically had 3 debates in two days with the top2 in each group advancing to the semis. For the prepared debate we were up against MS. The other two impromptu debates - a debate in which we only have 1 hour to prepare everything - were against MD and SMSA.
The training went on for weeks, even swallowing up some of my first term holidays. Mr. Bobby and Mr. Lyndon headed most of the prelims training sessions and guided us very well. It was very much a team effort! We went on and on discussing about the same topic for hours at a time by squeezing every little drop of idea out of our brains. We had a crapload of points and found it hard to cram everything within our designated 6 minutes of speaking time.
The topic? 'This House believes rejects Free Trade' and we were opposing that motion.
The core team members were Jarrod, Julius, Arafath, Azeemah, Jah Izzati and myself. Notice the term 'core' I used? Cos that's what's written down on paper but the whole team was more than that. Lots of the research, brainstorming, awesome ideas and constructive criticisms also came from Vernon and Sheila who I thought helped us a lot! Heck, we even had our own 'Simon Cowell'. (I'm not gona mention his name here though=p)
The day finally came. I can't recall being nervous, honestly. I was just glad that I got to skip classes *grins*.
We had twelve people in the school's entourage for that day. It was us six, Hafiz, Rafi, Sheila (chairperson), Vernon (timekeeper), Mr. Lyndon and Mr. Bobby.
But the team got very little recognition from the school. Well that's what we (and the teachers) thought. Maybe they thought we were pushovers and weren't worth the effort. It wasn't rocket science to figure it out, we weren't even provided an official transportation. We're not that dumb either to not notice all the extra support and attendance we got from the admin only came when we reached the semis and finals, especially the finals. Ah well...Driving and layan-ing talkative teens for 400km+ in two days can get tiring. Anyways, Mr. Lyndon and Mr. Bobby did a great job in that haha.
The competition's all the way in KB and I don't really fancy flattening my butt on long car rides. Well I don't mind if I'm driving though lol. But I have to admit, that that was the shortest 100km+ car ride I've ever been in. Jarrod, Julius, Arafath and I tagged along in Mr. Bobby's car and we had a blast talking about random topics. Topics ranging from religion to sports cars!
We arrived at...11.30? or was it 11? Anyways, we were due to start at 12. But that's 'Brunei time', so we kinda guessed that the first debate was gna start sometime around 1. And hell it did! There must be a huge time difference between the Brunei-Muara and Belait Districts.
For the prepared debate, it was 3 guys against 3 gals. Jarrod went first, I was the second and Hulio, I mean Julius, was our third. The debate went quite well for us, and yes we won (hahaha inda excited lagi). But we were abso-fuckingly ecstatic by then! MS gave a good fight but it was 1 win out of 1 for us.
Had some refreshments soon after that. We had a quick 'post-mortem' session on our first debate and discussed the team line-up for the 2nd debate. You see, there's this rule which states that we have to get at least 5 of the 6 team core members to debate. So Julius and I voluntarily dropped out, pushing Arafath and Azeemah into the first and second speaker's role respectively.
When we found out our first impromptu topic, I knew we were in deep shit. Consequently, we lost against MD. The fact that the topic was against us ain't an excuse, but it didn't help us either. But hey, MD did well!
Remember when I mentioned about 'Brunei time' earlier in my post? We were 'supposed' to finish with all the formalities by 5.30. I reached home 15 minutes before 9. There has got to be a time difference between the Brunei Muara and Belait Districts ey? haha.
For half of the journey home, we carefully calculated our odds of reaching the semis.
MD had two wins, MS and us have a win apiece and SMSA were still empty-handed. We somehow needed to at least get the outright 2nd place by the next day. We were going head to head against SMSA, while MD will go against MS.
But hey, 1 win out of the first day was probably almost more than what he had initially bargained for. The chance of reaching the semis was still alive!
The rest of the way home, we talked about cars and..Russell Peters haha!
Damn, that was a helluva good time!
To be continued =D
