I'm proud of him

It was a tough competition. Contesting against student representatives from junior colleges like VJC, RJC, ACJC, NYJC, CJC, JJC, TJC and polytechnics like SP, TP, and institutions like MI, JI …. What were the chances of D getting in?

Yesterday we accompanied D as he was participating in the preliminary rounds of the national plain english speaking award in the JCCI/ITE/Poly category. It was a long-drawn competition that lasted from 9am to 4pm! As the students went up one by one to deliver their prepared speech, I was silently worried for the boy. Worried on one hand, yet filled with a certain sense of admiration for him as well.

For him, to have the courage to stand up against these people from acclaimed elite tertiary schools across the nation was no easy feat.

I wouldn’t dare. I would have shrunk back in fear if I knew who my contestants were, and how excellently they delivered their speech, articulating their words with precision, expressing their statements with dramatic effects, knowing where to pause, where to emphasize, having absolutely no grammatical or pronounciation error at all, standing up there oozing poise and confidence.

But D went up there and did his thing.

He rattled on like a machine gun, prob fueled by his nervousness. He stumbled over some words. He mispronounced “evidence”, He did no strutting across the stage. waving about of hands or any of those dramatic effects.

But he just went up there and do his thing, and we applauded.

“Good job,” we all told him, “you just need to slow down”, we advised.

Deep inside, I knew he couldn’t make it. The others were just too good. My colleagues and I resorted to cursing the other participants , hoping they would be disqualified, and we were silently eliminating those who would not be able to make it, JUST so there would be a spot in the finals for our boy.

As we waited for the results to be delivered, we kept assuring him that winning was not everything.

But I knew that it was everything.

It was not so much the claiming of the coveted title of “champion”, but I knew that getting a spot in the finals was critical in boosting his confidence and it definitely meant a whole lot more for an ITE student to get in...for an ITE student to break the stigma and assumptions of the language ability of our students. D really put in a lot of effort in practising his speech, correcting his pronuounciation, etc.

Thus, you can imagine the resounding cheers from his supporters, aka, us, when his name was announced as one of the top 12 who’d proceed into the finals.

I was overjoyed.
The boy deserved it.

In the morning on his way to the competition venue , D had smsed me about how he was feeling nervous but that he would do his best to make his school proud in the competition

I smsed him back:

"we’re already proud of you."