I joined the 346th meeting of Tokyo international TMC.
This club is a bilingual club of English and Japanese, usually meets in Shinagawa, Tokyo in the evening on the 2nd, 4th and 5th Wednesdays. Due to the pandemic of the COVID-19, we are holding online meetings since March.
My role for this time was TMOE (Toastmaster of the Evening), which is master of ceremony of the meeting.
In this club, the meeting is divided into English and Japanese sessions, and this time the first half was English session.
In English session, everything is held in English (of course).
At the beginning, those who took roles explained what they are supposed to do during the meeting.
In Toastmasters, some of the members are assigned as helpers to hold meetings smoothly;
Word of the Evening:
Chooses a key word of the meeting, and attendees try to use the word as many times as possible while speaking.
Timer: time keeper
Grammarian:
Checks speakers’ grammar usage
Ah-Counter:
Counts speakers’ unnecessary words while speaking.
Vote Counter:
Counts votes to decide best speaker of the meeting
In this club, we combine Grammarian and Ah-Counter and call it “GRAHCO”.
In English session, there was 1 prepared speaker and talked about the current situation of this club and how to improve it.
After the speech, a speech evaluator evaluates the speech—in Toastmasters, evaluators give feedback to speakers within 3 minutes 30 seconds.
And after that, each role taker reported the results. In the end, General Evaluator evaluated the speech evaluator, and the English session as a whole.
Next, after the intermission, the latter half was Japanese session.
We had 2 prepared speakers; the one talked about his project about how to hold successful virtual meetings, and the other talked about how to enjoy stay home period.
The speeches were followed by evaluations, and reports by the role takers.
After the prepared speeches in Japanese, we voted for the best speaker, and after the evaluations in the Japanese session, we voted for the best evaluator.
Finally, General Evaluator evaluated the two Japanese evaluators, and the meeting as a whole.
During evaluation, the vote counter secretly told me the results of the best speaker and the best evaluator.
As TMOE, I announced the results at the end of the meeting.
Thanks to the supports by the attendees, the meeting ended on time.
This is the basic flow of Tokyo International TMC meetings.
TMOE has to be responsible for everything at the meeting and in this club, TMOE has to be flexible to facilitate in both English and Japanese.
I was in a small panic in the Japanese session;
I was working on a project to introduce speakers effectively, and I was trying to make warm and interesting comments to all the speakers.
Then my vocabulary was gone in Japanese session (though my native language is Japanese...!).
But Toastmasters is a place to make mistakes and learn from experiences, and it was good opportunity to challenge.
I completed all requirements to achieve DTM. It’s time for me to start application process.
🗼 BalleRirina 🗼