5/23/2020
If you want to practice speaking “off the cuff,” this is the place for you.
The meeting started off with the pledge, which is their club culture. Most clubss around where I live do not say the pledge during the Toastmaster meeting due to Toastmasters being an International organization. There were 22 people to attend the meeting. A role which was unfamiliar to me was the Funmaster. The Funmaster put the words of the song “Imagine” by John Lennon in the chat box and asked most everyone to tell what the words mean to them. It wasn’t really “fun” but it was interesting. Maybe at other meetings the question is more “fun”. It did start to get a little political.
They had a role called the posture monitor, which had me worried about how I was sitting in my uncomfortable, straight back chair during the meeting. However, it turned out the posture monitor just gave feedback on gestures of the main speakers during the meeting. The main speakers spoke “off the cuff." They were given a topic and had to speak on it. There were 4 speakers. However enjoyable the speakers were, I still wonder about how it relates to the Toastmasters educational program and how they are able to meet the criteria laid out for the member in the projects. Since this is an advanced club, their main focus was speakers and evaluations. They gave evaluations of the speakers and table topic answers.
Although I enjoyed this club, I would encourage the members to engage with both visitors even if they both share one screen as Steve and I did. I really like visiting different clubs and have found there is no one right way to do it. Agendas can be switched around, the meeting can be all table topics, some meetings say the pledge and some do not, some meetings have the evaluator introduce the speaker and some clubs have the toastmaster do it. However the club decides to do it, I love learning different ways of doing things whether I think my home club should adapt it or not. It works for that club.
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