Vagabond Toastmasters Gaithersburg, Maryland

6/8/20

 

Toastmasters is a place you can always strive to get better.  Hats off to this group of non native English speaking members who use this club to polish their English speaking skills.  They are acutely aware  of the importance of pronunciation in communication.  As I mangled their names as Table Topics Master, they patiently told me the correct way to pronounce it.  Maybe I need to do a little polishing of my pronunciation skills also.  Vagabond Toastmaster chartered in 1984 and has been Presidents Distinguished for the last 16 years.  That tells you how much they strive for excellence. 

 

As they started the meeting, the “cheerleader” stirred up the crowd with “WHO ARE WE?” and the crowd yelled, “VAGABOND TOASTMASTERS!’  “Are we going to have fun tonight?”  And the crowd yelled, “YES!”  They certainly got into the spirit of things right off the bat.  I settled in to have some fun.   Together they said the Mission Statement and The Toastmaster Values.  The General Evaluator said at the end of the meeting that it might have been better to have one person read the mission statement, since online the words sounded garbled.

 

There were 4 visitors at today’s meeting.  Steve served as an evaluator and I served as a Table Topics master, which finally gave me a chance to use my handy dandy Table Topic conversation cards that I got as a present  4  Christmases ago and never have used.  They like to give everyone a chance to answer a Table Topics question except the speakers and evaluators, so I ended up asking 5 questions.  Not only did they  have a Word of the Day “Gleaming” but they had an Idiom of the Day also, “Whale of a time” or Whale of a meeting”.  So fun trying to use that in our conversations. 

 

To me,  being early is on time and being on time is late.  When Steve and I logged on to this club 15 minutes before start time of 6:00, they already had 7 people logged on.  Good going guys.  They greeted us warmly.  Asked us all kinds of questions and made us feel very welcome.

 

I would definitely recommend this club to people.  Especially non native English speaking people who are trying to brush up on their English skills.  This club is all about learning and growing and using those skills professionally.  Keep up the good work, everyone!