Speech Meet Technology

I am ashamed to realize that I haven’t blogged for two weeks! Oops! But one of the activities that has been consuming much of my time these past two weeks is my speech team. During that time span I judged three sub-section or invitational meets, have coached weekdays after school, and participated with my team at sub-section and section. And I’m very excited to report that I had three students qualify for the State Speech meet on April 18th (it’s bittersweet: we had great success- but now I’m not done for another few weeks!!).

With that said, there is a connection to technology and its side-effects (as I see it, anyway). During speech meets, a handful of the head coaches gather in the “tab room” to tabulate the results throughout the meet. We pair up and write down scores and do the math with paper and pencil. We trade results and have someone else double check our findings.

There are computer programs out there in which you can simply type in the scores and instant results are given (But even these technology programs are imperfect- so one still needs to be careful). Some argue that it’s ridiculous that we’re not using the computer technology more regularly. But our strongest argument for continuing with the pencil and paper- is the group camaraderie.

I thoroughly enjoy going to speech meets because I have my “friends in the tab room”. We have years of rapport, family stories and inside jokes that have been established because of this tab room. When we are at our separate computers typing, this camaraderie is lost.

In general, this is one of my fears with the increased use of technology. It’s easier to hide behind the keyboard than to speak with people face to face. Yeah, I’m into texting and FBing- and it’s definitely fun! However, the interactions between people directly cannot be replaced with technology- or we are going to be in trouble. I truly believe this.