July 18th meeting

We would like to welcome our guests Brandy, Vicki and Brian H.
The Toastmaster of the day was Lee, who talked about the history of Toastmasters. He gave us facts like how it started officially in 1924 by Ralph Smedley. Another interesting fact he told us was that all Toastmasters meetings around the world are held in English so everyone can compete together in the international competitions. Christa was the general evaluator of the day, and she thanked Brandy, our guest, for participating in Table Topics, and sharing how she found our club. In her evaluation, Christa also thanked our evaluators for being so specific to the person they were evaluating, and balancing the compliments and advice they provided.
There were two speakers of the day, Diane and Avital. Diane gave her second speech from the Competent Communicator, Organize Your Speech. In her speech, she talked about how there are several advantages to going to business school online. As an online teacher for Washington State University, she shared her experience teaching online, and how the students still get to interact with each other. For the student, she said this format gives them flexibility to work and go to school. Another thing Diane said about the students is that most of them just need to finish their degree that they had started and then life got in the way. One last thing that she found with teaching online is that her students seem more serious about their degree. Brian was the speech evaluator for Diane. Since he is her mentor as well, he talked about how she had talked to him about this speech. He complimented her organization, and how she connected her ideas. His one comment on how she could improve was a more final ending, and using more frequent eye contact.
Our second speaker of the day was Avital, who gave her sixth speech in the competent communicator, vocal variety, called Choice. Her speech explained how a woman she knew battled cancer, and was told that she only had a few weeks left to live. When faced with this news, she had her son come to see her to say goodbye. He asked her why she did not fight, and she decided to change how she looked at the chemotherapy. She did research into how the therapy works, and found the plants that the medicine was made out of. When she started her last round of chemotherapy, she had a different perspective, and had less side effects than she had ever had when going through cancer treatments. Kathleen was Avital's evaluator of the day, who talked about how she had heard Avital talking to Lee, her mentor, before the speech, and the speech was even better the second time she gave it. One thing Kathleen complimented her on was her use of pauses to emphasize her points. The only thing she saw that Avital could work on is her ending so that it is more direct.
Lauralee was the Table Topics master of the day, who focused her table topics on the manuals. She took speeches, like the sales pitch speech in the professional speaker manual, to inspire her Table Topics. Laimons sold a vacation package to Hawaii, where he asked if everyone had good health, and enjoyed warm days? He then went on to talk about how the people are generally friendly, and he knew the main island better than the others, so he was selling his package to the big island rather than anywhere else. Brandy, our guest, was asked how she heard of Toastmasters. Her brother in law went to a Toastmasters meeting in Utah, where he has learned a lot of skills and has been very supported through life's trials, including being diagnosed with a disease. Because of his progress, she decided to come to a Toastmasters meeting near her. Christa Colway won the table topics trophy after persuading us that Disneyland is great if you have the time to wait in a line for two hours, in the heat, and pay a lot of money to go there.
Paul was the timer of the day, and Peter was the grammarian with the word sarcasm.