Forensics club meets for first time this year
The forensics club met for the first time this year on December 11. With many meetings to come, the students will have enough time to practice for their events before the first competition. “The first few times we meet we run through the set up of the category and the expectations. Once the piece is put together they practice it at home and with either Ms. Paskey or myself. We watch, listen, and critique to help find areas the students can improve,” adviser Nicole King said.
December 17, 2020
A very competitive speaking club recently started meeting to prepare for the year ahead. They met to look over events and decided which ones they think they will do well in.
New to high school forensics, sophomore Autumn Young joined the club this year for a reason that many people dread.
“I joined forensics this year to get over my fear of public speaking,” Young said.
Forensics is a club that consists of multiple different events that high schoolers perform in front of judges. The judges then give them a score on how they think they did.
“There are several different types of speech or drama categories that students can choose from and then they would compete against other students as well as trying to improve themselves,” forensics adviser Nicole King said.
To compete in these different events takes both skill and practice. Getting into a routine on how to practice for each event is key.
“I will compete in either special occasion speech or moments in history speech,” Young said. “To prepare for my events I will research, write, edit, perform in front of peers, fine tune and repeat until I feel confident enough to be able to compete.”
Due to COVID-19, how students compete looks a little bit different.
“Our tournaments will be virtual this year. This will offer more flexibility for student schedules but will be less interactive with students from other schools, for obvious reasons,” King said. “Students will need to submit a recording of their performance by certain deadlines for each tournament. The video links will be dispersed to the judges and then results back to the schools. Instead of celebrating in an auditorium at the tournament school we will have team celebrations here at Berlin.”
In past years, forensics has been known as time-consuming but that has changed and King advises that this would be the year to join because of that reason.
“If anyone has been thinking about maybe trying forensics, this would be a great year to do it! Usually we spend several hours at a school where students perform and compete, but instead we are recording and sending in the videos. The time commitment would be less this year,” King said.
The club will compete at their first competition in January.
