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So yesterday while I was already out of the campus I got a text message from the secretary of the Office of Student Affairs saying that I would be off campus again today accompanying some of our graduating students to the culminating round of this English debate sponsored by a call center training company.

I guess I am the default adult companion of the group anyway, if no other faculty member is available, so I’m just wondering why it has not happened more often in the past.

There was already a session held in campus sometime before and a champion and a first runner up emerged after several tests, both written and oral, on vocabulary, pronunciation, interview and debate.

Those two were supposed to compete now against the other schools that the company had visited and given the tests to, for a final debate to show their reasoning and English skills.

So I do not know why it was said that all twenty of those who had participated in the first session had to be there.

Considering that the venue was just two classroom-sized training rooms whose partition was removed (and named after key cities of the world, by the way, where I suppose the clients of the company resided) then if we had brought everyone along it would have been a tight fit. Good thing only three of the students who did not place joined.

As it was, the largest group there was from a school whose chorale members also provided the intermission.

The second intermission was the president of the company who performed a rather complicated magic trick whose main source of awe could actually be explained by three instance of misdirection and making the audience believe that what was not actually a random choice was.

Anyway, even our students thought that there would still be some vocabulary and pronunciation parts, when it was actually just a debate, where each of the sixteen participants only got to speak twice with a time limit of one minute each instance, except for the captains of both side, who also got to spoke at the opening and the closing.

Well, our students, Kate and Ted, didn’t win, although the judges (both the president and the head of their human resources) told us during the picture taking afterwards that their scores were close.

More than one of our group wondered out loud if that is what they told all the schools.

After all, each participant got free ten-day training with them available up to June 2010.

We got back to school (well, actually I did in the hired van) at around 2pm earlier, and I left the plaque and their evaluation of the scores of our students with the Dean. I’m sure the Director for the School of Information and Communication Studies would find the data interesting.