A Judge for Two Days

As a teacher, assessing, criticizing, critiquing and evaluating things aren’t really new to me. I’ve been an educator already for half a decade and of course, I have done a lot of grading sheets already. However, believe it or not, long time ago, I really wanted to experience being a judge of a prestigious event of an institution that I am not connected. It is because all my experiences in checking and grading different things would always be related to my job and my profession. It’s either I’ll be checking the outputs of my students or would be choosing the best entry for an essay writing contest.

So, while I was thinking of an activity that I’ll be doing for the Walk the Edge activity, I was so glad when I received two invitations to be a judge of two different events hosted by two different schools. This is something that I really wanted to experience. With this, I gladly accepted both invitations with a lot of enthusiasm even though I had to re-schedule some of my errands to resolve schedule conflicts. 

On July 7, 2017, I went to St. Joseph School of Pandacan to be their judge on their Club Recruitment Day. I was one of the three judges who were tasked to choose which among the clubs will be the recipients of the special awards – Most Creative, Most Organized and the Most Enthusiastic.

Each club presented their persuasive campaigns inside the classrooms of all the students and it was a half-day activity. There were twelve co-curricular clubs and most of them prepared a video campaign hoping that the students will be interested to join their respective clubs after watching the videos that they have prepared. Honestly speaking, I did not have a trouble giving scores since it is quite easy to distinguish which club did superb.

However, I did not experience the same thing last July 13, 2017 when I went to San Beda College to judge the class presentations of the forty sections of the Senior High School Department. The activity served as their culmination for Integration 2017, an annual event that is conducted to welcome the newcomers in the Bedan community.  It is indeed a unique way of introducing the Bedan culture to them.

There were twenty presentations and each presentation is composed of Grade 11 and 12 students. The STEM students’ theme revolves around the future of the environment and the technology. ABM students’ presentations must depict the future of the economy and the HUMSS students must show how they view the future of peace. GAS students were allowed to choose any of the aforementioned.

This time, I felt how hard it is to be a judge. I was erasing my scores from time to time because I was undecided. Most of them did well and it was not an easy decision that we, the judges, need to make. As a matter of fact, when we were tallying the results, we found out that most of us have different bets on the contest. The decision wasn’t unanimous and it only shows how tough the competition was.

At the end of the show, I realized that even if being a judge and being a teacher both require the skill of assessment, these two things are still far different from one another. Indeed, it’s an experience that I am going to treasure. Even though it gave me a headache, I still had a lot of fun and I am now looking forward to the next one.