By Aimee Bisbee
ROGERS, ARK. — Haas Hall Rogers has a new club focused on building scholars’ confidence in public speaking. The speech and debate club was founded by sophomore Delaney Fehr and is the newest addition to Haas Hall’s club roster.
Many scholars are excited about the new club. Quinn Matushek, a member of the club, stated her feelings about it, “I like how much you get to speak your own opinions; and, we’re just all working together in the group, and we all get to bounce off each other, and really communicate.”
The goal for the club is to improve scholars’ public speaking skills, “Well my goal really is to help people be better with public speaking cause that’s such a thing that we’re losing these days as everybody struggles with social anxiety so much but it’s getting so much worse in all kids these days…if you’re going to be successful and have a good job someday social skills are important and this is just really confidence boosting.” States Delaney Fehr.
Currently, the club is only open to 9th-12th graders; they meet every Monday from 2:30 to 3:30. As for what members can expect to do at meetings Ferh stated, “Well they can expect to practice debates, have debates, and give some different speeches, and we’re expecting to hopefully go to competitions where we can professionally give an actual speech in a competition and give debates with other people not from our school.”
Matushek gave additional insight into what the practices are like, “Sometimes we’ll play debate games. We’ll do five-minute speeches; and, we mainly do debates on fun topics.”
When asked about the atmosphere of the club Matushek replied, “It can get tense sometimes, we are debating, but usually it’s very positive; and, we’re all trying to help each other, and move it forward.” She then continued, “We all try to encourage each other and keep it nice, and be encouraging for people doing speeches.”
Despite debating controversial topics, the club has a very positive environment. “Well, for the most part, you just have to keep everyone who is not currently debating quiet or they’ll get distracted, and if they’re going way too far you just cut them off a little bit.” To keep order during practice, there are moderators assigned to make sure debates go smoothly.
Though they have not been to any competitions yet, they plan on participating in some at other local high schools. Captain Delaney Ferh explained the different competition events, “So there’s kinda a lot but there are three primary categories; there is speech, debate, and forensics. So in speech, there is impromptu speech, there is an informative speech, and there is a lot more but those are the important ones that we’re working on.”
The club is currently focusing on impromptu speeches, “Right now we’re working on impromptu because you have five minutes to research and then you give a 2-minute speech. So yeah it just helps you think on your feet and it gives you all those skills you need to do a debate. The speeches are often really casual in a way like they’re not casual but they’re entertaining, they’re supposed to be uplifting and like you’ll say a joke or something.”
Ferh encourages anyone who is interested to join the club. It can be a great opportunity to learn new skills and make friends, “It’s a lot of fun you should come.”
