April 7, 2014 Club Meeting

The following is a summary of the minutes from our April 7th meeting.

Meeting Location:   San Mateo City Hall, San Mateo, CA     6:00 p.m. – 7:15 p.m.

Attendees:

Present at the meeting were: Samya Boxberger Oberoi, Brenda Chung, Eric Jones, Lara Miller, Aditi Mishra, Suzanne Mulcahy, David Nazzaro, Martin Quan, Xin Tang.  There were no guests.  Glenn

Aditi was the Toastmaster; Eric was the General Evaluator; Glenn was the Timer, Brenda was the Grammarian, and Eric was the Ah Counter.

Speaker #1:  Suzanne:  “Bullying Behavior Among Our Youth – Part II”

Manuel #8:    “Get Comfortable with Visual Aids”

Suzanne began her speech by describing some of the contributing factors of bullying behavior, which included children being exposed to too much violence, and the society being more polarized.  She described the four forms of bullying, physical, verbal, social, and cyber bullying.

Suzanne then described the three players in the bullying scenario.  There is the bully, the victim, and the bystander.  “The life blood of the bully is the bystander.  They love an audience.”  “Experts have said that empowering the bystander to take action, might be the key to stopping bullies.”

Speaker #2:  Samya:  “Building An Aquaponics Garden””

Advanced Manuel, #3:  “Speech to Inform”

Samya described the method that she used to build a sustainable garden system where she could grow organic vegetables.  She used a fish tank with five fish to generate the kind of chemicals and nutrients found in the soil.  This water is then directed up to a gutter system on the top to furnish water for the plants.  This water is filtered and then sent back to the fish tank.  The water is flowing in such a way that it generates oxygen for the fish.

Samya gave her speech with the details of this entire system and how it was built.  She ended her speech by showing us a picture of the completed project.     

Evaluation:  Lara evaluated Suzanne’s speech.  Lara stated that Suzanne was clearly an expert in this field and presented her information well and in an organized way.  Her message was clear and very informative.  Lara suggested that Suzanne use a power point presentation, which would be more effective since it would allow the visuals to be presented in color.  "Suzanne was very succinct and her message was supported by images that illustrated her message but did not overpower her voice or distract from her words."      

Evaluation:  Samya’s speech was given with a group evaluation.  They stated that the demonstration of her new system was ingenious.  One person asked if Samya was an engineer.  She gave her presentation with humor and wonderful detailed information about putting this system together.  Samya captured our attention and really piqued our interest.  Many asked her if she thought of getting venture capital for this idea.  She definitely achieved her objective of taking us through a project to its conclusion.    

The theme of the meeting was: “Baseball” and the Word of the Day was “surreptitious”.   Xin was the Table Topics Master.  

Samya closed the meeting at 7:20 p.m.