Archive for July, 2009

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Tips on How to Conduct a Table Topic Session


2009
07.14

Posted in Table Topics ideas | 2 Comments »

DTM Ron Kirchgessner, the Immediate Past District 11 Governor, share these tips:

Running Table Topics is one of those areas that I really enjoy.

Some approaches I have used are
  • Have a membership roster that has people with duties marked off. That way you are calling on those who don’t have speaking opportunities. And it will help when you don’t know someone’s name.
  • Have three levels of questions: softball, regular and challenge. That helps everyone feel comfortable, from the novice to the pro. Make sure there is at least one super challenge question for that 20+ year veteran.
  • Variation on the challenge question is to take some figurines (I used Lord of the Rings) in three sizes. Let them select a small, medium or large figurine and then receive the appropriate easy, standard or hard question, respectively. This also works with candy or mints which the speaker can keep.
  • A variation on the Picture entry in your document is to assemble a collection of vacation pictures of you and ask them to describe what is going on in the photo. The pictures were collected over several vacations with no two the same place.
  • The Academic Challenge is modeled after Jeopardy. I have five topics (Religion, Gender, Math, Politics and History), each with a softball, standard and challenge question. They choose both the topic and difficulty level.
  • This Day in History is a great source of topics. The site http://www.butlerwebs.com/holidays/default.htm is useful for finding and developing questions for a session on a particular day.

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How to Be Funny with Table Topics


2009
07.10

Posted in Table Topics strategies | 3 Comments »

Sometime when you converse with your friends, you mention something off the cuff and then they laughed. That’s the funny moment. If you record these little incidents, you will have your own compilation of funny moments.  These are jokes that are already proven by you. So you know it works.

If we cannot share our jokes, we can share humourous stories. Think ‘Stand up Comedy’.

I heard that William Robin is so good with comedy, that if you give him any topics (from A to Z), he can tell you a joke on the spot.  You can do it if you practice often enough.

The problem with some people is that they rehash the same jokes from Internet. It is better to extract from one’s own experience.

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How to Practise Table Topics


2009
07.10

Posted in Table Topics ideas | 2 Comments »

Sandy Campbell shares a good tip:

To practise table topics I flip through radio stations while driving.  I turn on to a station and whatever is the topic that DJ is speaking about, or whatever topic the song playing is about, I use that as my Table Topic.

So the other night as I was driving to a Toastmasters meeting, I did a quick 2 minute speech on “Truck Tires in my driveway…” (country song!), and “Taxes due April 15th” and “melting glaciers.”

You can do that same thing with a newspaper in the morning.  Open up a page and give a table topics speech on the first headline you see.

Sandy

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