Practice habits!

[rkrboi]

How do you guys practice? How long? Any tools?

Fire away!

[Aramis90]

When I was in speech ( 2004-2008) I practiced every day. I try to get my students to do that nowadays, but they always seem to come up with an excuse. No matter what though, if you work on your cases or performance a little bit every day, itll all come together later. Stuff I do to make peices crisp: I have a program on powerpoint. I have different slides with different numbers on them, ussually 1-10(can be more for duos but this is mainly for HI). I have the people assign each character in their peice a different number, then I slide through the powerpoint through the different numbers until their pops are crisp and clean. For debaters, I constantly have my students hit each other. Not in the face (though it somtimes gets to that in LD, lol). Anyways, they always know what everyone else is running and help each other out on their cases, this makes sure that there arent a lot of flaws in their cases. My extempers do an extemp draw once a day from a list of ten extemp topics that Logan Scisco writes on his website, and I have all my speakers perform pen drills. This is where you put a pencil or pen in your mouth and speak each word in syllables. This really helps with enunciation and makes the speaker seem more elegant and professional.
If you have any other questions, please ask

Kyle

[rkrboi]

That is interesting. It seems like that can produce some very skilled students.

[oHIo]

Lets see...

Well, I have a full length mirror at home and I try to run at least one piece a day when I have a tournament that weekend to stay ready. I don't really do any pop exercises because my pops are already really clean and probably won't get that much better with exercises.

A couple weeks before national tournaments though I pull out the video camera and tape each of my pieces, watch them myself, then send them out a bunch of people to get their opinions/notes/critiques on them. After I get those I just work more and keep taping/sending out stuff.

That's pretty much what I do. It's a bit abnormal though because my school doesn't have a coach for interp and I have to do stuff on my own.

[tis4tara]

I 'm an extemper and at my school we ussaly cut on tuesdays, give practice speeches on thursdays, and before big tournaments, give a simulated speech on friday where we sit down and outline a question and answer on a chalkboard.

[madeline(:]

At my school we have two 'practice rooms' with a huge mirror in them so you can see yourself preform & often we will video tape ourselves because sometimes you can't tell that you've fallen into a vocal pattern or other details until you watch yourself.

We actually don't practice that much at school on i.e. events much to our coach's dismay. But we do start to stay afterschool more and more as bigger tournaments come up.
We also do a lot in class performances to get critiques and that helps too.

[DavidSSabb94]

I am the only congress debater in my school, as my signature might suggest. Therefore I am on my own as far as writing bills, doing research, and making speech notes. As far as the actual speeches, over-rehersal will make them seem too canned, I like it when my speeches have some amount of feeling, but I'll always try to have all my basic points memorised.

Our school as a team practises every Thursday, and also on Tuesday and Friday if a tournament is immienently approaching.