On Wednesday, April 9th, thirty Choate students headed to East Haven High School to participate in the 26th annual Connecticut Council of Language Teachers Poetry Recitation Contest. Sixteen students returned with medals, earning Choate first place in the overall high school competition. Bledar Zenuni ’08, Angela Lee ’10, Supat Songmetta ’09, Jenny Wang ’09, Ashwini Kadaba ’08, Maddie Broder ’09, Kathleen Morales ’11, and Yoojin Ha ’08 received gold medals. Jimin Kim ’08, Andrea Mui ’08, Amy Gobel ’08, Noor Habboosh ’10, and Gerica Alvarado ’09 received silver medals. Adeline Mitchell ’11, Margaret Vallone ’10, and Angelica Calabrese ’10 received bronze medals.
CT COLT is an organization composed of language teachers from various schools in Connecticut. At this year’s competition about 1070 students from 95 different schools competed in 14 different languages, including American Sign Language, Ancient Greek, Mandarin Chinese, French, German, Modern Greek, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
“It was so crowded!” said Bledar Zenuni ’08.
The criteria judges looked at were memorization, diction, and interpretation. The high school level poems were fourteen through thirty lines long. Choate competed in eight out of the fourteen different languages: Spanish, Latin, Italian, French, Russian, American Sign Language, Japanese, and Chinese. The competitors from Choate placed in six out of eight of these languages.
The Poetry Contest’s purpose is dual: to encourage competition among Connecticut students and to foster a love for the verbal expression of language.
“Reciting the poem itself really helped me feel more comfortable with the language,” said Bledar Zenuni ’08. “Especially with not just the ability to pronounce the words, but to know the intrinsic and underlying meanings under the words and expressing these emotionally.” Bledar competed in the Level 3 Japanese category and won the gold medal.
Kathleen Morales ’11 was proud to know the meaning of her poem: “Of course I know the meaning of my poem,” Kathleen, who won the gold medal in the Level 1 Spanish category, told a fellow contestant.
Gerica Alvarado ’09 purposely picked her poem, Soneto XC by Pablo Neruda, because of the meaning behind it. “It was a love poem about a man who had a near death experience and all he could think about was his lover because she meant the world to him,” she explained. Gerica competed in the Native Spanish category and won the silver medal.
The students who competed were quite positive about the experience, although working up the nerve for the recitation was challenging. “It was a lot of fun,” said Noor Habboosh ’10, who won a silver medal in Latin level 2. “It was nerve wracking at the time, but it was nice and relaxing after that. They had some entertainment for us for about an hour with two girls that sang and a band that played for us.”
Choate won the contest overall, and received a plaque for the “Most Place-Winners at High School Level Award.” Choate has received this award before in, 1995, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2003, and 2006.
