Micheal's Memoir
During my freshman year of high school, my Ag teacher, Mr. Holthaus taught my class the basics of parliamentary procedure. Parliamentary procedure are the proper rules on how to hold a meeting. The United States Congress, the FFA, and many companies use parliamentary procedure to make sure that business is taken care of in a timely and efficient way. Mr. Holthaus thought that learning parliamentary procedure as an important part of being an Ag student and an FFA member, so he took it upon himself to teach the students parliamentary procedure. The whole class had to learn the basic motions like Receive and Dispose, Rise to a Point of Order, Refer to a Committee, Lay on the Table, and other motions. We all participated in this and it was fun making up random motions and voting on them. Time passed on and we soon finished the unit and I thought my days of parliamentary procedure were over, but they weren’t.
Towards the end of the year Mr. Holthaus approached me about participating in the Conduct of Meetings Team. I was hesitant to join at first because I knew that it would require a lot of practice to learn how to properly hold a meeting, but I decided to join anyway. My team consisted of Kayleigh Koch as President, Hunter Mcleree as Treasurer, Courtney Koch as Reporter, Caryn Stewart as Secretary, Cameron Amos as Sentinel, Nashua Lansing as Advisor, Russell Pleggunkhule as an Alternate, and myself as the Vice-President. The eight of us knew that if we wanted to do good in this contest we would have to practice often, so we decided to practice every Tuesday and Thursday. As the days wore on we soon came to enjoy the time that we spent in Mr. Holthaus’s room practicing and becoming better friends.
Before we knew it contest day was upon us. Sub-Districts was being held in Oelwein, so my team and I boarded a bus with our fellow FFA members and headed South. When we arrived at Oelwein we sat in a gymnasium before we were ushered of to the Conduct Holding Room. There we waited along with the other teams competing. We were the last team out of six teams to compete so we knew that it would be a while before we performed. So, we just relaxed and messed around. We played card games, chatted and simply became better friends. When we were finally called to perform we had lost all of the butterflies in our stomach because we had completely forgotten about the contest during our time in the holding room. With hardly any nerves we performed well and nailed our questions. Now came the long wait, we went and ate supper and sat around and chatted with other FFA members. Contest after contest went up on the board, but the Conduct of Meetings results seemed to take forever. Finally after nearly two hours the judges came out and put the results up on the board. We placed second Gold and we advanced to Districts. We were overjoyed, but we knew that our ultimate goal was to make state so we kept on practicing. Districts was only a couple weeks after Sub-Districts and before we knew it we found ourselves in the holding room again. We knew that it was going to be tougher this time. The competition would be even more difficult and the judges would expect more from us, but we didn’t let that make us nervous. Again we simply stayed calm in the holding room and just had fun. We weren’t last this time so we
North Fayette Valley FFA