Spanish Competitions?

All but one school has given me permission to share Viglo with it’s students so far, which begs the obvious question of how can I up my chances of getting a school’s approval to promote Viglo? Earlier a silly idea of creating a Spanish competition popped into my head.

The way I imagine this scenario is that I would bring in native Spanish speakers from various everyday life situations to come in and role-play with the students, and score them on how well the students were able to communicate in these role-playing situations. For example, I could have a waiter from a restaurant come in and role-play real-life situations at the restaurant. What we could do is give the student a task they need to accomplish with the native speaker. So, while interacting with the waiter, the student could receive instructions from Viglo to: "order a milanesa sandwich and an alcoholic beverage. Then, when you receive the sandwich, you'll need to make sure that you explain that you couldn't finish it and you would like the leftovers to be packaged to go." Once the role playing is completed, the native Spanish speaker involved in the role-play would take notes and score the student on his or her abilities to communicate what they were expected to communicate.

The next competitor would be put in the same situation but with different instructions. “Order spaghetti with white sauce. Then you need to complain that the noodles not cooked enough,” just as an example. All the competitors would go through their own situations, and earn points based on the native speakers' judgments.

I could take a competitive format like this and offer to host it for these language schools to let their students get some real-life work in with the Spanish skills that they're developing at the school. Of course, I'd have to disclose that the host of the event is an online language program, but maybe the event would be considered fun enough to permit me to do this with their school.

Obviously, there are lots of potential pitfalls with this idea. First, the potential monetary costs for me. Do I need to buy props? Would I need to pay for some kind of prize for the student who wins? Would I need to rent out a space to host this competition? Maybe the judges would come of their own accord just because they think it'd be fun to be a part of an event like this. Maybe if the event is shown to have some success and people enjoy it, I could convince various companies, like restaurants to keep with the example above, to offer a gift certificate as a prize for the winner of that round of competition. And I assume I need to have snacks and drinks for the competitors and judges to make the event enjoyable for all.

I still think that convincing the schools to participate in this would be difficult for two reasons: 1.) they simply would not wish to involve themselves with an event designed to promote a rival (which Viglo certainly is for many of them); and 2.) our modern-day sensibilities, sadly, are squeamish at the thought of competition. The idea that people will be judged as winners and losers is only viewed negatively with our modern mental fragility. This is an unfortunate aversion towards reality-based criticism because as a loser, seeing a winner’s achievement can be something to aspire towards, and your loss can be a motivator to up your game (that’s how a mentally tough individual would view it). Nonetheless, I definitely do see schools being very uncomfortable with seeing some of their students openly demonstrating their superiority over others in the ability to communicate in Spanish. This fear is something that we should grow out of, but society has decided to take the infantilization route.

One obvious response to the aversion of competition would be to host this event without judging the individuals involved. Let them simply go through with the role-play, share ways that the student could improve, and not score them or make it a competition. But this is something I absolutely refuse to do because it goes against the spirit of Viglo. Viglo's vision is to create a mentally tougher world, and exposing yourself to potential failure is a necessary step in mentally toughening yourself. In a situation like this, being judged will allow you to recognize your failures and give you tips and hopefully motivation to improve yourself, as a mentally tough person would. So, Viglo would not participate in an event that keeps these adult students participating in child's play.

While writing this, I’m starting to realize that to ensure that Viglo's values are being promoted and not neutered, Viglo simply needs to host the event itself rather than find a partnership. I was only looking at what I would need to do to make this competition a face to face one, but I could host it online and find competitors online instead of begging schools to provide me with competitors. Maybe just try to find six Spanish students to begin with who are interested in the competition. I could invite the Spanish judges to my apartment to conduct calls with the individual competitors, and the conversations could take place within the Viglo platform. This will expose the competitors to the Viglo platform as well as the competitive, tough-minded spirit of it. And I believe my cost would be zero. Maybe I only need to pay for a prize of sorts.

Furthermore, I can set a minimum standard of ability to converse in Spanish, thus filtering out students who would not be able to use Viglo in its current format… leaving me with only potential customers.

I’m going to test this out with my girlfriend Roxy. I will be a competitor and let her judge me, and we will get some data if this is something we should try.

Okay, this article has gone on way too long (the fact that I called it an "article" shows how long I've been rambling). But I am itching badly to try this out!

UPDATE (JAN. 10, 2024)
I woke up extremely excited on Monday because I could finally release the post I've been working on that would find out if others were also interested in trying a Spanish competition… only to be let down with lots of disappointment. Luckily, the disappointment didn't come from a lack of interest that I'm aware of, because my post wasn't even permitted to be displayed on Facebook groups or the Reddit pages where I wanted to share the competition idea with the community. I tried various Facebook groups and Reddit communities, and did several other things to try and get my post shared to the websites, but with no success.

The most frustrating thing about the entire situation is that my posts are being denied without an explanation. I'd like to know if they smell commercial marketization in my post (which they would be correct to do), or is it because my post is really long (which it is because I was sharing the details of the potential competition so that people would know it was an idea that had real thought put behind it).

I'm going to continue trying to get my post approved online, however, a new opportunity to recruit competitors fell into my lap yesterday at the school where I'm going undercover as a student in order to recruit Viglo users. (I go into detail about this in my January 10th update on my post about going undercover at a short-term Spanish School.) So maybe face-to-face recruiting for my Spanish competition idea will be better in the here and now. As mentioned in the previously linked article, I need to figure out how I'm going to approach these new students and convince them to try the Spanish competition idea. You'll find out how it all went down when I update the previous linked post again on Friday… my last chance at making this happen at that school.

UPDATE (JAN. 17, 2024)
I ended up canceling last week's attempt at having the Spanish competition (Boo!) since I couldn't get my post published anywhere online (the moderators would not approve it, and I never received any explanation. It was frustrating because half the posts on some of these Facebook groups are just individuals promoting their tutoring services. That's fine, but self-promotion certainly can't be the reason my post was denied, which I would've assumed was the reason). This week I didn't really know what to do, so I came up with the most genious idea.... I tried the same thing... copying and pasting my rejected post again to the websites. The outcome was almost universally the same, however, one of the Facebook groups accepted my post this time, for reasons I will never know. The only thing I can think of is that maybe it was a different moderator who looked at my post, and this moderator thought it was worthwhile for the Facebook group.

As soon as my post was approved and published, I began asking friends, and the friends of my girlfriend, to like it and add their own comments in the comments section. My thinking is that if others see a flurry of activity, this will provide some legitimacy to the post. I did get a lot of people liking the post, but when I would reach out to them individually, the vast majority either ignored my messages or claimed to be too new to Spanish to be able to compete (not sure if that's true or not). But, 4 days after the original post, I've done three interviews with participants. These consisted of 5 to 10-minute conversations with my girlfriend (a native Spanish speaker), which she would then score, one through ten, to indicate their level of Spanish for the competition. We don't really know exactly how to judge and score these calls, so my girlfriend is just assigning a number that, in her mind, quantifies the students' ability to converse in Spanish.

To find more participants, I've been contacting small Spanish programs in the United States as well by email, asking if the teachers have students who might be interested in participating in the competition. One of the schools with a very vague email (something like "info@nameofschool.com") responded positively, saying that it sounded like a fascinating idea, and the administrator forwarded my email to a number of individuals at the school. But so far, none of those individuals have chosen to reach out to me (maybe today I will contact each of those individuals myself, since I can see their emails in the forwarded email that was sent to all of us). I also went to several online language exchange websites and have been contacting individuals who are trying to learn Spanish. Of the well over 50 people I tried contacting so far, only three have responded, all expressing different reasons why they do not plan to participate. But today I will continue writing to more individuals, as soon as I'm unblocked from doing so for sending too many messages in a short amount of time on these language exchange websites.

Last night I also did another test call with my girlfriend, pretending that we were participating in one of these competitions, and I'm finding more and more issues that I need to resolve… luckily they are very solvable issues that just need some thought.

So even though I am disappointed in the lack of participants, I am more and more confident that this idea is legit. I think it's going to be a useful exercise for the participants, and I think it will be a great showcase for the power of Viglo. We're just 3 days from the event… woo hoo!