Secondary schools in the South West Education Division (Swed) and Shire Highlands Division on Saturday and Sunday battled it out in the Association of the Teaching of English in Malawi (Atem) divisional finals.<\/p>\n
The Shire Highlands divisional finals were held at Thyolo Secondary School on Saturday where only four schools participated namely St Patricks, Providence, Chiradzulu and the host.<\/p>\n
The host however, failed to utilise the home ground advantage when they came last with St Patricks on first position, Providence on second position and Chiradzulu on third position.<\/p>\n
The three schools have since qualified for the regional finals whose dates will be announced later.<\/p>\n
The South West Education Division was held at HHI Secondary School in Blantyre on Sunday where 14 schools participated.<\/p>\n
The plays started in the morning but went all the way to the early hours of yesterday with the results being announced around 1:18am.<\/p>\n
It was a tough battle with the judges of Tiyesa Singano and Joshua Bhima having a tough task to pick the best three to make it to the regional final.<\/p>\n
It was a long competition which kept the students and the audience waiting but at the end of it all the host HHI came first with Our Lady of Wisdom and Michiru View Girls coming second and third respectively.<\/p>\n
The three have qualified for the regional finals.<\/p>\n
HHI whose students went on singing spree chanting \u2018Wakwiya ndi Mfiti\u2019 after their triumph shined with their play titled Friday at 4PM <\/em>while Our Lady of Wisdom staged their production titled Expedition Gallop <\/em>with Michiru staging a piece titled Tears Shed No Tears. <\/em><\/p>\n The competition saw schools staging plays tackling different topics including love and human trafficking but the productions lacked quality and most of them were sub-standard.<\/p>\n However, there were some schools which did well and as usual the schools excelled in the area of costume and props.<\/p>\n The other schools that participated included Naizi CDSS, Jacaranda School for Orphans, Target Private School, Soche Hill Secondary School, Joyce Banda Foundation, Bright-Era Private, St Thereza, Lunzu, Baptist and Bangwe CDSS.<\/p>\n There were also other awards during the competition among them Best Actor and Actress, Best English Speaker and Best Directed Play.<\/p>\n Atem still needs to work up from its slumber and attract more sponsors for the competition which has seen every year schools putting in much effort but not getting enough in terms of rewards.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a challenge really, schools are putting in a lot of money, you talk of costume but then the prizes they receive are not enough and as a result some schools have not joined the race this year. Atem organisers need to jack up,\u201d said one of the teachers, who did not want to be named.<\/p>\n He also said that the organisers need to hold the competition in neutral venues and true to his word, the students from the host school had an advantage and performed whilst the hall was quiet but thereafter the other schools performed with noise all over.<\/p>\n This made it difficult for the judges to hear some of the performances and at one time one of the judges had to plead with the students to stop making noise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Secondary schools in the South West Education Division (Swed) and Shire Highlands Division on Saturday and Sunday battled it out in the Association of the Teaching of English in Malawi (Atem) divisional finals. The Shire Highlands divisional finals were held at Thyolo Secondary School on Saturday where only four schools participated namely St Patricks, Providence, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":19390,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19385"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19391,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19385\/revisions\/19391"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}