What Do You Do on Day 1 with Your New Team?

A new speech & debate club started up today at Wexford Montessori Magnet School. I spent an hour working with 13 students and their new teacher/coach, Eric Royston. I was so excited after spending so much time advocating for new clubs in the past year to be seeing one actually getting going, and a lot of it had to do with Eric’s willingness to step up and take charge of it. He visited each classroom at the school to pitch the idea of a speech & debate team, and I think that made a big difference. 13 is a really good number for a first meeting. It bodes well for the other new programs getting started in the coming weeks and months.

We spent time discussing the difference between speech & debate and other competitive activities like soccer, how speech might enable us to have the skills and confidence to make changes in the world. We discussed what sorts of things would be worth changing and why advocating for change can be difficult. We also did a round table debate brainstorming exercise on the topic of whether the school should double its recess time. Health and productivity benefits figured prominently.

It was wonderful interacting with this group. They were very engaged with our discussion and there were always 4-5 hands up ready to make a contribution. The students did a great job and convinced me they are going to be a very successful team in Mid Michigan, a model for other new programs starting up.

A Zen Approach to Anxiety

Zen of Throwing it Away

Neat article with a useful principle. If you have some hangup causing you trouble, one way to deal with it is simply to abandon it. I think the principle works well with speech anxiety and perhaps other forms of anxiety as well.

Presentation Zen: Is it finally time to ditch PowerPoint?

Presentation Zen: Is it finally time to ditch PowerPoint?

I have been collecting information about PowerPoint and this blog entry from Presentation Zen encapsulates the main issues involved in my opinion. As much as I love to transfer all my frustrations with bad presentations onto the software, Garr Reynolds is right to point out the tool is not to blame. Then again, the templates and defaults are created by the programmers and can we really expect people to make their slides the slow way? Okay, let’s blame it on bad design, but let’s also aim scrutiny at the software designers.

Don’t Look at Your Slides????

Myths about the developing world (Amazing graphics) (TEDTalks, Hans Rosling) – Google Video

Steve Esquith passed this along to me and I think it is an excellent speech. At around 4:00-4:30 there is a neat and clear case where the speaker has turned his back and is talking to the visual aid and is most certainly getting away with it. The description of the video makes almost an unflattering comparison to a sportscaster, referring to “the drama and urgency.” On the contrary, the speaker is actually just displaying basic competence by speaking in a dynamic and engaged fashion.

There is much to praise about the speech and it’s also about a very interesting subject, in Tufte’s words, the visual display of quantitative information. Rules of presenting are made to be broken when you have a good argument…

Here’s some other commentary.