I teach a basic public speaking course at a local community college. In order to appeal to a variety of learning styles, I start each 3 hour class period showing a 10 to 15 minute public speech that has been acknowledged as a "great speech." We then take another 10 or 15 minutes to discuss the speech - what we liked, what we didn't like, the delivery, the use of metaphor or language or alliteration, and other speech-related components. I've shown Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, President Kennedy's inaugural, Stephen Colbert's address to the White House correspondents' dinner, and President Reagan's address to the nation after the Challenger explosion. While I considered trying to incorporate less political speeches, I found that the truly great speeches, and the ones that particularly show the elements I'm highlight in class, tend to be political. And while I'm trying to provide a balance of ideologies, many of the modern "great speeches" tend to be made by liberals.
Yesterday I showed Obama's acceptance speech on election night 2008. While this is a speech by a politician, it has notably no policy components. Rather, it is a tempered, well delivered speech where Obama uses personal information, addresses a variety of audiences, uses metaphor and alliteration, gets the audience involved... everything public speaking book authors promote. And that was what I wanted my class to focus on.
As I was pulling the video up, one student noticed that it was Obama, and made a joke about "getting a cot." I thought maybe there was something about Obama's delivery he found boring; Obama does tend to speak slowly, and perhaps this man didn't love that. But once the video start playing, he began reading his book (at least it was the text book, I guess). And for 17 minutes, while the whole video played, he didn't look up once. After the video was over, I turned the lights back on and opened the discussion for the class, looking for elements they saw that we had talked about in class, or elements they liked or didn't like. Throughout this discussion, this man continued to read his book.
Toward the end of the discussion, I said that I understood that not everybody likes Obama or thinks that he's a good speaker, directly calling out this guy who would rather read his book than watch. He ignored me. So I pushed it further, asking him to tell us what it is about Obama's speaking that he doesn't like. He said that he just disagrees with everything Obama stands for and so he can't listen to him, and he'd learn more just from reading his book. I turned to the rest of the class and said that this is a good example to think about for persuasion speeches (which are coming up), in that if you pick a subject that the audience is completely ideologically opposed to, you end up alienating the audience and further entrenching their previously held opinions rather than changing their minds.
In retrospect, I suppose I should have asked him to leave. After all, if he can learn more from reading his book (reading the chapters he was supposed to have already read for class that day, by the way), then he can go and read his book somewhere else, instead of distracting and frustrating me, which in turn distracts the class. Part of the issue is my own personality, which isn't the type to do that to anyone, combined with my fear of confrontation (which is why I'm not a lawyer), and, frankly, the fact that he's a non-traditional student and is older than me. I know it shouldn't matter, but it does.
Class progressed, and we talked about getting ready for their persuasive speeches, including how they should do audience analysis in choosing a topic. Then I had them work in pairs to come up with topics, and worked my way around the classroom to talk to each student. When I got to this student, he provided his topic, which was that the United States government, in order to solve the budgetary problems and growing deficit, should make trillions (yes, trillions) of dollars of spending cuts across the board.
Interesting that after the whole class talked about their love for Obama, and considering my own (probably clear) predilections, that he should choose this topic. Now, I don't want to impose my beliefs on my students, and I want them to feel that they can talk about anything they believe in. He does show a lack of audience analysis though. He and I have had discussions outside of class about political issues, particularly the issue of funding education and paying teachers, so he knows where I stand.
I'd never do it, but I'd really like to pull out a book and start reading through his whole speech.
