This has been a rough semester.
Three weeks ago today the college’s beloved choral director, Bill Brewer, died after an 18-month battle with cancer.
Yesterday my friend and fellow speech professor Carolyn Buttram died after living with cancer for nearly 20 years.
There’s no way around it. It sucks. But there are aspects around Carolyn’s passing that are sweet, as well as aspects I regret.
This is very human: I tend to assume that if you are a good, intelligent person, and you know what I know about some issue, then you will do what I do. If you don’t do what I do, then it must mean a) you don’t know enough yet to agree, or b) turns out you’re not a good or intelligent person after all.
It’s a very human assumption. It’s just not very useful. Continue reading
There is a bit of wisdom that sticks with me from childhood, from Ecclesiastes 4:12, that says, “A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” Even if you don’t do a lot of manual labor (I certainly don’t), you still know that a typical rope isn’t just a bunch of threads. It consists of fibers twisted into yarn, yarn twisted into strands, and strands twisted into lays. A typical rope consists of three lays.
That metaphor serves well in thinking about improving effective speaking. It takes competence in three areas woven together: effective delivery, effective organization for the ear, and effective content. Continue reading
There is some standard advice you hear offered to writers of every type and sort. “Don’t write unless you have to,” or “If you can not write, don’t.” The idea seems to be that writing is so hard that you shouldn’t do it unless you feel a compulsion to do so, or else that unless you feel that sort of compulsion, you will never achieve any level of skill.
Rubbish. Continue reading
Communication is always important, of course, but it’s especially important in a crisis. There have been no posts here for a week or so because we’ve been dealing with our own crisis, but there was plenty of communication going on.
We live in East Tennessee, where six Red Cross shelters opened up because of people losing power or water during a weeklong battle with ice. Snow and freezing rain fell several times, and the temperature did not go above freezing for nearly a week. Continue reading
My wife said something to me while I was in the middle of a frustrating experience that completely changed it.
She said thank you. Continue reading
Note: this post mirrors one I posted on the PSCC Mobile Fellows blog. I think it will interest this audience also.
Brandon Ballentine and I talked about this a bit on an episode of our new podcast, Mobile Talk. (Promotional bit: you can subscribe on iTunes or via RSS feed, or look at the Podcast category for past episodes.) Twitter can be quite a useful tool for sharing information among colleagues and students, and there are a number of mobile tools for managing it. (My favorite is Hootsuite, available for iOS and Android.)
There is a practical question for teachers, though: do you maintain a separate account for professional-interest tweets, or do you simply tweet as yourself from one account for everything you’re interested in? Continue reading
My students are just finishing an assignment. I asked them to write down 10 possible topics for an informative speech every day for a week (well, five days out of seven). In other words, they would wind up with 50 possible topics.
I have survived the system they are now working through, so I know, with absolute certainty, that many of them put it off until the night before it was due and generated 50 topics all at once. Continue reading
In my public speaking courses, we are just finishing the first round of “speeches.” (I put it in quotation marks because they’re really get-on-your-feet exercises.) I can already see a key difference among many of them.
There are two kinds of speakers: drivers and sailors. (There are two kinds of people: those who put everyone into two categories, and those who don’t. But that’s another post.) Drivers may or may not know where they’re going, but they try to steer everything exactly where they want to go. Sailors, likewise, may or may not know where they’re going, but they’re comfortable adapting to constantly changing conditions. Continue reading
After a couple of days, I noticed that the level of the creamer I kept in the community fridge in the hospital’s PICU (pediatric intensive care unit) had gone way down, much lower than my own usage would suggest.
My daughter’s health was, of course, of much greater concern, but it still registered in my consciousness. Later in the day, the level was noticeably lower, despite me having had no further cups of coffee.
Obviously, someone was using my creamer, although it was clearly labeled with my daughter’s name and hospital room number. Continue reading
