Batter up… to the podium?

About fifteen years ago, I joined a church softball team.   My position was right field, the spot long-coveted by weak players who pray the entire game, dreading that a fly will veer so far toward the right field fence that the center fielder will not be able to dash over and snag it for the team.

No, I was not athlete.  I hadn’t played ball since I was in elementary school and could be talked into shagging baseballs out in the cornfield for my older brothers.  But I decided that my daughter who was taking Algebra II again needed to see her mom fail at something.  And what could be more public and humiliating than to fail at church softball, in front of people I would see on a regular basis and who would sympathetically cluck at me, rather than curse, when I struck out or jogged breathlessly to first base if the impossible actually happened and I hit the ball?

 

Probably like most people, I had spent the majority of my adult life engaged in activities and interests where I showed some proficiency.  And that expertise is what so deflated my daughter as she struggled with a subject she was not naturally gifted in, even though she was a “gifted” student.

I remembered my softball days today as I began searching for Socratic Seminar articles on overcoming the fear of public speaking for my handful of anxious students.  The tips in each article were essentially the same as those in the student text, so of not much help.  I cannily switched my search to YouTube, but with little success there, either.  I found ads or motivational TedTalks by coaches who clearly worked with highly proficient players.

That’s when I remembered another anecdote about my daughter. 

A few months ago, she shared with our writing critique group how she sometimes pauses the “Perfection Tape” that plays in her head when she begins a new piece:  She tells herself to create the worst piece of writing she possibly can.  Once that is on paper, the revisions come easily.  She has given herself permission to do a poor job; therefore, in her mind, it is acceptable as a first draft.

Her strategy is like when I tell my students to circle words they cannot spell.  It gives them permission to get the content onto paper and ignore conventions for the drafting stage. 

That’s when I had it:  I will schedule time for my Speech students to give the worst speech they can imagine.  Maybe we will even come up with a rubric for it. We could take the official speech rubric and negate it in as many ways as possible.  Then each student will have two minutes to try to outdo each other in the worst speech possible, as their first speech.  Of course, it won’t be graded, but it will allow them to mess up… and in a huge and public way, and with an appreciative audience.  Their second speech is bound to be better, now that they will have done their worst.

If it turns out the way my softball experience did, it will be an opportunity for nervous students to realize that even though we can sometimes look silly and inept, we can always improve.