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Public speaking challenging for teens

A few years ago, my husband and I were tag-teaming tutoring one of my young cousins as she was in the final stages of her high school years.
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A few years ago, my husband and I were tag-teaming tutoring one of my young cousins as she was in the final stages of her high school years. I was in charge of the liberal arts portion of the curricula and my husband looked after the hard sciences and maths while she looked after keeping us updated on her texting fights with her friends and of how excited she was about getting her licence and about graduating high school.

I am a school dork and I really love it when someone in my family needs help with their English homework. With one major exception: speeches. I know that speeches are a constant part of the high school English curriculum in British Columbia. Every year when I was in high school, we all muddled through our three minute speeches (in thirty seconds) that no one cared about (perhaps not even the teacher). We hoped that the speech was longer when we were saying it in class than when we were practising it at home and usually it wasn't. Then, of course, there were always one or two actors in the class who were seemingly smarter and more charismatic than everyone else in the class and their speeches would be chosen to perform first in front of the school, than in local, regional and provincial competitions. That person was never me.

When I first entered high school, like so many other eighth graders, I made the classic speech error of choosing too big of a topic that was too serious. The topic I chose was suicide and my speech could be boiled down to one point: don't do it. In ninth grade, I chose to do my speech on the Wiccan religion. Because, you know, witches are cool. It was not a good speech. In grade ten, I'm pretty sure that my speech had something to do with the meaning of life. As you may be able to imagine, I found the meaning of life, wrote eighteen books about it, I have my own talk show and I am rich and famous.

When I was tutoring my young cousin and it was speech-time, I groaned inwardly, and I asked her if she chose a topic yet. She very earnestly wanted to write about "war." I asked her what was it about war that we wanted to write about and she responded, "I mean, war, what is it good for?" My husband immediately, yelled: "Houh!" and then we both sang in unison, "Absolutely nothing! Say it again, ya'll!" Meanwhile, my cousin, who is a member of much younger generation, blinked at us in total confusion while we sang the rest of the Edwin Starr song.

My cousin eventually ended up writing about how bad she is at cooking rather that the pointlessness of war and she did very well. I know that high school speeches are designed to have us practice public speaking so we aren't terrible at it in our real life jobs but I have some doubts on how the hormones and extreme social discomfort that exists in high school helps in any real way. My own discomfort during high school English speeches has not helped me in my career and I speak in front of large groups of people frequently. Time and comfort in your own skin goes a long way to helping you not look like an idiot while public speaking; but there are no guarantees.