{"id":812,"date":"2006-10-26T22:54:00","date_gmt":"2006-10-27T03:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/wordpress\/roguerhet\/?p=812"},"modified":"2025-05-30T21:07:51","modified_gmt":"2025-05-31T02:07:51","slug":"halfway-there-teaching-public-speaking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/2006\/10\/26\/halfway-there-teaching-public-speaking\/","title":{"rendered":"Halfway There&#8230; Teaching Public Speaking"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"mobile-post\">It&#8217;s officially the halfway point and I have to admit that I&#8217;m not sure where the time has gone. One short speech, two long ones, and lots of non-discussion later&#8230; I&#8217;m not sure what the students are getting out of the class. I haven&#8217;t a clue if they are learning anything about speaking; I&#8217;m certainly not sure if they&#8217;ve learned anything useful. I hope they have. Honestly, I&#8217;ve tried to explain and demonstrate the power of words. But, students range from engaged to barely present intellectually.<\/div>\n<div class=\"mobile-post\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"mobile-post\">That&#8217;s pretty strange, when you think about it. I wonder if I&#8217;ve lost their interest at this point. I can&#8217;t tell if they care at all about the course. Then again, if I wanted a science degree and had to take speech, I wouldn&#8217;t care about it much either. I&#8217;m not sure there is a reason to care. How can I say such a thing?\u00a0Because the truth is that most people never do speak in a public forum and about the same number will ever think critically about the content of what anyone else says.<\/div>\n<div class=\"mobile-post\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"mobile-post\">I&#8217;m cynical, certainly, and maybe I hope to change one or two minds about how we think, but for the most part I&#8217;m not sure that&#8217;s likely. I&#8217;m not into theory, certainly not into the classical traditions of rhetoric, and couldn&#8217;t tell you all the big Greek or Latin words for how to analyze a speech. What matters to me is that if a student wants to learn to speak, I can do my best to help him or her.<\/div>\n<div class=\"mobile-post\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"mobile-post\">My ideas about speaking are nothing more than a hunch. That hunch is no different, I suppose, that what all the famous dead men wrote about speaking. That makes me think they weren&#8217;t so smart or wise &#8212; their works are simply the ones to survive and the ones we quote.<\/div>\n<div class=\"mobile-post\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"mobile-post\">So Aristotle had some ideas. That&#8217;s nice. Do they apply to my students? Maybe. Or maybe my hunches are just as valid as anything some thinker wrote in the fourth century BCE. I wish I could care more, but I don&#8217;t. It isn&#8217;t like I&#8217;m ever going to grasp theories about human &#8220;constructions&#8221; of knowledge and I don&#8217;t really mind that my mind is more practical.<\/div>\n<div class=\"mobile-post\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"mobile-post\">Students need the practical more, anyway.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s officially the halfway point and I have to admit that I&#8217;m not sure where the time has gone. One short speech, two long ones,&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/2006\/10\/26\/halfway-there-teaching-public-speaking\/\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Halfway There&#8230; Teaching Public Speaking<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":1148,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"iawp_total_views":6,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,12],"tags":[60,66,163,192,260,277,317],"class_list":["post-812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","category-teaching","tag-career","tag-classical-rhetoric","tag-greek","tag-latin","tag-public-speaking","tag-rhetoric","tag-teaching","entry"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Halfway There... 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