Posts

My TED Talk; or, Why Not To Change Your Topic 36 Hours Before Deliviring a Speech

As you might well surmise from the title of this blog post, the preparation process for my TED Talk took something of a turn for the unconventional partway through. This in fact stems less from what I did read in preparation for my talks as much as from what I did not read. I had prepared a talk that, due to a lack of reading of the assignment sheet and a few bad assumptions, was only tangentially related to the research that I had already conducted. Late on Tuesday evening, as I was practicing my speech, my instincts told me that my speech might not be related enough to my research to fulfill the requirements on the assignment sheet. Sure enough, it did not fit the requirements, and I wrote and practiced an entirely new speech on that day and the day after. Beyond my correction of this oversight, the reading with the greatest influence on my final talk was certainly all of that reading that informed me to make my speech a narrative. I found that framing the growth in the anti-scie...
Post a Comment
Read more

Educational Shifts; or, Why You Shall Never See A Poem Quite So Lovely As A Tree

After CAS on Tuesday, I was walking back to my dorm with one of my friends from the class and discussing the subject of other English classes. As we were doing so, I came to the realization that he had not had to memorize and recite poems in his English classes as I once had (One common poem choice for recitation, Joyce Kilmer's "Trees", was the basis of the title of this blog post). This in turn led me to realize that memorization in schools in general seemed to no longer be in vogue and, as such, that a paradigm shift had occurred. As a result of this realization, and the realization that finding sources for my other topic ideas was near impossible, I decided to choose as my topic the shift from memorization to critical thinking and analysis as the focus of education (especially in the humanities) in the past few decades, driven in part by the rise of the Internet. My thesis, in turn, will be that between 1960 and the present education has followed a general trend of ...
5 comments
Read more

Paradigm Shifts; or, How We Learned to Stop Bullying and Love the Nerds

Usually, when we talk about paradigm shifts, we talk about changes within large, complex societies. There was, however, one major paradigm shift that occurred before large, complex societies and made all later paradigm shifts possible: the development of agriculture. Before the development of agriculture, humans lived in small societies (capped at around 150-250, based on a psychological constant known as Dunbar's Number , which determines how many people we can form relationships with) that relied on hunting, foraging, and fishing for food. They generally were nomadic to some degree, moving seasonally in search of optimal food sources. The development of agriculture around 12000 years ago changed this permanently in societies that developed non-pastoral agriculture; they became settled and tied to a single homeland as opposed to migrating frequently. Villages developed, oftentimes with populations far higher than those of hunter-gatherer bands. This in turn set the stage for t...
6 comments
Read more

Audience Attention; or, Margaret Thatcher and the Power of Ad Hominen Humor

Margaret Thatcher, also known as the Iron Lady, is remembered as one of Britain's greatest prime ministers. She led Great Britain in the early 1980s, passionately opposed communism, and led a revival of conservatism after the famously liberal 60s and 70s. She could have done none of this, however, had she not been a master of manipulating audience attention. Gaining and maintaining audience attention is perhaps one of the greatest challenges in speaking and is certainly one of the most important goals for any speaker. An audience that does not listen may well miss the speaker's message and as such will not be convinced by it. As such we can say that one of the marks of a great speaker is the ability to keep audience attention. By this metric, we can easily say that Thatcher was an excellent speaker. For an example, look at Thatcher speaking in opposition to the Labor Party's push for greater unity with Europe here . This is, of course, a rather dry topic, and therefor...
3 comments
Read more

Kairos; or, Sun Tzu the Rhetor

Image
Sun Tzu, master of military strategy, wrote in his seminal work The Art of War "He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight". Of course, rhetoric is not a military art, but it is still strategic (i.e., it involves assessing one's circumstances systematically and identifying what to do to reach some goal) and so this advice still holds true. If we reinterpret this statement along rhetorical lines, we might summarize it by saying that no rhetor will be successful unless they speak (or write) their message at the optimal time. In fact, given this rephrasing, we could easily say that Sun Tzu was talking about the military equivalent of the rhetorical concept of kairos. Kairos is a Greek concept that is roughly equivalent to the English word timing. It means possessing the right confluence of current trends and events as well as audience beliefs to convince an audience of a concept. An argument without good kairos will inevitably fail, while a well-timed ...
6 comments
Read more

FDR's First Fireside Chat; or, Investment Banking for Dummies

Image
Photo Credit: Fireside Chat, undated. From UNC Greensboro Special Collections and University Archive's Photostream Imagine yourself as an average American on a Sunday evening in March of 1933. The Great Depression has reached its peak and for the past few days every bank in the nation has been closed. Unemployment is at record highs and shows no sign of improving. You are afraid for your own future and the future of your country. Then, the President's voice comes over the radio. Less than 15 minutes later, your fear is assuaged and you know what you must do to help the nation's economy recover from the crisis. That will be the hook for my civic artifact speech, which will be about FDR's first Fireside Chat (which you can listen to here ). The Fireside chats were a series of speeches broadcast over the radio throughout FDR's presidency directly to the American public. The first, made shortly after FDR was inaugurated as president, dealt with what was then a ver...
4 comments
Read more

Don't Get Me Started; or, Why I Hate Windows

Image
Anger by Saurabh Vyas I have noticed through watching the news and occasionally listening to the radio that angry people seem to be the most engaging. According to  PBS , twice as many Americans listen to the always-angry cable news than famously level-headed NPR. As such, in the name of making sure my blog is engaging to its audience, I decided to adopt an angry tone in my blog. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) for me, however, there is nothing that aggravates me so much that I can rant about it for 5 blog posts. I therefore found myself in a bit of a conundrum as to what I was going to use as a topic for my passion blog. It was at that moment that I remembered my favorite party game: Don't Get Me Started. The premise of the game is that all of the players sit in a circle and take turns going on angry rants about different subjects. The fun of the game comes from the conventionally benign and mundane topic of the rant. It is the job of the player whose turn it...
6 comments
Read more