Final Presentation Speech

This is the original draft of the speech that I gave today as my final presentation. Before the text, here's the YouTube version:



Debate is changing.

Ten years ago, the activity of policy debate was about speaking 300 words a minute, about using tools of reason and communication to talk about big ideas and big government initiatives. For decades now, this formula has worked well to get kids from suburban schools, rural schools and fancy private schools to come to tournaments every weekend. But it’s been hard to get kids from urban schools to succeed at the top levels of debating in the traditional manner: talk faster, research more, know everything about the far-away lands of policy and politics. Recently though, several urban schools have started a new approach: make it personal. Suddenly kids are showing up at tournaments and winning by asking new questions: how does debating affect me? How does its elitism exclude us? How can we use its tools to break it down and put it back together again as something that connects to our experience? We’ll get back to these questions in a bit.

Education is changing.

In America, it’s always fashionable to talk about the latest change and how we can grab onto it, how the old way of doing things is obsolete and should be replaced. Education has always been changing; lately it’s been changing in a way that attempts to put the experiences of students front and center. Think about the questions Adie asked of us for this final project. “How can we bring students’ backgrounds into our teaching?” Not whether, not why, those questions are assumed to already be answered. This narrative that MSU wants us to learn isn’t about progress, it isn’t about saving American jobs; it’s sort of about saving the American soul, about healing the wounds of divisiveness and hierarchy. It’s about making education relevant to students; in short, making it personal. A few weeks ago I had a conversation with Avner Segall, the professor in charge of secondary social studies for all of us going that route. One of the things Professor Segall said to me was that TE250 is the real social studies curriculum, which I thought was a very revealing statement.

I am changing.

I got into teaching to be an agent of debate within schools, to gain the power of a teacher so I could spread my message like some kind of missionary for competitive speech. And don’t get me wrong, I still believe that. But I’ve been slowly waking up to something else recently, too. Teaching as a craft, as a science, as an art is not abstract. Great teaching is personal, and to be a great teacher I will need to know a lot more than just a body of theory or a handbook of guidelines, I will need to find out how those play out in every single one of my students. I am not a particularly good social studies teacher, in any area save perhaps government and civics. Here’s a factoid for you history folks: I have taken exactly zero history courses thus far at MSU. So I’m nervous about my lack of content knowledge, but after TE302 I’m way more nervous that I won’t be able to connect with some students in my classroom. All I can hope for is that my skills at learning and communicating along with my habit of trying to think my way through life will help me to figure that out. Because after this class, I’m convinced that making connections is critical.

 Here’s the other big picture idea I got from this class: teaching is bloody difficult! I think of teaching as a conversation between a teacher and a group of students, and man there are a lot of things to pay attention to in the midst of that conversation. I plan on keeping conversation moving to get the class into a team spirit of working for a common goal, which I have my coaching background to thank for. I want to let kids’ voices be heard, and that means more than just making sure everybody talks. It means stepping back sometimes and letting their interests come out, trying to find points of connection between what they know, what they like and what we’re thinking about that day. I want to test them in ways that allow them to have perspectives and beliefs. And this all sounds nice but at the same time it’s terribly subjective and I don’t really know yet how I’m going to be fair about it.

Debate is changing, education is changing, I am changing; seems like there’s change everywhere I look. And with change in mind, I hereby announce my endorsement of Barack Obama for … oh wait, wrong speech.

In the introduction to this course I posed a question for everyone, namely what is the purpose of education? Well at the end of the class, I want to ask a different question out loud, namely what is the purpose of my education? After taking this class and working more with kids and thinking a lot, I think the answer is simple: make it personal. I am creating myself as a teacher using the tools I have available. After almost 15 years debate is woven through me like threads in a tapestry. I think philosophy is important so I want to understand what’s going on in the field of education and why. And I have a new appreciation for the challenges and rewards of teaching that I didn’t have before.

To finish up, here’s a one-sentence summary of the history of human thought. Every time a group of people comes up with thinking tools in pursuit of some goal, a different group of people will use those same tools to ask “why that goal, why not another one?” and wander off. In debate, urban kids are asking big questions about what debate is and why it exists. In education we’re looking at kids in new ways, with the big idea that maybe what kids think really matters. And for myself? I’m still wandering off but now I call that learning. And helping other people to do the same? I call that teaching. Thanks for being my classmates.