wiki 5 20/20 - I like your post but I am not sure I agree with your final remark. The speech had ALL kinds of 'kid content' - esp. all the sports connections and references to HUDDLES and huddling up. (I don't see many grandmas doing that!) The bird story at the end was a bit "old" but the rest was pretty universal.

11/6/09: Mr. Schlesselmanns chapel

He did an awesome job! He enunciated clearly and made sense. His points all were very clear and all flowed together well. He didn't move very much from the podium, and he didn't use many hand gestures. I thought he did a okay job with his train of thought, but I thought it was geared more towards the grandparents than the students in his audience. I don't know that it was relateable to everyone listening, but if he was talking to the adults I'm sure it was very good. He looked up from his notes quite a it, and his eye contact was pretty good. I felt like he tried to connect to his audience. Overall, great job on presentation. Content could've been geared more towards his audience.

wiki 4 - 20/20 - Good posting - I am on the fence about the bird.. part of me wonders if he'd just have said let's all have a look and then moved back to his speech it would've helped us all ignore it for the rest of the time... but I'm not sure... never gave a talk with a moving object flying about before! :-)

10/29/09: Pastor Clausing's Chapel

Well, this one's a simple one, since I've been studying his speaking for four years now. He's really good at emphasizing his points and enunciating clearly. You know by listening to his inflections which parts he really wants to drive home. It's fun to count how many hand gestures (we all know that one) that he uses while he's talking, and probably one of those that he doesn't even realize. He doesn't seem to have a problem with verbal pauses and communicating clearly. He's easy to listen to and everything flows together very smoothly. After all his years leading chapel, he's very at ease in front of his audience, but he still has an air of confidence and humility. He respects the audience even when he presents a hard topic. This week he dealt very well with the distraction flying around the room but not paying attention or drawing attention to it at all. I think his ignoring the bird helped me focus on his talk a lot more. He always has a great public speaking countenance and this week was no different.

wiki 3 - 0/20 - no posting this week.

wiki 2 - 20/20 - good notes on this one... it's funny to me how his movements drive some folks CRAZY and others love them and claim it keeps them awake. Guess that's the way it goes with speakers.. some viewers like a guy who bounces around! He did handle his tech glitch well.

10/16/09: Mr. Stec's chapel on Friday:

Mr. Stec's style of speaking could be compared to seizures. He moved around so much it was distracting. He was constantly jumping around and trying to talk to everyone at once. He made pretty good eye contact with the whole room, but he was so over the top in his movement and accents on words that the eye contact almost slipped by unnoticed. He used inflection well, and didn't seem to uncomfortable. He knew what he was doing and was not afraid to take a chance on having everyone sing. He knew how much time he had and adjusted accordingly, even without a powerpoint to keep him on track. That's what impressed me the most; he still managed to put on a good chapel without what most speakers rely on to know what to do: the powerpoint. He addressed his audience and caught their attention with his opening scripture analysis. He had smooth transitions and it was easy to understand. I like his enunciation and accents. There was excessive hand gestures. Physically speaking, his stance overall was distractions.

wiki 1 20/20 - great response work!

10/09/09: Ron Paul's "What If" speech-

I thought Ron Paul's speech was compelling. He stuttered a bit in the beginning, maybe because of nerves, but do speakers still get nervous enough to stutter after speaker as long as he's been speaking? I bet they might. His rate sped up as he kept going. It was a pretty short speach but it contained everything necessary to mkae his point. His volume increased to punctuate his sentences. Inflection was key for his speech and he did a great job making it clear what he was trying to do. He atriculated clearly for the most part, except for the couple times he stumbled over words. He stood up straight, but there wasn't a ton of eye contact when he was talking. He appeared confidant and poised. He looked convincing and persuasive. He spoke with authority. He knew what he was talking about and he believed it. He used a repetition method and repeated "what if" at the beginning of all the sentences, which really drove his point home. He didn't gesture a lot, but his facial expressions were helpful. He was serious and gestures would have been distracting. He established relationships with his audience by specifically addressing the groups of people. At one point, for instance, he spoke to the conservatives and addressed them as such.

The Wake Up Call

            “Matt is not okay.” That’s all he wrote. That was the night I grew up. I became a person carrying the burdens of adulthood.

            Earlier that morning I had asked Jared, my boyfriend, if he wanted to hang out. He was spending the day at our friend Matt’s house. I wanted to see both of them, so we made plans for the boys to swing by my house and pick me up in about an hour.

            I got ready and waited eagerly. I waited a good half hour past our agreed upon time without worrying. Then I called. Jared’s first words were, “We’re not coming. We slid off the road into a tree.” I didn’t think it was a big deal. They were fine and the car was okay, except the front fender. I was determined not to let this affect our plans together.

I asked, “Would be okay if I headed over there instead?”

He told me, “Matt’s in a bad mood.” I knew what that meant.

            As soon as I walked in, my suspicions were confirmed. I smelled it on his breath. The empty glass next to him told me all I needed to know. Matt and I had talked for countless hours about his problem. It was a recurring conversation. We tried to talk about other things, but we always came back to this. We told each other everything. I thought I could help him, that I was helping him. He always assured me it was getting better. He claimed knew his limits, and he had it under control now. It had been months since he first told me, and he’d proven to some degree that he fully understood what he was doing to himself. The bottles hidden in the drawers, and all over his room were sure signs he did not have it under control. I didn’t know how bad it had gotten until that day. His dad was furious with him for not being more careful, screamed to make a point, and he drank away his dad’s criticism, like always. If he wouldn’t acknowledge the problem, all I could do was be his friend, and make it seem like the problems at home weren’t at terrible as they felt.

            Matt told us, “I’ll be fine. You go ahead.”

Jared and I left. I couldn’t stop thinking about Matt. I worried that he would feel abandoned and drink more. I knew how much he had already drunk. In the car on the way to my house, Jared related to me what had happened.

            “As soon as we got back to the house, he reached for the closest bottle and swallowed as much as he could. I tried to stop him, but you know that’s not possible when he get’s like this.”

 I texted Matt to see how he was holding up. His responses were barely words, jumbled masses of letters strewn together.  I got angry like I always did when he wouldn’t let me in. I told him to text me once he was sober. I didn’t know that could have been the last thing I said to him.

            Jared left my house a few hours later. On his way home, he got a phone call. He sent me the text, the one that made my heart drop.

            Three girls, Jaimie, Anne, and Kelsey, had been texting Matt. They had been receiving the same jumbled texts I was. The texts he sent them got progressively worse in the hours I refused to respond to him, and finally, they stopped.  The girls started to worry and went to Matt’s house to check on him.  No one else was home, but the garage door was open. They found him on his back, unconscious. Anne became hysterical. Jaimie called Jared. I got a call five minutes later. I won’t ever understand why she didn’t call me first (it’s a well known fact Matt is closer to me than a brother). Kelsey called an ambulance, and the three girls worked together to move him to the floor. That was easier than trying to roll him over. When the ambulance took him to the hospital, the girls followed behind in a car. Jaimie kept me informed and an hour later, I headed to the hospital. The snowstorm outside was so heavy; it took me well over an hour to make it the fifteen miles I hope I never have to make again. By the time I got there, he had been admitted, his stomach had been pumped, and the girls were gone.

His dad was waiting for me when I walked into the waiting room. I asked, “Can I see him?” His response sounded cold. “No, I don’t think so.” I accepted this with some dignity in the moment, but I went insane in the parking lot. Everything was his fault! The man who caused the problem in the first wouldn’t let me see my best friend! This irrational man who had no reason to be so critical told me I couldn’t see his son. He didn’t ask Matt if he wanted to see me. He just told me no, and thanked me for coming anyway. Matt told me later he tried to come see me when he heard I was there.

            I’ve never cried as long or as hard as I did that night. I was hit with the reality of losing someone I love as much as my own family. I realized we had to do something, and perhaps this was just the wakeup call he needed.

            A month later, he gave me the first draft of a paper he’d written for a class. It was an account of that night told from his perspective. He wrote, “With the help of an angel, I’m determined to stay sober. Alcohol will no longer control my life.”

I sobbed while reading it. He finally understood his problem, and he wanted help. A week later we met with his parents. At eighteen years old, my best friend is a recovering alcoholic, and I’ve never been more proud.

wiki 5- great job.... love your list... except having experienced my kids' weimer, I wouldn't suggest ANYONE get one.... (Roxy is a tad nuts!)  Enjoyed reading your thoughts in this first unit and love the frank way you view life!

9/18/09: My bucket list: Get married, move out of my parents house, have children, go to europe (backpacking), go back to China, go to Africa, see the pyramids, have to get a new passport because it's full, get gray hair and have to dye it, see my sister graduate high school and college, have a picnic on the English countryside, meet the President (whoever it is at the time), see an end to the abortion holocaust, be on a CD as a soloist, own a weimaraner, own my own house, start a company, have lunch at a Parisian cafe, and see Taj Mahal.

9/18/09: I would not want to be lied to abut something I had. If I was sick and going to die I would want to know about it and be able to do things I want to do before I die. I don't think I would do that to anyone else either. It seems really selfish to keep something like that from a person who deserves to know just because you can't handle it. I didn't like Minta's dad. He was only thinking about himself and it ruined the last few months of his wife's life. I think she would have wanted to live as if she was dying,not have to fake it for her pathetic excuse of a husband. 

9/11/09: I've already read the new kid story... pretty cool story. It's interesting to watch the rejected kid turn into the people who picked on him. He knew how the new kid felt, but instead of sympathizing with him, it was easier to pick on the new kid to make himself feel better. I think a lot of times we do this... we pick on people so that we feel better about ourselves, like when we talk about other people at the lunch table... there's not a good reason for it. We just do it so that we feel higher than the people  we're talking about. 

9/11/09: When we talked about the President's speech, I was expecting some sort of comment that all the controversy had risen from. Where was that? Why was it such a big deal that the President wanted to tell us about staying in school and not doing drugs... okay, wonderful. I've heard that since I was 4. WHERE WAS THE BIG SCARY COMMENT?? I'm so frustrated that Americans make such a big deal when someone they don't like talks, regardless of what they are going to say. Really? Why are we so close-minded? Yeah, Obama isn't who I would've voted for, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have good ideas.

9/3/09: So, the story we got today in class made me just ask a ton of questions. Like where did all the people go? Why wasn't this house destroyed like everything else? Why was there still a tree branch that could fall and break the window if everything else around it was destroyed? I just wondered about why he wrote the story. Was it to tell us something about society? My thought was that there were no humans left because we have all kept getting more similar and similar so that soon there won't be anyone different left and everyone will just cease to exist... I couldn't think of anything else. I thought it was a little pointless. Not my favorite story.

9/3/09: Usher II was SO INTERESTING. My favorite story we've read so far. It had lots of twists and turns you just didn't see coming. I liked remembering all the different stories and trying to figure out which one's he was alluding to. I loved how what scared everyone the most was what ended up killing them all, just because they hadn't read the stories, and if they had, they would have known what was happening. I loved the ending and watching him not know what to do, all because of his ignorance of some of the best works of all time!

8/26/09: I'm planning on writing a short story for my project. It's going to be a combination of fiction and real life experiences. One in particular, names and little details changed, but this particular event rocked my world for awhile and I think it's too meaningful to me to pass up writing about it. I'm really excited about starting it which I'm doing tomorrow. It's going to be a challenge to keep it to a minimal page length because so much emotion is going into it. I'm not really sure how effective it will be, but I figure if I'm a good writer than my emotions should affect the reader too. Expressing my thoughts in a way that it makes it less about me and more about knowing exactly what I'm talking about, relating, is really what it is about.

8/26/09: We talked a couple days ago about teenagers being treated like they were stupid just because of age. I think I started picking up on this more since then. A couple things have caught my attention in particular. I work at St. Louis Bread Company, and we pride ourselves on knowing our products. We've tried almost everything on the menu and have formed an opinion, so in the event a customer asks us our opinion, we have one ready, whether it's telling them it is one of our favorite or that its not. Today I worked 4-close. The entire night it felt like I was being badgered by customers, making sure I wasn't making mistakes. I wasn't. By the time we were closing up, I got to talking to my manager, asking him if these questions were legitimate-- was I wrong? Here's the thing. I wasn't wrong. I got their order right, I was polite, but I was insuperior, even though I knew more. I've had training. So when customers ask me questions like "What's in that salad?" I know what I'm talking about when I answer, yet I still get second questions like "Are you sure?" and "So there's not (insert ingredient here)?" No, I just said that... and then I watched my adult co-workers playing this game with customers... they NEVER got the second questions. Not one all night. They have the same knowlege I do, but mine is insignificant, and apparently wrong. It made me wonder if I blow off adults in the same way, questioning theur wisdom because after all, "they grew up in a different age..."

Good job on Wiki 2! I appreciated your frank opinions! Good job. I love the last thought you had right above this! How interesting to think it may cut both ways! Glad to hear the story idea is rolling!

8/21/2009: The story Charles made me laugh. I think I saw the ending coming all along because there was so much reference to Charles' mother; I just figured she didn't exist. Maybe I could've been wrong, but it just seemed like a really predictable short story ending. Had I been that mom, I would have had a chat with my husband about our son first... which inevitably would have led to a talk with my son. He would've been punished and I would have also apologized to his teacher! Imagine what she and the class have been through! They probably would have been mortified that I didn't know what was going on, or worse, they thought I did and that I was such a horrible mom I just let it continue. 

8/19/2009: Today in class we talked about bullies, and it got me to thinking about the internet harassment law suits. 

What are these people thinking when they decide to harass already unstable people?? Especially the adults. You'd think they would have grown up from when they were in high school. Don't they have anything better to do than prey on younger people? These girls (which is usually who it is) are students in junior high and high school! I don't know about anyone else, but during junior high, I was super insecure. I had no idea what I was doing. I made bad decisions, and I think they would have been worse had I been harassed by some person over the internet.  I was a junior high small group leader for the past three years... I know exactly how unstable those girls are. I spent three years figuring out how they think, and had that happened to one of them, they wouldn't have had a clue about what their "big stick" could be. How would they stop it? How would they present themselves as something other than an open target? That is something I want to explore further. How can we stop it? The internet is a public tool. How can we make it safer? How can we have less innocent victims?

You ask EXCELLENT questions in here... I personally think it is CENTRAL that adults know their way around cyberspace and that they ALSO know what their kids are accessing - that means they shouldn't just smile and say "Oh, that Facebook is just for kids... I have no interest in going there.." How irresponsible!