Week 14 Post 1

An Interview with Ms. Nguyen

I’ve talked a lot in the last couple of weeks about how speech is teachable, but I haven’t yet sat down with a speech teacher to discuss it. Ms. Nguyen stepped in as the teacher for our speech and debate team at the end of last summer and is totally awesome. Under Nguyen our team has grown not just in numbers but also in terms of health and diversity of success. (aka we’re winning more stuff than we used and we’re better people while doing it #score)

M: Hi Ms. Nguyen, thanks for sitting down with me! You’ve done a lot to grow our team, but what have you found has been the biggest blocker to people joining?

N: Probably either students being too busy or being too scared.

M: You’ve been able to work around those problems for a lot of our new team members. How did you do it?

N: Well when students are too busy, there isn’t much we can do but I try to offer very flexible practice hours in order to maximize the number of students who have access to the team. When students are nervous, I try to make speech seem as normal as possible. What makes people feel the most threatened by the activity is generally the idea that speakers have to be super rich, super smart, or super brave in order to have any success. I just make you guys look like the mega dorks you are and suddenly they realize that speech is a safe space that they can have fun in, and people get more comfortable with doing it.

M: Haha nice, if people don’t have to be rich, smart, and brave to do speech what do they need?

N: I’d say that mostly they need to be ready to learn and be creative thinkers. Like nobody is going to join the activity and immediately be successful but it’s the kids who work hardest that are going to do well. More importantly, if kids are really set in their ways, it’ll be hard for them to have fun while doing this activity. They need to be creative thinkers because in debate especially, it is the kids who come up with ideas that the other team wouldn’t be able to think of that do well and have fun.

M: What do you want your students to focus on to become good speakers?

N: Well first off, I don’t think success should be the final goal for our team. I want us to focus on being good people and then think about being good speakers. And, what I think is really important that a success-based point of view ignores is that the more fun you have the better you’ll do. Judges can see when you’re enjoying yourself. You’ll be more relaxed, you’ll give speeches that are more fun to listen to, and you’ll just have a good energy. The more relaxed you are, the more natural your delivery will be, and the more fun the judge will have. So, I guess to answer your question, I want my students to focus on having fun.

M: Our team has been successful in the past when fun wasn’t the main point of our team, what do you think allowed us to be good then?

N: I think it’s that students were doing well just from how hard they were driving themselves into the ground. You know, they were giving two speeches a day for months on end with no breaks. That’s not sustainable and it’s why Lily and Nathan had a reputation for being bad sports in the prep room because they were so miserable that everyone was scared of them. And you were there when JT crashed and burned at Marshall because he was so anxious after getting second at MBA. Like on paper the team was doing well but I don’t think the kids inside it were doing well and kids are definitely supposed to be more important than success because why are we doing this activity if we don’t enjoy it?

M: Thanks Ms. Nguyen!

N: No problem Mo!