Week 8 Post 1


Background: The Montgomery Bell Academy (MBA) Tournament is notorious for being difficult to qualify to. Only the top 16 competitors in the country are invited. Nobody aside from the tournament staff who send out the invitations know what the exact metric for qualifying is, however, it is possible to “hunt” an invite by attending (and succeeding) at high level tournaments around the country. I qualified as a junior resulting in a 4th place finish and as I’m writing this post it has been less than 12 hours since I won it as a senior. This year I asked around with my competitors and some of the attending coaches about experience level, coaching, and speeches given per week. Because I believe that communication is a skill and not a talent it is my hypothesis that the more experience, coaching, and speeches given per week a competitor has the more successful they will have at the tournament. To measure this I decided to create a “total experience score” which is calculated by multiplying years competed, speeches per week, and number of coaching types.

Place
Name
Years competed
Coaching
Speeches Per Week
Total Score
1
Mo Marks
4
Team, Private
7
56
2
Brian Zheng
6
Team, Private
2
24
3
Anuj Kothari
6
Team, Private
2
24
4
Kay Rollins
7
Team, Private
3
42
5
Anurima Mummaneni
5
Team
4
20
6
Pranav Pattatathunaduvil
5
Team
4
20
7
Jack Silvers
5
Team
4
20
8
Juliette Reyes
6
Team, Private
4
48
9
Angela Wang
5
Team
4
20
10
Gustavo Lanz
5
Team, Private
2
40
11
Eve Mainster
4
Team, Private
3
24
12
Nikitha Kalahasti
3
Team
3
9
13
Muktha Darmapurikar
2
Team, Private
4
16
14
James Gao
3
Team
3
9
15
Steve Asthana
3
Team
2
6
16
Alex Massa
3
Team
2
6

I think that my hypothesis was correct. In general, the people with the lowest scores are at the bottom and the highest scores are at the top. All the people on this graph are highly talented, otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to qualify to this tournament, but it is clearly the work we do to build our skills which allow us to go from good to great. Not to mention, many lower level competitors don’t even do a speech per week, the fact that it is a metric which can be used for this chart already shows that the people on the chart who were invited to the tournament do the most work and therefore earn the results they get.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 12 Post 2

Week 12 Post 2 Most people believe that in order to have an original idea, it can not be similar to any other ideas people have already come up with. This belief is false or else humans would have run out of original ideas long ago. In order to ensure that an idea is original, a speaker must keep their own rhetoric, body language, and stories but they may benefit by comparing their speech to one that has already been written. In doing so they can iron out some of the wrinkles with their speech and also find new materials to strengthen it with. For this exercise to be as effective as possible, the person doing it should attempt to find a speech similar to theirs in subject, purpose, and speaker. By ensuring that those elements are as similar as possible, the speaker can get the most success possible by running this drill because they will be able to draw comparisons to their speech much more easily.  This proves that public speaking is a skill rather than a talent because t...
Read more

Week 13 Post 1

 Link to source for this week:  Why Are We Scared of Public Speaking? It occurred to me that I've talked a lot about how to overcome communication anxiety but I haven't really investigated why it happens. This week is an attempt to rectify that problem. Communication Anxiety's legal name is Glossophobia  and about 25% of people report having it 4 primary factors to this fear 1) Physiology -Autonomic nervous system responsible for fear and anxiety -Audiences can be perceived as a threat, triggering "hyper-arousal" -hyper-arousal magnifies emotions like fear and anxiety, creating a cycle in which they magnify themselves -this can cause a small fear of public speaking to be exacerbated exponentially 2) Thoughts -people overestimate the stakes of communicating their ideas to the audience -people are unnecessarily critical of themselves -performance orientation vs communication orientation --performance=public speaking is a task that requires very spe...
Read more

Week 4 Post 1

Mind Shift  is a subsidiary of NPR. It is a non profit provider of free education news and information which supports parents and teachers around the world. The first article I'm working off of is from their editorial board and was published on October 3, 2016. Here is the  link to the article . Edutopia is a website published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation. It celebrates and encourages innovation in K-12 schools and focuses on how different learning strategies have different outcomes. The second article I'm working off of was written by Oli de Botton, an English teacher who has worked in educational policy as a 'government education adviser' for the UK and he has held other positions in politics. He is currently serving as the Headteacher of a school he founded in 2012 called School 21. His article was published on September 15, 2016. Here is the  link to the article . Math and Literacy (M&L) are currently the most focused on topics in school. M...
Read more