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A nice compliment
Nov. 20th, 2006 01:10 pmAt the end of class last week a student waited until everyone else left, then came up to me and asked me my opinion about whether she should take a public speaking class. She told me how even in a normal classroom environment she gets nervous and her mind goes blank, and she ends up asking questions she knows the answer to. (She asks a LOT of questions)
I told her that I believed that almost everyone could benefit from more exposure to public speaking, and that it was possible that she'd learn some tricks to help her think before she spoke and to help her focus. I said that in my experience, the more you know your topic, the more confidence you will have with presenting it, and that when I was teaching if I lost my train of thought I'd get very flustered and have to pull something out of my ass to get back on track.
She said she was very surprised at that, and that she thought I was completely confident and a natural at public speaking, which is why she asked me my opinion. Huh! I blathered something about how I knew my topic, had been teaching for over seven years now, and how I still get a tiny bit nervous on the first day of class. But inside I was thinking "really? me?" I understand the power structure that we have -- me teacher, her student -- so I know it might not be completely genuine, but it was still surprising.
Surprising mostly because I just don't feel all that confident when I am teaching. When I was in college I thought of myself as an extrovert; over time that hasn't really seemed to fit, though, and I recently read an article describing the introvert -- the need to be alone a lot of the time, the need to be forced to attend social events, the need for downtime after social events, being completely happy being alone. That's totally all me. [Although when I've taken the Myers-Briggs test it claims I am an extrovert. Maybe I'm schizophrenic. Or those tests just suck.]
Anyway, I've been getting really good feedback at work from the training sessions that I'm holding at my day job, too, so this is a pretty big ego-boost week. I don't know how my head will fit through the door.
I told her that I believed that almost everyone could benefit from more exposure to public speaking, and that it was possible that she'd learn some tricks to help her think before she spoke and to help her focus. I said that in my experience, the more you know your topic, the more confidence you will have with presenting it, and that when I was teaching if I lost my train of thought I'd get very flustered and have to pull something out of my ass to get back on track.
She said she was very surprised at that, and that she thought I was completely confident and a natural at public speaking, which is why she asked me my opinion. Huh! I blathered something about how I knew my topic, had been teaching for over seven years now, and how I still get a tiny bit nervous on the first day of class. But inside I was thinking "really? me?" I understand the power structure that we have -- me teacher, her student -- so I know it might not be completely genuine, but it was still surprising.
Surprising mostly because I just don't feel all that confident when I am teaching. When I was in college I thought of myself as an extrovert; over time that hasn't really seemed to fit, though, and I recently read an article describing the introvert -- the need to be alone a lot of the time, the need to be forced to attend social events, the need for downtime after social events, being completely happy being alone. That's totally all me. [Although when I've taken the Myers-Briggs test it claims I am an extrovert. Maybe I'm schizophrenic. Or those tests just suck.]
Anyway, I've been getting really good feedback at work from the training sessions that I'm holding at my day job, too, so this is a pretty big ego-boost week. I don't know how my head will fit through the door.
