Speeches

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In English class over the past two days, we presented speeches about what we thought were important to us. I picked three rather cliched topics - My writings (This site, WYEP Stuff, newspaper fails), the outdoors (scouting, the summit, biking), and videography (eugh... you lost me).

I gave my (horrid) speech, and then proceeded to listen to my classmates' speeches. I learned a lot about the people whom I pass in the hallways everyday. Granted, this was a scholars class that had grown close due to the smallness of our class and our school, but still we learned of each other.

There were gamers, dancers, indie music (TALLY HALL) lovers, travelers, cheerleaders, basketball players, baseball players, card trick wizard/relgionesque dude, and there was even an actress/artist/figure skater. It occurred to me that the true meaning to high school is CERTAINLY not learning something academically, but to learn about the people and relationships and interactions with those around us. It is only when one walks 10,000 steps in one's shoes that one can begin to comprehend the complexities behind that individual (and WOW is that cliched).

Anyway, I learned things about my class that quite frankly surprised me. I was told once that you are a person who is either creative or intellectual. There is the very small few who are both. She told me that I was both, but I constantly question how creative I am (Considering I come up with ideas that have already been done) and exactly how smart I am (Umm, I still can't find theme in most written pieces... forget finding one in my own). Regardless of my personal situation, there are definitely people in my class who posses the gift of both. Take the actress/artist/figure skater for example. She is perhaps the best novel interpreter (finds crazy literary stuff I can only hope to catch on to) that I know behind, like, professional novelists (shoutout to JayScribble!) and people who read Greg's comics (No Andrew you CANT Read "Carrot"). She also can draw quite well.

The thing that I indirectly stated in my speech is the fact that I absolutely loathe English Class writing assignments. I am one of those bratty writers who want to be completely freeform. You tell me to write a third person story about a magic toaster or something, and I can do it. Tell me that I need four paragraphs, the toaster is unpersonified, and I must use at least seven vocabulary words, then you take the story and squash it.

Finally, never are we given prompts about alpacas or toasters or anything good. It all must have a tie in to what we are doing, use some mechanism of the mind control that education has been instilling into us (umm, when am I going to be given a list of completely impractical vocabulary words and need to work them into, say, a blog post?) and then it gets sent off to be judged by someone.

I digress. Bottom line, I have learned more from my fellow classmates about life and reality in the short 60 minutes of speechifying than I have doing proofs in Geometry, or finding a specific theme in a short story written hundreds of years before I was born.

Literature only becomes irrelevant when one tries to look at it from a modern perspective and try and find modern aspects to it. If you'll excuse me now I am going to memorize some literary terms revolving around literary techniques for a midterm test.