Journal 56: Public Speaking

Haha so my feeling about public speaking has changed on different sides for several times. When I was a kid in lower class of primary school, I barely ever spoke in public and I hated speaking in public. I was also really shy and didn’t dare to express my feelings, so sometimes people thought I was ignorant but really I was just too shy. But in the next year I transferred to another school to join a kind of training program. There were a lot of good teachers over there and we did things that we would never do in local normal classes. We have research projects, we had reading analyses, we had a lot of science-fair-like projects, and most importantly, we had debate class.

Debate class was a heavy load; we did spend some time on it, and probably because I met new friends that are more opened than those in my old school, I became really “annoying,” quoted from one of my teachers. I started gaining confidence and honestly I was quite good at it. I started actively participating in a variety of school campaigns and affairs, and I was also the speaker of most of the school’s events. It was really funny because I actually got into a fight, not a physical one, with my math teacher because he forced me to use subtraction to solve division problem. What’s funny was that eventually he got fired because of I don’t know some kind of violation of the something of education. Everyone actually thought I was going to be a politician. ( you know how Asians like to think about what we are going to do when they grow up)

But then during the year I spent in Columbus, public speaking was basically a nightmare. Well it turned out to be okay because I didn’t understand a thing and I didn’t do it, but still it sort of made me freak out when I am asked to speak in public in English. Same thing happened when I decided to leave local school and get an English-oriented education. I hated public speaking because I found that I had strong accent and weird intonation with lack of clarity when I spoke. No one really made fun of me but I just felt really bad. I preferred writing over speaking a lot at that time.

It got better when I finally convinced myself that I should be proud of my own accent; it’s like an identity that you can never get rid of. Besides, that’s not a bad thing, and people would only keep making fun of you if you don’t have confidence and pride of your identity. I learned this from one of my Singaporean friends, nice guy isn’t it. The final push to get me through this mess and to really make me like public speaking for the second time is the MUN program I have at PAS. There is just this kind of excitement when you know you are not simply yelling at each other with a sole purpose to use your eloquence to gain support regardless of whether your idea actually makes sense; instead, you get to learn more about the current situations of different regions in this world. Also, participating in an MUN conference can really teach you see a thing from different perspective. We become more mature, more tolerant, more understanding because of MUN.