The starting point: In a word, group helps children find their voice by Barry Carter
On May 16th, the photo accompanying Mr. Carter’s column in the Star Ledger caught my eye as I flipped through the paper, listening to my coffee perk. Above Carter’s dapper byline picture was a photograph of a young lady with thick ponytails and chunky beads, standing in front of a large blank green chalkboard. She’s in mid-word, looking to her left, her eyebrows raised and an air of seriousness about her.
The young woman that intrigued me is Mia McNeill, and she was participating in her school’s New Jersey Orators competition. Carter chose this article to tell us about the New Jersey Orators, dedicated to teaching NJ schoolchildren the art of public speaking. It’s quite an operation: “It begins each year in September with300 to 400 kids in 15 chapters from Newark to Willingboro”, and hosts weekly meetings, various exercises, and competitions, as Carter mentions.
When I was in elementary school, we had something similar, which always struck me as a useless Victorian throwback. We had to memorize and declaim, two or three kids with better short term memories than mine invariably performing to the applause of teachers, while I stumbled and skipped through my routine. Can you tell I hated it?
However, now that I’m slowly gaining my place at the grownup table, I like this idea of training kids in public speaking, making it not just an important “life skill”, but an art. A good part of my mental beat involves me circling the idea of literacy and all it entails, recognizing the often unexpected ways the skills involved in literacy crop up in daily life. But, as open as I thought I was, I had never considered public speaking (recitation, declamation, etc) as a leg of this table.
It makes sense now: If a child or an adult is capable of getting up in front of a crowd and informing, persuading, or entertaining with brevity, personality, and (yes!) panache, then they’re using all the skills we try to promote here at the NLC. This is a wonderful thing for a classroom of any sort. It would be a great idea to add to the adult program, even in small-scale ways, such as having regular “readalouds” with the adult students and their tutors.
Techniques such as those promoted by the New Jersey Orators truly take literacy out of the “reading/writing” box, out of the “classroom” box to get those children involved and passionate. That’s the kicker – passion. Carter included a small anecdote about a young man, Isiah Sams, performing his personally-written speech about his father: “Dear Father, It’s just me. Your son. Your seed…I’m old enough to feel pain, and that’s quite enough….“ Isiah’s pain is palpable, and his expression both tells on and belies his young age.
These are things meant to touch you, to form a bridge between the “places” of student/teacher, adult/child, and so on. The power of public speaking, like any of the literacy skills, is to emphasize not only the rules and techniques of form, or the content, the expression, but the humanity of the orator. What a beautiful thing to cultivate at any age.
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