What is a good speaker?
12 Feb
I feel really lucky that Ohio State brings in some pretty incredible speakers. I’ve seen bell hooks, danah boyd, and at the end of this month Maya Angelou will be here! Today, I saw danah boyd. There was conference at the law school on youth and social media. It was a free conference and I made sure to register right away because the topic is so relevant to me and my research.
On a side note, I got to the law school and looked around a little. The place is gleaming, with a grand staircase and fancy carpet and a coat rack and FREE Panera bagels (and later I found out FREE lunch)! They have their own library and their own auditorium. And everyone in the audience besides me and one of my professors was in suits and had really nice haircuts (boy was I mad at myself for waking up late, shoving my hair into an unkempt braid and wearing some jeans that were saggy in the butt). If you could only contrast this with Ramseyer Hall (that houses the school of education), you might be as surprised as I was. Or maybe not. It is the Law School after all. No one goes there to work with kids in a low paying job for the greater good. People go there to make a fat paycheck. And the building and everyone in it conveyed that very clearly. Ramseyer is one of the older buildings on campus, lined with lockers from the time it was a lab school back in the 50s. The rooms are oddly shaped after years of being chopped up over and over again into different configurations. Some have drop ceilings, some have high ceilings, some have projectors hanging from the plaster. They just painted the walls (for the hundredth time I’m sure) to cover up the peeling paint. The building is nice in its own way, it has a charming feel, some decorative carvings and heavy banisters, but compared to the law school, it’s practically condemned. This all says something about the prestige of these two fields. Just sayin.
Anyway, back to the conference. So, I get there a little early, and danah is prepping for her speech. She’s walking around a bit and I make sure I go say hello to her. It was a brief exchange, but she knew who I was and she was friendly. She seemed a little nervous too, which always surprises me. I don’t know why I have a hard time understanding that even well-established people get nervous before talking to crowds. For some reason I think that if I really knew what I was talking about, that I wouldn’t get nervous, and since I only sort of half know what I’m talking about, I’m always nervous. But, I’ve been thinking about this for awhile now, about what it means to be a good speaker. Because, you know how when you go to see some speaker and it’s this guy that’s a real schmoozy slickster and the words roll right off of his tongue and he makes difficult things seem palatable and believable? Well, he would be considered a “good speaker”, right? And I HATE those types of speakers because I feel like they are insulting the intelligence of the whole audience by believing that the audience wouldn’t doubt a thing they have to say. I much prefer a bumbling professor that circles round and round an argument, thinks about things on the fly, and considers that the audience is also thinking about the topic. Even though they may appear to be a “bad” speaker, they aren’t selling anything. I mean, they are in a way, but they are selling it with a much more complex argument, one that won’t just be consumed by the audience like a bag of doritos (mindlessly). Not all professors are like that of course, and not all slicksters are really that slick, but you see what I mean. The reason this helps me a little is because I get nervous before I speak. I get nervous because I know that I don’t know everything about the topic I am going to present, but what I need to realize is that NO ONE does. So, any slick speaker has essentially become uncritical of the stuff that’s coming out of his mouth. I would rather have someone nervous and conscious of their own deficiencies than someone that has forgotten that they have deficiencies. In academic research, there’s no real truth to be told, there are only angles of the truth, partial truths, fictions. So, given that, I consider myself a darn good speaker.
danah was a good speaker in both senses. She was confident, but also tried to show several sides of the argument. She seemed less nervous as the presentation went on, and she shared some very interesting research. She talked pretty fast and you could tell that she just had so much to share and one hour could never be enough. You could also really see how passionate she is about her work. I hope I can do this someday like that. Another thing I loved about her was that she had her hair in a folded bun thing, nothing fancy. She had a big fuzzy sweater on and big crazy earrings. She also used a mix of casual and academic language, which was cool. I want to be comfortable and confident enough that I can dress and speak more casually for conference presentations. Wearing jeans and speaking casually does not make you dumb, so why do I play that game? I hate wearing suits. Don’t make me wear a suit. Oh, and danah even had a mac with stickers all over it (what makes that especially funny is that she works for Microsoft right now). I wonder what the law students thought about her.



