brooklyn Friends School Newsletter
Vol. 9, No. 2 Winter 2013
Tony Robbins Meets Public Speaking 101
The Strength of Ideas, Presentation, and Persuasion by Jeffrey Stanley
“H
ow many used car salesmen does it take to screw in a light bulb? I’m not sure but I’m running some numbers on my calculator and I think you’ll be pleased with the results.”
“Knock knock. Who’s there? Charlotta. Charlotta who? Charlotta bad jokes in here.” Ouch. There’s an old pearl in public speaking about opening with a joke to warm up the crowd. Upper School Public Speaking teacher Larry Williams gave it a twist in a recent class by having students come to the front of the room and read aloud some bad knock-knock and light bulb jokes. They were the kind of jokes that are lame on purpose so they still achieve the intended result of eliciting a laugh. This type of warm-up exercise was clearly welcomed by energetic 15- and 16-year-olds with somewhat short attention spans. Larry has a great rapport with his students and an avuncular demeanor. That’s due in part to his work as a BFS librarian for ten years — he has watched most of these kids grow up and has taught them their research skills. After warm-ups were over, students took turns fulfilling an
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earlier assignment to speak on which five people — living, dead, fictional, nonfictional — with whom they would like to have lunch, and why. The answers were surprising, clever, and made clear that these were sharp kids with a variety of unique passions. Maya Kaul spoke about her plan to invite Dr. Who because he could time travel in his phone booth time machine, the Tardis, and the character Fletcher from the magical Skulduggery Pleasant book series because he can teleport anywhere. He would be in charge of gathering the lunch items from Maya’s favorite restaurants spanning from Montreal to Belgium. She and her two guests would picnic in Prospect Park. What about her other three guests? That’s where the Tardis comes in, to transport Maya first to ancient Rome so she could meet philosopher and poet Lucretius, so she could quiz him about his epic philosophical poem De rerum natura, or On the Nature of Things. Next it
would be back into the Tardis to drop in on Aristotle in ancient Greece, and so on. Jesse Slade D’Addona spoke of his lifelong obsession with television; not just with watching it but with how TV shows are produced. He spoke of his particular fascination with extras. “If it’s done well you don’t really notice the people in the background, but if there are a hundred people that’s a hundred costumes.” His interest has already led him to professional work as a day player on the hit shows Gossip Girl and The Carrie Diaries. The mature Bianca Rhea, only 15 but with a comportment beyond her years, completed a different assignment in which she described in captivating terms one of her passions. She began by explaining that she could have talked about her love of movies, or her passion for Motown, because the music reminds her of her father, but she figured movies and music would be lots of her peers’ favorite passions so
To learn more about the Upper School curriculum, go to brooklynfriends.org/upperschool
she chose something different. She spoke with with great selfassurance about the fact that she has been a self-defense instructor since age 12, teaching young girls at a local center for nonviolence. Her students have come from as far away as Philadelphia to learn techniques such as how to get out of a choke hold. “It’s not about how to win a fight, it’s about how to get out of a fight,” she stressed. After each presentation, Larry led the class in a group critique using eight points of successful public speaking: presence, posture, breathing, eye contact, gestures, volume, vocal quality, articulateness. He concluded the
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Bianca Rhea and Larry Williams in Public Speaking class.