‘It’s official, my first grade 11 project in PLP has been completed. We started off the year with a new teacher, Ms Madsen! Our project focused on writing and reading out a speech to the class. The speech was focused on the significance of the Manhattan project. The driving question for the project was to answer, How did splitting the atom change the world?
If you want to read the speech, click here!
When it came down to delivering the speech I felt pretty confident on the day. I felt that it was a good length, I had practiced a good pace to speak at, and gone over the content on which I wrote about. When I was walking up to the podium I had few doubts. One thing I kept telling myself was breathe, take it slow and breathe. I find I often speed up and talk fast during presentations, so reminding myself to breathe has become a habit before public speaking. As I was speaking I realized, wow this is going fast, I’m already on the second page. All the times I had practiced it had gone by much slower and seemed like the four minutes that it actually was.
I was lucky to get a bit of more one on one time with Ms Madsen. I was able to read small bits of my speech and get feedback on the pace I was going. The feedback I was receiving on my pace was always positive, which is part of the reason I was confident going into my speech. It’s also why I know my speech was the right length, even though it may not have seemed like it. I received other feedback like working on my stance and talking less with my hands, which is something I do a lot. Even though I was confident about my pace, I was still nervous going up to speak and while I spoke for approximately four minutes, my nerves is what made it seem like much less.
This was my first project in a while where the end product was a speech in front of the class. I think this was a very effective way for everyone to really learn and take in the information. First we get all of our regular lessons in class teaching us the importance and the significance of splitting the atom. We learn that the splitting of the atom set of a chain reaction, ending with our world now possessing nuclear weapons. Without those weapons our world would look very different today. After learning the basics and having that base understanding we moved on to writing our own speech about it. This allowed me to take a further look into it and gave me another opportunity to process and understand all the information. Then once we had this understanding we got to listen to our classmates take on it. Many people had different views or took different approaches to how they wrote the speech. This added another layer of knowledge onto what we had already built. I think having all these steps and going over the information in so many different ways was helpful and gave me a deeper understanding of the topic.
This project was a great way to launch my grade 11 school year. It got me to work on my public speaking skills, something that I have been developing over the years. For me I think it is a skill that I will always need to work on and continue practicing. Which is why this was a great opportunity to do so. I think that if I can continue working on my public speaking my speeches won’t go by in a blur because I’m nervous but because I’m confident and ready ad can speak with ease.