Speech Class

Consul­tan­t’s report con­firms inep­ti­tude of Atlanta schools

Damn. The mind bog­gles just think­ing about what I could do with $14k a year for shad­owkatt’s edu­ca­tion, but the Atlanta pub­lic school sys­tem con­tin­ues to insist that isn’t enough, and that real­ly, maybe they could teach some­body to read if they had lots more money.

My sus­pi­cion that 90% of the peo­ple in my speech class are from the same fra­ter­ni­ty has been confirmed—they’re all “teeks” (Tau Kap­pa Epsilon). Appar­ent­ly, they take as many class­es togeth­er as they can. It seems a bit child­ish to me, but I guess it works for them. It does make for over­hear­ing some inter­est­ing conversations.

I need to do anoth­er speech a week from today. I have three choic­es for the type of speech, which is to be 5–7 min­utes long

–a bio­graph­i­cal por­trait of some­one who is alive today and is nei­ther a peer nor a fam­i­ly mem­ber of mine
–“after din­ner speech,” which must trans­mit some kind of use­ful infor­ma­tion while being humorous
–ana­lyze the impact a spe­cif­ic Supreme Court deci­sion has had.

I’m most inter­est­ed in the after-din­ner speech, but there’s a problem—my jokes do not seem to go over well with this par­tic­u­lar audi­ence. They are so tight­ly focused on them­selves and their lit­tle social cir­cle that they seem inca­pable of relat­ing to any­thing out­side their expe­ri­ence. That’s also the speech that the teacher says is most dif­fi­cult, and which he does not believe any­one in the class can do suc­cess­ful­ly. He did also say, though, that he’d be impressed if any of us try it, and would grade a lit­tle more lenient­ly because he’s nev­er man­aged to be good at that kind of speech.

I haven’t thought of any­one on whom I want to do a bio­graph­i­cal sketch. Okay, there are peo­ple I find inter­est­ing, but I doubt any of these kids has any inter­est in them and appeal­ing to the audi­ence in ques­tion counts as part of the grade. 

Nobody is doing the Supreme Court option, accord­ing to an infor­mal poll tak­en today. I sup­pose I should at least skim through a list of Supreme Court deci­sions to see if any­thing catch­es my eye.

Any sug­ges­tions?