ENG - An Analysis of the Hits and Misses

"Your opponent, in the end, is never really the player on the other side of the net, or the swimmer in the next lane, or the team on the other side of the field, or even the bar you must high-jump.  Your opponent is yourself, your negative internal voices, your level of determination." -- Grace Lichtenstein


It took a considerable amount of time for me to calm my nerves to reflect upon the oral presentation itself, and the events leading to it. I had to revisit my first blogpost to remind myself of the reasons I was putting myself through the gnawing fears, again. In retrospect, this experience I wouldn’t be able to convey in its entirety, but has certainly made a huge impact on my learning journey.

Firstly, of utmost importance, I would like to express my gratitude towards my group members for their efforts, Xing Quan for leading the group through this entire project, Billet for his encouragement and his wonderful ideas, and WenLue, for giving his utmost to make the oral presentation a success. One other special person I have to thank is XiaoShi who went the extra mile, sending messages of encouragement through the week. These gave me the strength to pull through.

Preparation
The hard work put into preparation paid off largely. Despite a hectic timetable for all of us, I really appreciate how everyone managed to cast a sizeable portion of the long Deepavali weekend aside, just to focus on improving the delivery of the presentation, to the point we could even pre-empt what Erin (the teacher in the movie) was going to say.
We had delegated our parts early, a week before for crafting the script. Initially, having watched how Ken Robinson was able to put a spell on the crowd, I was very keen to do much storytelling to bring the points across, but thankfully, the timely advice from Billet and Xing Quan made me think twice. It was simply unrealistic—instead of leaving audiences spellbound, my then unmemorized script was a guaranteed spell for confusion. A better organization of content had to be developed.
Through the week, with the little time in between FYP commitments, deadlines and projects, with just running the words and ideas in my head, my rehearsals were rather dismal. From time to time, my speeches varied in confidence and content, despite the outlines being somewhat planned out. Nonetheless, it was a great leap of faith for our group to accept Billet’s idea. But I believe we rose to the occasion on the eve of the presentation, and even filmed it down to work on the flaws. In fact, we held our last rehearsal at 730am on Monday to gather the props and mentally prepare ourselves.


Delivery
It was a feeble attempt to boost my confidence with a greeting. The feel of presenting the class seemed very different from only the video camera and soon, I began to lose my thread of thoughts and hence the stammering, excessively peppered with ‘erms’.  At times, I wasn’t coherent. The proposed strategies were a crucial part of the presentation and yet I could not exude the confidence necessary to articulate that. This was a letdown to the group for their hard work. Their remarkable patience with my pauses and time-outs during the practices should not go unmentioned as well.
But one thing I can probably be glad for was that I managed a firm stance without looking at the slides and a better attempt with eye contact, which was a noteworthy improvement from the peer teaching presentation. I wished I could have smiled a little more. Also, I felt that it was a relief that the Q and A session was better than expected, as our group were prepared for several of the questions asked.


Slideware
After the decision to change the presentation style, the slides had to be naturally altered to suit it. I loved the simple white background, black words and some red for emphasis. The design was minimalist, with appropriate pictures to enhance the points that were made. This actually brought up the level of difficulty as the onus was on us to demonstrate our ideas better through our speeches.


In all, I would say that the preparation was largely sufficient for the group and we have come a long way together. On individual performance, the bulk of my problem was my fear of making mistakes, the paralysis upon standing in front of any audience and the sheer inability to block out the negative thoughts upon looking at their responses. Brad’s many tips for public speaking were certainly useful. But to acquire the confidence to look at the audience in the eye and yet remain unfazed to carry on speaking... This is something I hope to achieve with more exposure and practice. I thank all of you for enduring and piecing together the puzzles of my speech on Monday. Rest assured that my next audience, whoever they are, would see an improvement in the level of confidence.


"Far away in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see the beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead." -- Louisa May Alcott