OVERLOOKED FUNDAMENTALS OF PUBLIC SPEAKING
To improve our teaching it pays to go back to basics.
Fred Smith
July 1, 1987
Every summer you can find advertisements for basketball or football camps where big-name stars, for a fee, will instruct young people dreaming of athletic greatness. I wonder how much actual learning takes place when an all-star quarterback, who spends most of his time preoccupied with reading and outmaneuvering sophisticated defenses, tries to coach a junior-higher who's still trying to figure out how to grip the ball with hands that aren't quite big enough. Sometimes people learn more, not from the superstars who have long since learned to perform the basics without conscious thought, but from others only slightly further down the road, those who've recently shared the same struggle. Often, I suspect, a similar effect happens to those who want to achieve superstar poise and eloquence in the pulpit. The key is focusing not on the dazzling techniques but on the fundamentals. Improvement comes from concentrating on the basics until we can perform them without conscious thought. I talked with a woman yesterday who has a child with a learning disability. She told how difficult it is not to compare him to the other three boys, who make almost straight A's. She has to remember to praise his little progress as much as she praises the greater progress of the brothers. Her tendency, she said, is wanting to deny that he has a handicap; she wants to make demands of him that she makes of the other three. And so she has to remind herself that his slower progress is just as great, for all progress is relative. Most of us have learning limitations of greater or lesser degrees. It's the rare, very gifted individual who is able to make progress in quantum leaps. In fact, this is one of the traits of genius. A Rubenstein, four years old, starts ...
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