37 Last Public Speaking Lectures

Photo by Ian Smyth of North Campus Construction

I taught my first public speaking class in fall, 1983, at Idaho State University.  Yesterday I gave my last lectures on using reasoning and appealing to emotions in a persuasive speech to four students who needed to miss class last Sunday because it was Easter.   I watched and assessed their evocative speeches and gave my lectures on a volunteer basis, hoping to make up for the idiocy of the machinery that scheduled me.  As one student said, "they should have real people doing the scheduling instead of robots."  Yes, indeed.  Banner isn't a robot but I completely agreed with her.

I wanted to go across the street, get on a plane, and fly somewhere rather than come back home and face the piles of grading that are part of the midterm experience.  But then ever since I started teaching out at Redmond, that's been one of my fantasies.  Back when I began it was easy to walk across the school's scrub-filled back lot and airport parking area to get to the terminal.  It's probably still simple but the walls around the parking and the current college construction make the escape seem more challenging.

The longing to escape has always been part of my self-management toolkit.  I've never felt at home in the dry and dusty high desert.  But then, as I learned a long time ago from my semester long individual study of Being and Time, the experience of being "not-at-home" in the world - umheimlichkeit - is just a part of our human experience.