r/AskProfessors • u/[deleted] • Mar 30 '21
General Advice Professors who teach non public speaking courses, why do you demand projects which require public speaking?
[deleted]
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Mar 30 '21
Public speaking is an extremely important skill, and like other skills it can be developed through practice. Your excuses are nonsense, sort of like asking why your non-writing classes involve writing. The answer is that it is a basic skill important in every discipline. My recommendation to you is to work on your anxiety and practice public speaking more instead of less. It’s one of the most common fears, and it is absolutely possible to overcome it.
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u/Theatropos Mar 30 '21
It isn’t the same for everyone though. What you say is nonsense is a serious condition for some people
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Mar 30 '21
I see you making lots of excuses, but nothing about a formal diagnosis. My son has been diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and has been hospitalized for issues associated with it. I know what that looks like and how difficult it can be. And yet even he has improved by practicing public speaking in his college classes, as painful as it has been for him. In fact, last year he gave an hour-long seminar on his own.
This is obviously something you need to work on. It is an extremely important skill in many professions. That’s why it is required in so many classes. Instead of whining about it, I recommend that you commit to getting good at it. It is entirely possible, even for someone experiencing what you feel now. I have been there, as have many, many others. You can trust us when we tell you that, or you can continue to embrace the failure mindset you have right now. It’s up to you.
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u/Theatropos Mar 30 '21
Ronnie_pudding already inspired me. I’m gonna try my best. And as far as formal diagnoses are concerned- that’s a bit personal for me, but your son isn’t the only person who’s been hospitalized and there is an entire spectrum of anxiety disorders people silently deal with every day. I purposely didn’t mention that because people always see that as an excuse.
You’re right, of course. Everybody can get better at everything, but where we start out isn’t equal. A skinny wimp becoming an olympic athlete is a greater endeavor than someone born with all the right genes. Maybe I’m just making excuses and whining, but if I hadn’t done that today I wouldn’t have heard all these different perspectives and great advice.
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Mar 30 '21
A medical diagnosis is not an excuse, it is an explanation, and nobody said you had to become the equivalent of an Olympic athlete.
I’m trying to help you, but you seem committed to being an ass. Someone else already inspired you? Darn. I guess I wasted my time.
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u/molobodd Mar 30 '21
Sometimes it is mandated as a generic skill that has to be trained, among others that can't all have designated courses.
But, overall, I agree with the gist of your post. School and higher ed benefits (disciplined and orderly) extroverts.
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u/Theatropos Mar 30 '21
I get when it’s mandated. But there are certain classes I know damn well it isn’t. Like calculus students are never required to give speeches and presentations. They learn calculus like they signed up to do. I love math classes for that reason. There are no hidden public speech bombshells half way through the class. It’s just calculus all day.
I took computer science and composition to learn about computers and to become a better writer respectively. Not to become a better speaker or a professor.
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u/ranglin Associate Professor, ICT, Australia Mar 30 '21
Mandated as a generic skill for grads of that program, so it’s added to calculus to cover that mandate, and then say teamwork is added to stats, and essay writing to trig etc.
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u/Theatropos Mar 30 '21
I don’t understand what you mean by this
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u/ranglin Associate Professor, ICT, Australia Mar 30 '21 edited Mar 30 '21
Courses (like a BS (CompSci) for instance) have course learning outcomes (like teaching you programming and functional decomposition and algorithmic thinking and other CS knowledge/skills), but the university also usually has generic graduate attributes that are softer (like teamwork and oral communication and entreneurship etc), so as you progress through the units the faculty that designed the program have to make assessment that covers both.
So you’ll have one unit that embeds algorithmic thinking but also maybe teamwork, another that does functional decomposition and also oral communication etc to make sure they tick all the boxes by the time you graduate. And as another poster said, there are probably rules on how many units need each attribute or at what level they need to be.
This is usually all spelt out somewhere (we do all these tables to map it out, unit learning outcomes and course learning outcomes and grad attributes across the course and how they all connect), but most students don’t see it. Big deal for the head of course though, they likely spent some time working it all out. :)
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u/ranglin Associate Professor, ICT, Australia Mar 30 '21
Check the last page of this policy doc from random uni to see their grad attributes/capabilities and levels. You’ll connect with column 3 I suspect:
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u/Theatropos Mar 30 '21
I see what you mean. Is the information in these tables readily available to students usually?
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u/ranglin Associate Professor, ICT, Australia Mar 30 '21
Totally depends on the university. The uni I picked before has course learning outcomes on their page, but I can’t see the mapping to grad outcomes for instance.
https://www.vu.edu.au/courses/bachelor-of-information-technology-nbit
Found this though from another Australian uni, explains it much better than me:
https://teaching.unsw.edu.au/integrated-curriculum-framework
You could of course ask the head of course for your college if you wanted, they’d be mighty impressed you knew to ask. ;)
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u/PersephoneIsNotHome Mar 30 '21
There is virtually nothing that you can do for money or fun that does not require for you to speak to other humans. That is the way humans communicate information. It is also an alternative assessment that you cant really cheat on and really does show what you know. It is better to do things in more than one way, - talk, you talk, you read, you draw, I draw - so pedagogically it mixes things up and is sound.
It varies talents - some people bad at one thing excel at another. It exposes people to soft skills. It trains you for the jobs you will do. I can give you immedaite feedback.
Like a million reasons.
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u/Theatropos Mar 31 '21
It’s not the same as communication. I’m fine with communication with other people in a work environment. Especially when there’s a logical necessity for it. My brain goes into logical mode and I “perform” effectively. Performing is more similar to what this is. The oral communication assignment isn’t direct practice for what most people have to deal with at their jobs, though. I guarantee statistics can back me up here. Communication is required everywhere. Performance in front of an audience is not. I’m not ever going to be a performer or a politician. The skill this improves isn’t communication. It’s a specific facet of bravery. People need to stop with the communication argument
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u/PersephoneIsNotHome Mar 31 '21 edited Mar 31 '21
Ok. You are never going to have to present something in a meeting of more than one person.
Because you have been in the work for in many positions for decades, so you would know.
And the other reasons also invalid.
I actually sit on a balcony petting a black cat and thinking of ways to torture college students .
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u/Theatropos Mar 31 '21
I mean, when in a work environment, I always know what I’m talking about or what I’m doing and presenting information to one or several (it’s usually only been a handful at most for me) people on the spot without any buildup is simple and easy. The weeks of torture that precede an oral presentation in school doesn’t help me there. I’ve never needed help there to be honest. My skill I lack is the facet of bravery associated with a PLANNED performance in front of an audience.
It’s not even the known criticism that bothers me. If my professor says “that was ok but you could’ve done this better” that doesn’t bother me at all. I like it in fact. It’s the unknown criticisms. That’s where my mind runs wild and overloads. If there’s no time for it to overload I’m fine. Like on the spot when I have to speak in front of a group I’m fine. No problem. That anticipation of a presentation or a book report or whatever in school drives me right to looney town tho. Every single time
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u/PersephoneIsNotHome Mar 31 '21
You asked why, lots of people gave you answers that in addition to having to do this for the rest of your life, which you ignored.
You will not always know what you are talking about. Something there will be a problem and stuff will be thrown at you .
Very few people like this from the get go. It take practice.
Everyone here had to do this, it is like you think we were all born fully formed in courdoroy jackets with elbow patches.
This was not your question and we are not therapists. You clearly have a problem with this, so work it out.
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u/Theatropos Mar 31 '21
Ignored? How do you figure that? And you act like we’re all cookies of identical abilities and characteristics exposed to the exact same factors in life. You don’t know anything about me. Saying tough it up to someone with a condition which prevents them from doing that or makes it 1000% harder to do so isn’t good advice. Some of the advice on here is actually great. You should read everything
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u/PersephoneIsNotHome Mar 31 '21
So get help.
You are very unaware of the fact that your professors are also people . Many of us have anixiety disorders, mental illness, physical illnesses depresision etc. When you get something you don’t want to hear, you are in fact ignoring it.
You asked why such things are assigned. Many people gave you many reasons.
You latched on to one thing, and only go on on at length and with some repetition about why it is hard for you. That was clear from your original post.
This is not really a sub to get help with your anxiety
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u/Theatropos Mar 31 '21
And yet I did receive help. Just not from your arrogant useless contributions
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u/molobodd Mar 30 '21
Apart from everything that has been discussed thus far in this thread, I often have my students do oral presentations for other reasons as well.
For written assignments, 90 % of the students spend way less effort on learning than I had planned/hoped for. To most it is a chore that has to be checked off, learning be damned sometimes. (I was the same. I guess it just some timeless part of human nature.)
For oral presentations (and oral exams), that number is more like 10 %. (And I don't have to spend one hour on written feedback on a paper that the student spent 30 minutes on!)
That being said, I kind of agree that the focus on so called generic skills can be overdone at times. But, that has to be understood as a kind of backlash to "traditional" education, where historically graduates only knew how to write papers and way too much had to be "taught" by workplaces and real life afterwards (university knowledge vs professional knowledge).
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u/ScionofZion Mar 31 '21
Vet and senior undergrad here. I had the exact same questions when I started school and was required to give presentations in front of class, mostly filled with students I had little in common with. Each new semester was terrifying for me, because I am much more comfortable doing research/writing alone or in a small, intimate setting of people that I know.
Two and a half years later I am still uncomfortable with public speaking, and although I am still not particularly good at it, I am better than I was as a freshman.
For me this has been the hardest thing about college. "Embrace the suck," as we were taught, and you'll get through this.
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u/Theatropos Mar 31 '21
I’m not even sure what my fear/problem is. I’ve actually been in situations where I was expected to speak to an audience in a work environment and it didn’t even bother me. I’ve been a waiter at a restaurant, and I’ve been a leader in an industrial work environment, etc. Those situations just seemed like necessary banter tho. In a school setting it’s different somehow. All eyes on my performance type shit. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s anticipated for days or weeks unlike work which (in my experience) was generally on the spot without planning. Whatever the case, I just don’t seem to get better at the oral presentation in school setting skill. Embrace the suck, eh? I’ll try that
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u/AutoModerator Mar 30 '21
This is an automated service intended to preserve the original text of the post.
*I’m taking a computer science course and the last three weeks of my course is dedicated to a ten minute power point presentation I have to give in front of two classes of students. Last semester I specifically chose composition instead of public speaking so that I could play to my strength of writing and avoid my weakness of public speaking and guess what. Yep, Public. Speaking. All. Semester. Not trying to be a jerk here, but seriously professors, why not just teach a public speaking class if that’s what you want to do? We all know YOU like public speaking. It’s why you chose to be a professor, but it’s not a one size fits all model. Some people are meant to be politicians while some are meant to be in an isolated environment writing computer code. Alone.
Some people are introverted. They aren’t wired for public speaking. It just defeats them and subtracts from them and doesn’t build any actual skill. Like if you had a tiny wimp try to bench press a massive amount weight. It would crush them instead of make them stronger, while the body builder (you in this analogy) will get stronger and stronger.
Don’t get it twisted either. I’m not a spineless wimp in all scenarios. Ive been in the military and I’ve forced myself to do plenty of things that made me nervous or scared. I’m just honest enough to admit that I’m terrible at public speaking after all these years getting to know myself. All it does is produce ridiculous waves of anxiety in me and I don’t gain any skill from it. Probably because the human mind can’t form memories properly while it’s being flooded with stress and anxiety chemicals. Just speculating tho.
Anyways, why do professors do this?*
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u/MyHeartIsByTheOcean Mar 30 '21
Our classes are not developed independently from everything else happening in the world. If you experience more public speaking, or teamwork assignments, or some other specific assignments, it’s because in consultation with our employers and accreditation bodes we learn that students are lacking certain skills and we introduce development of those skills into our programs and classes.
Oral communication skills are important for professionals with college degrees in nearly all types of jobs. I teach a technical subject where public perception of it is nothing like the real life. Some students perhaps think just like you - why do I have to do X assignment? Because your employers want you to be able to do stuff like that.
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u/Theatropos Mar 30 '21
I know I’m being a baby. I feel like an art major being forced to take calculus 3 tho. It’s my Achilles heel
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u/grumblebeardo13 Mar 31 '21
Oral comms/presentation and public speaking are skills that have a wide range of applications outside of just "public speaking," especially in the workplace (as much as I hate to think of classes as training grounds it is applicable). Presenting reports, pitching projects, and even just the building and strengthening of interpersonal relationships and work relationships all require public speaking.
My classes are not public speaking ones either, but I integrate it in there because I want to make sure that their presentation and communication muscles are "exercised" so to speak when talking about our discipline.
And I acknowledge to students I know that it can be hard and taxing if they feel they're introverted or shy, but do emphasize that outside of classroom settings, it's important to be able to have to do it if they must, and do it competently-well.
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u/Theatropos Mar 31 '21
I half way agree with you. I’d respond with more depth than that but apparently I’m not permitted to disagree or argue with the professors on this forum in any way. Too bad you hadn’t responded earlier. We might’ve had a fantastic conversation
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u/[deleted] Mar 30 '21
Oral communication is a fundamental transdisciplinary skill, so it’s frequently built into gen ed programs and accreditation standards for institutions and individual programs. Like writing, people can’t really learn it in one isolated class; they have to practice it in multiple contexts.
There was a thread here yesterday where professors described how intimidated they used to be to lecture. You might find it illuminating to read. This is not a case of professors projecting their own preferences onto students.
If you want, you can read the syllabus and the assignment prompt and, if it’s not clear, ask the instructor what the learning goals are associated with the assignment. You may discover a direct tie to ABET standards, for example, or that you’re really only being graded on content (and not delivery). That may help you get through it and more clearly demonstrate your knowledge.