Group Work

Class this week made me think. I looked around the classroom and watched everyone interacting with eachother. We didn't all know eachother in the beginning of the semester, but if a stranger were to walk into the classroom one would think that the students in the classroom were the best of friends, and knew eachother well. I believe that we've all made this kinship with eachother, and gained this friendship for several differant reasons. Since the first day of class, our professor had us engage in group work that had to do with the asking our other classmates questions and getting to know eachother. Another reason why our class room is so comfortable to be in, is the fact that we are all friendly people. I think our classroom is so friendly also because we all share one fear, well sort of fear, of getting up in front of a group of people and talking. This is also a communication class, so we are all communicating on a weekly basis, and maybe thats what our professor strived to do with our class, to make us feel comfortable enough to communicate with one another, not only properly, but in a friendly matter. This idea, and to give us a little extra boost of self esteem, self confidence, by feeling comfortable in this class room, and to make us feel it's okay to communicate our feelings and ideas.

Class Today

Today in class we mostly talked about putting together a outline for our speeches. We began class talking about the seven steps to correctly put together a speech, and had to get into a group we had yet to be in. This I didn't find to be to hard of a thing to do, considering the fact that I feel I am a pretty friendly person, and the whole class pretty much knows each other to a decent extent right now. Then my group came up with the idea of creating an entertaining speech about carnies. I really didn't think that this would be as controversial of an issue as it turned out to be later in class. I understand that I may have other classmates that live in lower income families, but were not trying to take a jab at those people. The purpose of our speech was just to entertain people with funny instances of carnie people and their work. I really couldn't see the bad in that situation, but I understand my professor's warnings, and the fact that she was trying to get us to actually analyze our audience before the speech. All in all I thought it was a good class, but then again, I've yet to have a bad one...knock on wood.

Culture Speeches

In our last class, we had to present our culture speeches. I thought this assignment was actually pretty amusing because we got the oppurtunity to choose the culture or co-culture we wanted to research and present, therefore it gave me the oppurtunity to find a culture I felt passionate about informing my peers on. I thought the speeches themselves were really great. Not only did I enjoy learning about the cultures everyone else chose to do, but I thought it was intereseting to see what little changes everyone put into their speeches, and the differances between these speeches and our first. Though there were not a lot of differances, there were a few, and some of the previous wall flowers in our class had opened up and I thought that was awesome. All in all I thought our last class was pretty cool, and I enjoyed it a lot.