My first Toast Master's Speech

This is my first speech, where I get to talk about myself.  If I was sitting in your shoes, I might want to get up and leave, please don’t.  I know how you feel.  A lot of people feel that way.  But what others in your shoes have found is that by just listening you might be pleasantly surprised.  Hey, wait a minute.  This is starting to sound like a sales pitch, isn’t it?  That’s not surprising because I spent a couple of years trying to eke out a living in sales.  There were:

·        cars,

·        insurance products,

·        mutual funds,

·        collection services,

·        health drinks,

·        metal buildings

·        satellite dishes,

·        long distance phone packages,

·        and the last effort involved air and water purifiers. 

I don’t own any of the things I tried to sell.  That’s too bad.  Imagine.  If I had put money in a good mutual fund back in 1992, who knows what it would be worth now? Naomi would know.

Back to you though.  You might be thinking, as I ramble on, “What’s In It for me?”    I’m hoping to broad of your horizons, or just pass the time  pleasantly and hopefully bring a smile to your face.  How am I doing so far? 

Walk with me down memory lane back in Cleveland, Oh, in 1954  where I was the baby of seven.  Childhood consisted of fighting for scraps and wearing my older brother’s clothes until I got my first job at the age of 10 cleaning a bird bath twice a day.  Two dollars a week didn’t buy a lot, but things starting looking up when I got a paper route. At 13, I became a caddy at an upscale country club, followed by several years in and out of food service as a:

·        busboy,

·        fry cook,

·        waiter,

·        bartender and

·        finally a  galley slave and deck hand on Maine’s oldest functioning two masted schooner, called the Lewis R. French. 

It still sails today with a crew of four. It takes out 22 passengers for a week at a time. For those that like bathing, they provide cold sea water showers from a bucket.  Not much has changed since I polished brass and hoisted sails back in 1979.  The schooner industry prides itself on doing things the same way year after year. 

That summer though, I changed.  I developed skills that I still use today, and pass on to my students, like knot tying.  I learned that you can work hard all week, build muscles you never knew you had, and that after 13 weeks of eating lobster once a week, I’d rather eat a couple of hot dogs. I experienced contra dancing for the first  time but not the last. 

 In preparing the ship for three months of sailing, I discovered the satisfaction of fixing things and making things but I only made $65 a week though.   So I searched for a career that blended the pleasure of making things, and helping others do the same thing. 

When I enrolled in Kent State in 1980, my major was Industrial Arts Education.  The focus was drafting, wood shop, metal shop, graphics and a little pottery thrown in for good measure.  After teaching two years in Richmond County, NC, I moved to Boone to get my Masters.  After 21 years of teaching in three different counties, eleven different schools, including the NC School for the Deaf for one year, I am every bit as challenged and excited about my career as ever. 

How can that be?  I have the good fortune of teaching from a curriculum so broad that I choose which topics to teach, based on resources, my personal mastery of the material, and the most important criteria…will it be fun?  I select activities from the Career and Technology Exploration curriculum.  The way I see it, whatever I want to teach can be part of some career or some technology in one way or another. 

What would you see if you were to walk into my classrooms?  If you plan to visit, and you are welcome to, but call ahead.  I work at four different schools: Parkway, Cove Creek,  Mabel and Bethel.  I visit two schools a day, and then the other two schools the next day.  If at Cove Creek, all I have to work with is a computer lab.  At Parkway, I have more of a regular classroom; however, there is a light duty kitchen in the corner, and a greenhouse at the playground.  Bethel, usually considered the orphan of the county schools, has the best set up.  It has a Computer lab upstairs, and downstairs in the dungeon, one classroom with a full kitchen and another room with a workshop for carpentry and small engine repair. 

If you were to walk into my room, you might see students making a video about business etiquette.  Other students might be building a stand out of recycled lumber to support a rain barrel next to our vegetable garden.  you will find students researching a small business idea on the computers, hopefully not too distracted from the music they have playing through their ear buds.

 Others are taking pictures and learning to edit them for their power point presentation. 

Others are taking surveys about careers.  A couple of kids might be taking a part a lawn mower that has seen better days, and destined to never run again.  I tell them we are going to reuse the parts, but in reality, they are just learning to use tools on a machine that they can’t break.  I keep band aids handy. 

On a pretty day, you might find kids hauling mulch, to cover the flowers that we transplanted in a flower bed. 

At all my schools, kids learn to take and edit photographs and create a business like PowerPoint.  This year, with my new found enthusiasm for public speaking, they will present their work in front of the class.

All my students get instruction in using  3D computer assisted design, basic computer programmingand keyboarding, also known as typing.

 You might think traveling and teaching so many different things is challenging.  It is but that is not the biggest challenge.  Neither is coordinating supplies, which with limited funding for my program has gotten easier. 

My challenge is to remind myself daily that kids are kids, and given the chance, they want to learn how to do things that are relevant.  They also want learning to be fun.  I have to remember there will be messes to clean up, broken tools, and wasted materials.  Kids like teachers that like them. Kids, I tell myself, are doing the best they can, and if I were in their shoes, I would do the same thing. 

I have a favorite quote.   “Kids don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” More important than lessons, the grades, the projects, my first priority is to let them know that they matter most and I care.