District Presentation

This last Friday, March 27th, the Open Program students and teachers presented to all the teachers in our district. We spent weeks preparing for this presentation. We were trying to decide several things: what we would present, how we would present it, and who would present what. We varied from videos to standing presentation for the formatting, and settled on a live presentation from Mr. Davidson, and all of the Open students. Unfortunately, three Open students could not make it to the final presentation. Ellen Reckamp and Allyse Ketter both had vacations that left that day, as it was the day before spring break. They both prepared videos about what they were discussing, which had a few difficulties during the live presentation, but they were purely technical and solved quickly. Despite us just being a small group of only 9 present highschool students, the teachers listened. They asked questions that proved this, delving into what is going on in Open, and a few asked if it could be implemented in lower grades. The third student who was missing on that day, Nicholas McCourt, did not have as much warning that he would not make the presentation on Friday, and I myself ended up taking his place to present about the challenges the Open Program faced. I found the topic I presented to be appropriate, due to my fear of public speaking. The presentation practice in class was itself was a challenge, and presenting in front of all of those teachers was incredibly difficult. Nevertheless, I stood my ground and discussed our challenges.
I often wondered about why I was so nervous presenting. Because of this, I recently did some research, especially on being nervous. I found an article by Olivia Mitchell, which describes three possible reasons for nervousness in speaking. These three reasons are based off of our brains, which she describes as Old Brain, Mid Brain, and New Brain.

She began with Old Brain for an explanation. Old Brain is our natural survival instinct where our pack mentality comes into play. We do not want to stand out from the pack, the pack being the audience in this situation, so we fear to say something offensive or silly. Saying these things would separate us from the pack and so we fear to speak. Mid Brain is our fear from past experiences being blown out of proportion. This is when we had a bad experience from before and believe that everything following this will be the same bad experience. For this she suggested to compare it to something such as cutting off your own little finger. When considering that against giving a speech, the speech is far more appealing. The last fear she mentioned was New Brain fear. New Brain fear is trying to meet the demands of the audience and being afraid of being unable to. Her suggestion for meeting this fear of being unable to meet demands is to learn your topic so as to avoid being unable to answer questions, improvise if you get lost, and so on. In the presentation itself I did better than I had expected though.

For first semester, I talked about deciding on a project and acquiring our skill, along with the communication that went along with that process. In second semester, despite being done with the project decision and the acquisition of skill, I told the teachers that we are still challenged. This semester, it is our own challenging instead of the teachers. We have to adhere to our schedule by our own motivation, which provides challenges by the bushel. And of course, in all of these challenges, of course to me the most difficult was standing up there and talking to those teachers, even if it was only for a minute. Attached below is a video of our presentation, and I would like to extend a special thanks to all the teachers who helped design the Open Program, because without it there would have been absolutely no way I could have presented this last Friday. Thank you.

Here is the video:https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4KcrH0tHsbFajBHWTRhUzd5SmM/edit