As a post-script to the immediately-precedent BLOG essay on Toastmasters, I, Lawrence Keeney Marsh, cellist since age eight, testify that I helped establish a local club of amateur musicians called Music Makers, nearly forty years ago. That club is still in fully-vigorous existence today, meeting always the first Sunday afternoon of each month in various club-members' private homes.
Many long years of prior experience with music performance in front of Music Maker audiences was a great help in becoming a Toastmaster of far more recent time. Granting that speaking and instrumental music-playing are not identical skills, the two nevertheless do share some degree of common ground with such skills as artistic phrasing, dynamic contrast, tempo, rhythm and clarity of articulation. In serving as a Toastmaster speech evaluator, I critique speeches of other people with the ears of a trained musician.
More importantly, however, many long years of Music Maker experience have in large measure conquered the severe trepidations I might have otherwise had in my early days of Toastmaster speaking experience. Most important: I know that in both settings, I am among friends, and nobody in the audience has a shot-gun across their lap, waiting to blast me away a la John Wayne style, the first time I stumble a little.
-LKM
Monday, February 7, 2011
Friday, February 4, 2011
What Toastmasters Means To Me
As of the time of this writing, I, Lawrence Keeney Marsh, testify that I have been with Toastmasters International for twenty months.
Other people always see us from different sides and angles from that by which we see ourselves. We cannot possibly see ourselves from the same perspectives as those by which others see us. One man's villain is another man's hero, one man's coward is another man's diplomat. Are we bold and brave, or are we brash, reckless and foolish?
Toastmasters is to me a golden oppertunity for reality check, concerning the status of my relations with other people. As we speak to an audience, we expect certain audience reactions to our words, according to how we ourselves would also react. With some listeners, we are not disappointed. With other listeners, we are shock-surprised, for better or for worse, at the unexpected emotional impact our words have on them.
Often, we form our opinions of other people based on incomplete and limited information about them. We judge books by their covers. If we stay with Toastmasters for several years, we realize that in some cases, our first guesses about other people were correct; while in other cases, we were very wrong. Abraham Lincoln once said that it is better to remain silent and be thought to be a fool, than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt. President Calvin Coolidge was a man of few words and little action. Was he lazy, or was he judicious in his exercise of presidential power? In Toastmasters, we learn who are the ambitious and aggressive, and who are the restrained and reserved. When people do dare to open their mouths to speak, all doubts about them are indeed removed. Can there be such a thing as a "reticent Toastmaster"? Should there be? The answer to that question depends on the limits people want to place upon information about themselves they give out to other people, and upon their ability to live with the concomittant judgements other people pass upon them accordingly.
Finally, a strong criticism of Toastmasters: It is ideologically too much bent towards needs of corporate business America, when other professions, too, could use Toastmaster skills of communication. For instance, Toastmasters should also seek alliance with academia, so as to help teachers and professors to become better teachers and professors. Educators, for their part, should have some hand in the content and design of Toastmaster manuals. I would suggest publication of a new Toastmaster manual called Toastmasters For Teachers. The extant manual called Speaking To Inform is a first step in that right direction, but it does not go far enough. More cooperative research and brain-storming between Toastmasters and academia must be done.
How can teachers and professors turn mediocre students into excellent students? Is it not true that the success or failure of educators in their profession rests upon their ability to effectively communicate their academic subjects to their students? Perhaps a Toastmaster DTM should be one prerequisite for entering the teaching profession. By the same token, expounding upon new methods of marketing some new product, or re-arranging company financial policies and practices, is a very different concern from that of pedagogical methods in the teaching of science, mathematics and foreign languages. No academic subject is truly hard to learn, it merely seems hard to learn if there are gaps in the logical sequence of progression from one principle to another, such that students fail to see relevant connections between them. This is especially true of sequential subjects like science and mathematics, where grasp of a succeeding principle necessarily depends upon understanding of a related prior one.
To this end goal, Toastmasters communications techniques have almost infinite potential to boost academia to new heights of excellence.
-Lawrence K. Marsh, CC
Tech Corridor Toastmasters
M.A. Near Eastern Studies U.C.L.A. 1971
Other people always see us from different sides and angles from that by which we see ourselves. We cannot possibly see ourselves from the same perspectives as those by which others see us. One man's villain is another man's hero, one man's coward is another man's diplomat. Are we bold and brave, or are we brash, reckless and foolish?
Toastmasters is to me a golden oppertunity for reality check, concerning the status of my relations with other people. As we speak to an audience, we expect certain audience reactions to our words, according to how we ourselves would also react. With some listeners, we are not disappointed. With other listeners, we are shock-surprised, for better or for worse, at the unexpected emotional impact our words have on them.
Often, we form our opinions of other people based on incomplete and limited information about them. We judge books by their covers. If we stay with Toastmasters for several years, we realize that in some cases, our first guesses about other people were correct; while in other cases, we were very wrong. Abraham Lincoln once said that it is better to remain silent and be thought to be a fool, than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt. President Calvin Coolidge was a man of few words and little action. Was he lazy, or was he judicious in his exercise of presidential power? In Toastmasters, we learn who are the ambitious and aggressive, and who are the restrained and reserved. When people do dare to open their mouths to speak, all doubts about them are indeed removed. Can there be such a thing as a "reticent Toastmaster"? Should there be? The answer to that question depends on the limits people want to place upon information about themselves they give out to other people, and upon their ability to live with the concomittant judgements other people pass upon them accordingly.
Finally, a strong criticism of Toastmasters: It is ideologically too much bent towards needs of corporate business America, when other professions, too, could use Toastmaster skills of communication. For instance, Toastmasters should also seek alliance with academia, so as to help teachers and professors to become better teachers and professors. Educators, for their part, should have some hand in the content and design of Toastmaster manuals. I would suggest publication of a new Toastmaster manual called Toastmasters For Teachers. The extant manual called Speaking To Inform is a first step in that right direction, but it does not go far enough. More cooperative research and brain-storming between Toastmasters and academia must be done.
How can teachers and professors turn mediocre students into excellent students? Is it not true that the success or failure of educators in their profession rests upon their ability to effectively communicate their academic subjects to their students? Perhaps a Toastmaster DTM should be one prerequisite for entering the teaching profession. By the same token, expounding upon new methods of marketing some new product, or re-arranging company financial policies and practices, is a very different concern from that of pedagogical methods in the teaching of science, mathematics and foreign languages. No academic subject is truly hard to learn, it merely seems hard to learn if there are gaps in the logical sequence of progression from one principle to another, such that students fail to see relevant connections between them. This is especially true of sequential subjects like science and mathematics, where grasp of a succeeding principle necessarily depends upon understanding of a related prior one.
To this end goal, Toastmasters communications techniques have almost infinite potential to boost academia to new heights of excellence.
-Lawrence K. Marsh, CC
Tech Corridor Toastmasters
M.A. Near Eastern Studies U.C.L.A. 1971
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