Full Transcript for Why is Context Important for Speaking and Presenting?

and so on. Obviously, it can go much higher than that. Depends on what each student needs to do, but when you've got that much time, you have time to let things marinate, so to speak. So I'll introduce a set of concepts with the first assignment, and we'll return to them with a second major assignment and deepen and extend, and then we'll return to them for the third assignment and do something different so that we're still reinforcing those early lessons, but we're also advancing the goals of the course, that we're not just one and done. We're gonna address these goals with this project, and then we will never talk about them again. Across 13 weeks. Everybody's got the time to have a bad class and it'll be okay, including me. I was really sick a couple weeks ago. I had to completely pivot the day's work 'cause I was not gonna be on campus. Mm-hmm. And I didn't want to give my students busy work just to show me that they were working. I didn't want to lose the whole class time. So I had to figure out what I could have them do. That was useful. Productive and still not just do it because I asked you to do it. And so that kind of flexibility is built in when you have much more time and you still have to meet a set of goals. Every course has learning outcomes. Yep. And I need to be addressing those. I can't just throw them out the window on day one, but I have a lot of flexibility on how I get there because I have so much time to do it. So let's pick Kirsten: 00:04:59 up on that learning objectives thing, because you are a formally trained educator and professor, and I was an instructional designer and tech trainer, so very different skillset, but we both have the learning objectives thing. Yeah. Which is one of those things where it's like, okay, this is what we're gonna try to get to. One of the things that I noticed, With technical training is that I would bring in humor, I would bring in creative stuff. I would bring in ways to think about stuff that was outside of the box that really threw people because they're like, well wait, but this is tech training. Tech training is. The numbers boring. And I'm like, yeah, but people don't learn from dull. Mm-hmm. You know, humans don't learn when they're bored. They don't. So let's think about it differently. Like when I would teach database design, I started people out with legal pads. Mm-hmm. Which freaked them the hell out. Because I'm like, you're not turning on access until after we talk about what fields are and how you're collecting your data and how the data's gonna talk to itself. Mm-hmm. and we're talking about the concepts before we go in, into the software, and especially in technical training, a lot of times the huge mistake they make is they start in the software and they start with, now this is the file menu and this is the view menu. And it's like, okay, that's all great. But why the hell are you there and what is the problem you're trying to solve? Yeah. If you don't give it context, then you're basically doing rote work. Right. So I wanted to ask you, there's a term that is not in my expertise, but is in yours. Close reading. Yeah. What is that? How does that work? Kellie: 00:06:33 So close reading is when you, well read something and instead of just skimming the surface and taking in what it says, you stop. You notice and you analyze, and it's an inherent skillset of analysis, but we do it so often that we forget. We learned how to do it. So part of the goals of my class is to call that out for students to draw their attention to what they already do so that they can choose how to do it more effectively. So here's a somewhat short example. We're doing an analysis essay. One of the short stories is Molly Patterson's short story called "Honors Track" from The Atlantic 2012. And Plot is a group of highly, highly, highly ambitious high school students trying to get into the nation's elite colleges cheat and get away with it until one of them turns and exposes the group. And the group throws one student under the bus. And then there's the ending, which I will leave as it is, so, okay, great. Find something that interests you in this story. Step one, I'm not gonna tell you what you find interesting. You find something interesting. So being the geek that I am, I love Shakespeare's Macbeth, it's my favorite of his plays. And in this high school in sophomore year, in Brit Lit class, they have to do an essay on Macbeth. And that's a plot point because two of them don't do well and they start to gather data because they think the teacher's biased against them and and so on for plot. I'm making a point to my students. Okay. Brit Lit class. Very typical class. Analyze a Shakespeare play. Very typical assignment. Why Macbeth? Shakespeare wrote a lot of plays in a couple of different genres. History, comedy, tragedy. Why Macbeth? Well, Macbeth is about ambition and greed. And what would you do to achieve your goals and what do you sacrifice in the effort to achieve your goals, which is exactly what the short story is about. I. If you just skim the service and go, yep, Macbeth hated that play. Move on. You're missing something about what's happening in the story. And so you can just read the story and know what happens. But when you close read, when you read with the intention to analyze, then you're, oh, I see that clue. I see that red flag. Mm-hmm. there's another character, the character who is the betrayer in the story. Has two favorite movies, Home Alone 2 and Annie Hall. And that's relevant because she's trying to get to New York City. They're in St. Louis, she's trying to get to New York City. And those two movies are pop culture movies. Yeah, they're not serious cinema. Or maybe Annie Hall is, but Home Alone 2 definitely is not. And so you just go, favorite movies, gotta move on. Or you stop and notice that Annie Hall is about broken, dysfunctional, failed relationships. Okay, and Home Alone 2 is derivative. It's not an original.

It's the second one, and it's about a kid who keeps getting left behind and in Home Alone 2, when that kid gets left behind, he foils the plot of some criminals trying to do a big crime. And so from freshman year, when we learn that those are her two favorite movies, if we are careful readers, we will notice that something's different about this student. Something sets her apart. Mm-hmm. and it turns out she's the betrayer in their junior year. Kirsten: 00:10:03 Interesting. And so when you point that out, or when you help your students see that mm-hmm. your students are business students. Yeah. What connection does that make to them in the business world? undefined: 00:10:15 Well, Kellie: 00:10:16 being able to analyze market trends there, we're very big on entrepreneurship. Being able to analyze what the market has and what the market lacks and how can you bring something to market to support and fill that gap is an essential business skillset. Analyzing all kinds of data analysis is analysis, if it's words or if it's numbers. You have to have curiosity about what you pay attention to, and then you have to be able to link somehow that set of things you've paid attention to. That's, and figure out what the pattern is. That's Kirsten: 00:10:50 it. That's perfect. Perfect. So everybody listening, one of the things that we want you to take away from this is that it doesn't matter your discipline. Yeah. The core underlying structures and the intentions. Are the same. Yep. So making connections, making relationships between topics is how people deepen their knowledge. Yeah. And it's how they are able to take something and store it properly so that it is ready for retrieval. So when you're adding, oh, sort of a entertaining, I'm gonna put that in air quotes here. Entertaining dimension to a topic. So for example, I would put goofy science fiction names in my database list classes or, or things like that. Or have people write ridiculous letters. What is the worst possible, most ugly PowerPoint you can make? Okay. Ugliest one, win. And somebody's calling. Here we go. Mute. Mute. So the reason why I would do that is because it would push people to use the tool in ways that they might not if they were being careful. Yeah. Because I wanted them to see more of what was possible. So we went outside of the bounds. You actually were teaching Jekyll Hyde, and you and I were having a conversation about it in which you were talking about the sublayers of the meaning behind things like the back door. Mm-hmm. can you speak a little bit about that? Kellie: 00:12:16 I can, this is where we get a little bit blue in our conversation. So Jekyll Hyde, Dr. Jekyll Mr. Hyde. Spoiler alert, on a 200 year old story, same guy, and Dr. Jekyll is very respectable in his community, but has been acting a little bit weird. And so two friends go to check on him and on the way they see something happen in which Mr. Hyde attacks a random person in the street and like, Hey, that's

not right, da da da. And so they follow Mr. Hyde and he goes into this really disputable looking space. The door is really shabby, the neighborhood's kind of grubby and all of that. And this whole encounter's very odd plot goes on, and long story, a little bit shorter. Imagine a house on a really large corner lot, and it's large enough that the front is different, that the front street is different from the side street that corners the property. And so the front is nice and respectable and looks out on a lovely square, good part of town, da da, da. But that side road is where the neighborhood has started to go downhill rapidly. And it turns out that Mr. Hyde lives and went in through the back door of the property where Dr. Jekyll is, and there is a whole homosocial, homosexual entry about the back door are anatomical back doors. It is where the waste, where the filth is, exits our systems and It is part of the stigma against gay male sex that happens at the anus because it's associated with filth and wow, do my students not wanna have this conversation? they never see this coming. It is always very just out of nowhere. But once they see it, they can't not see it. And they see all the other ways in the story in which these references to what you hide. Hide and what is shameful because the thing that Dr. Jekyll does that causes him to have to hide, causes him to have to develop this alternate personality through taking a chemical. Substance is never named. So we have to infer from the story that whatever it is, is so very shameful. He cannot, literally cannot show his face. So sex of some kind, most often, sometimes money, generally sex. So once they've noticed that, they look at all of the other kind of repercussions in the story in which the story is unstable and it changes a lot for them. Whether or not they think Dr. Jekyll is engaged in homosexual sex, it's not the point. Mm-hmm. But the possibility changes what they see. Kirsten: 00:14:57 So what I find interesting is that because it's written in a certain time period, in a certain era, you also have to bring up the standards of that era, right? So Kellie: 00:15:07 this is the late 19th century London where homosexuality is illegal. And so if you were caught as it were, doing illegal acts, you could be arrested Oscar Wilde in the same time period, a newspaper slandered him and Oscar Wilde. Was gay, was flamboyantly gay and a newspaper said something linking Oscar Wilde to a man romantically and some kind of lover spout, whatever it was, I don't remember. But 'cause it was illegal, Oscar Wilde had to contest it and say it was slander. And then as it turns out, Oscar Wilde gets. Arrested right? And so I was like, no, I wasn't involved with that one. I was involved with that one. And so what the newspaper said was wrong, and therefore Oscar Wilde wins the case, except he's now been exposed as being gay, which homosexual acts are illegal. He goes to prison. And so this notion of what is publicly acceptable, but it's your private desire, what you have to put on as a face to the world, what you really, really want and have to hide and so on, is an important point for them, for my students to train themselves to start to look for, right? It's not the secret, meaning it's not, what does the author really trying to tell us? It's what is the author's environment that they're writing in that is just baked into their language choices. That's Kirsten: 00:16:35 it. Excellent. So the reason why Kellie and I do this is because we're committed to the ongoing mastery of presenting and speaking, and that is a very broad discipline. Yeah, that's a very broad topic. So one of the things that I encourage everybody listening to do is to kind of take the core theme that we have from today's show and just see in your next. Speech and your next keynote in your next breakout session and whatever, are there ways in which you can put in more than one, essentially track, and you have the obvious statements and the obvious line, and then the, oh, by the way, here's a secondary meaning that reinforces the point of the first. Mm-hmm. storytelling is something that. Is not used often enough in speeches, especially in the technical world. Mm-hmm. and I'm gonna hold up the How to Tell a Story by the Moth book because I would encourage you to take some risks Yeah. With your presenting and speaking. Because going a direction people don't expect and going into maybe a, a morey or a whimsical or theatrical way can actually reinforce a core point because people might have preconceptions about the topic. And if you then come around here from the side, you might show them aspects of this belief system they have and go, oh, well wait a minute. Maybe it isn't. Yeah. And especially in the technical world, when you are trying to kind of show people balances, like in cybersecurity, the balance between risk and freedom Yeah. Is a dance that all tech speakers have to deal with. Well, there's reasons why that you might want to make certain adjustments and plans. So let's some creative stories can help people see that. So Kellie, what's the takeaway that you would like people to have from our episode today? Kellie: 00:18:39 The takeaway is that analysis starts with noticing the details and when you notice the details, you are not overthinking it. You are not overreading it. You are noticing what's there and not just glossing past it, it's there for a reason. What could those reasons be? Now you've started analysis and Kirsten: 00:19:01 my takeaway will be I encourage you to take risks. So try to be a little more storytelling based, a little more creative, a little more literary in your work, in your presenting and speaking, and see if that allows you to make connections for people that they struggle to make on their own. Mm-hmm. And I think that's it. All right. So everybody, please make the, we are on all the socials and we have, and I think next week is an interview. Yes, and so we have a couple of things coming up. So we have talks like this. We have interviews, we have mini coaching sessions. Check us out on YouTube, please, like please subscribe and we will see you next time. Thanks for watching. Cheers. If you enjoyed this conversation about making connections among topics, check out season four, episode number 48. Why is Adaptability Key for Changing Workplace culture? The link is in the show notes.