Last month I was asked to be a judge at the annual Colorado American Legion speech contest. The national winner in April gets an $18,000 scholarship, which will pay a little less than half of one year’s tuition at a top-tier college. The third-place winner in Colorado gets $400, which will pay for about half of one semester’s textbooks.
I was also asked, for the first time, to coach six students for an oral interpretation presentation at their elementary school. The American Legion contestants are required to speak about the Constitution for eight to 10 minutes. The kids could use any poem they might choose, speaking for three to five minutes.
They chose poems about being eaten by a boa constrictor, “The Island of Lost Socks,” and similar subjects. The high school students talked about American exceptionalism and how long it had taken for blacks to be counted as more than three-fifths of a person and for women to have the right to vote.
I taught public speaking at six colleges and universities for 43 years, but every student and speaker is unique and the differences are sometimes startling. In a general way, the high school students are restrained, some with symptoms of stage fright, limited by the rules, and mostly dressed in black. They are required to wear “business dress,” which some embellished with flag pins and flag ties. I regarded those as props, which are forbidden, just to get a patriotic edge.
The second- and fourth-graders are a different story. They are too young to suffer from stage fright, so walking into a classroom of these students is like confronting a band of whirling dervishes. Their energy is without limits; it saturates the room with a power that threatens to reach overload at any moment. Harnessing it seems impossible, and I did not really try to do more than nudge it into little more than a momentary direction. I know my limits.
I sometimes worry that Facebook and Twitter are robbing our children of their childhood, but I saw no evidence of it in either group. I am a little concerned about the change that takes place between the insouciance of the very young and the angst of the college applicant, but I have no idea whether one is better, more valuable or more instructive in later life than the other. I just have a sneaking suspicion that something worthwhile is lost between the near anarchy of the fourth grade and the solemn graduation ceremony in high school.
Of course, adult life brings with it serious questions that require critical thinking and thoughtful solutions. Simply paying for a college education is serious enough, and a scholarship is well worth seeking. A second-grader and his sister, a fourth-grader, performed a poem about being kept awake by worrying about what-ifs, including parents divorcing. But it was clear neither one was really worried. They were just having fun. Soon enough, they will have all-too-real worries.
It is probably a very simple and ordinary progression from the innocence of elementary school to the teenage anxiety about what one is going to do with the rest of their life.
I was tempted to remind the American Legion contestants that no matter how important life seems at the moment, they might consider reserving some time for simple fun; none of us is going to get out of this alive, and we might take a tip from the fourth-graders and revel in the moment.
David Steiner (davidesteiner@) is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, a retired professor of theater and public speaking, and a columnist for the Allenspark WIND.
