Unit Five: Ted Talks
Week One Notes
Day One: Public Speaking Activities
Warm Up: Think of times in the past when you’ve given a public speech (perhaps for school, an extra curricular activity, church, etc.). How confident did you feel in delivering your speech? If you felt confident, what made you feel that way? If you struggled with confidence, why? Explain your feelings about public speaking.
Activity Number One: Connect the Dots
DIRECTIONS: You will choose two random words from the bag. Then, you will have 5 minutes, to come up with a short storyconnecting those two words. Use the space below to brainstorm ideas for your story, then you will tell your story out loud to the class. Story should be no longer than 30 – 45 seconds!
Activity Number Two: “Just a Minute”
DIRECTIONS: This time, you will have only 15 seconds to think before you speak! You will select a card about a topic from the bag. Then, you will have 15 seconds to gather your ideas. Then you must speak for 1 entire minute without stopping, pausing, or hesitating.
Day Two: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos
DIRECTIONS: Read through the following speech transcript. Then answer the questions below.
Unit Five: Ted Talks
Week One Notes
Our country is in serious trouble. We don’t have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don’t have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let’s say, China in a trade deal? They kill us. I beat China all the time. All the time.
When did we beat Japan at anything? They send their cars over by the millions, and what do we do? When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo? It doesn’t exist, folks. They beat us all the time.
When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically.
The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.
So ladies and gentlemen…
I am officially running… for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again.
It can happen. Our country has tremendous potential. We have tremendous people.
I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created. I tell you that.
How stupid are our leaders? How stupid are these politicians to allow this to happen? How stupid are they?
Hey, I’m not saying they’re stupid. I like China. I sell apartments for — I just sold an apartment for $15 million to somebody from China. Am I supposed to dislike them? I own a big chunk of the Bank of America Building at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, that I got from China in a war. Very valuable.
I love China. People say, “Oh, you don’t like China?”
No, I love them. But their leaders are much smarter than our leaders, and we can’t sustain ourself with that. There’s too much — it’s like — it’s like take the New England Patriots and Tom Brady and have them play your high school football team. That’s the difference between China’s leaders and our leaders.
We have all the cards, but we don’t know how to use them. We don’t even know that we have the cards, because our leaders don’t understand the game.
I’m using my own money. I’m not using the lobbyists. I’m not using donors. I don’t care. I’m really rich.
And I’m the one that made all of the right predictions about Iraq. You know, all of these politicians that I’m running against now — it’s so nice to say I’m running as opposed to if I run, if I run. I’m running.
Somebody said to me the other day, a reporter, a very nice reporter, “You’re not a nice person.”
That’s true. But actually I am. I think I am a nice person. People that know me, like me. Does my family like me? I think so, right. Look at my family. I’m proud of my family.
So the reporter said to me the other day, “You’re not a nice person. How can you get people to vote for you?”
I said, “I don’t know.” I said, “I think that number one, I am a nice person. I give a lot of money away to charities and other things. I think I’m actually a very nice person.”
I’ve employed — I’ve employed tens of thousands of people over my lifetime. That means medical. That means education. That means everything.
Nobody can do that like me. Believe me. It will be done on time, on budget, way below cost, way below what anyone ever thought.
Sadly, the American dream is dead.
But if I get elected president I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before, and we will make America great again.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Unit Five: Ted Talks
Week One Notes
1) What is the speaker of this speech trying to persuade his audience to believe about himself?
2) What is one particular moment of his speech that compels you? Why is it persuasive?
3) Why does the speaker believe he will be a better president than others before him? Do you agree with him?
Identifying Ethos, Pathos, and Logos
Ethos / Pathos / LogosDefinition[JN1]: / Definition[JN2]: / Definition[JN3]:
Look for[JN4]: / Look for[JN5]: / Look for: [JN6]
Angela Lee Duckworth: Key to Success is Grit
DIRECTIONS: Highlight examples of Ethos in your text. To the side, explain what the speaker is establishing about herself through the example.
00:11When I was 27 years old,I left a very demanding job in management consultingfor a job that was even more demanding: teaching[JN7].I went to teach seventh graders mathin the New York City public schools. And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests.I gave out homework assignments.When the work came back, I calculated grades.[JN8]
00:35What struck me was that IQ was not the only differencebetween my best and my worst students.Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric IQ scores.Some of my smartest kids weren't doing so well.And that got me thinking.The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math, sure, they're hard: ratios, decimals, the area of a parallelogram.But these concepts are not impossible, and I was firmly convinced that every one of my studentscould learn the materialif they worked hard and long enough.
01:15After several more years of teaching,I came to the conclusion that what we need in educationis a much better understanding of students and learningfrom a motivational perspective,from a psychological perspective[JN9].In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is IQ.But what if doing well in school and in lifedepends on much morethan your ability to learn quickly and easily?
01:47So I left the classroom,and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist.I started studying kids and adultsin all kinds of super challenging settings,and in every study my question was,who is successful here and why?My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy.We tried to predict which cadetswould stay in military training and which would drop out.We went to the National Spelling Beeand tried to predict which children would advance farthest in competition.We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods,asking which teachers are still going to be here in teachingby the end of the school year,and of those, who will be the most effectiveat improving learning outcomes for their students?We partnered with private companies, asking,which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs?And who's going to earn the most money?In all those very different contexts,one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success.And it wasn't social intelligence.It wasn't good looks, physical health,and it wasn't IQ.It was grit.[JN10]
03:00Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.Grit is having stamina.Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out,not just for the week, not just for the month,but for years,and working really hard to make that future a reality.Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.
03:27A few years ago,I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools.I asked thousands of high school juniorsto take grit questionnaires,and then waited around more than a yearto see who would graduate. Turns out that grittier kidswere significantly more likely to graduate,even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure,things like family income,standardized achievement test scores,even how safe kids felt when they were at school.So it's not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters.It's also in school,especially for kids at risk for dropping out.
04:08To me, the most shocking thing about gritis how little we know,how little science knows, about building it.Every day, parents and teachers ask me,"How do I build grit in kids?What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic?How do I keep them motivated for the long run?"The honest answer is,I don't know.[JN11]
04:29(Laughter)
04:31What I do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty.Our data show very clearlythat there are many talented individualswho simply do not follow through on their commitments.In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelatedor even inversely related to measures of talent.
04:51So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kidsis something called "growth mindset."This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck,and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed,that it can change with your effort.Dr. Dweck has shownthat when kids read and learn about the brainand how it changes and grows in response to challenge,they're much more likely to persevere when they fail,because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition.
05:28So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit.But we need more.And that's where I'm going to end my remarks,because that's where we are.That's the work that stands before us.We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions,and we need to test them.We need to measure whether we've been successful,and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong,to start over again with lessons learned.
05:55In other words, we need to be grittyabout getting our kids grittier.
06:01Thank you.
06:02(Applause)
Day Three: Identifying and Evaluating Pathos
Warm Up: Re-read the warm up speech from yesterday and highlight examples of Pathos that you encounter in the speech.
ChimamandaNgoziAdiche: The Danger of a Single Story
DIRECTIONS: Highlight examples of Pathos in your text. To the side, explain the purpose of the use of Pathos in the specific instance.
00:11I'm a storyteller.And I would like to tell you a few personal storiesabout what I like to call "the danger of the single story."I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria.My mother says that I started reading at the age of two,although I think four is probably close to the truth.So I was an early reader,and what I read were British and American children's books.
00:38I was also an early writer,and when I began to write, at about the age of seven,stories in pencil with crayon illustrationsthat my poor mother was obligated to read,I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading:All my characters were white and blue-eyed,they played in the snow,they ate apples,
01:03(Laughter)
01:05and they talked a lot about the weather,how lovely it was that the sun had come out.
[JN12]01:09(Laughter)
01:11Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria.I had never been outside Nigeria.We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes,and we never talked about the weather,because there was no need to.
01:25My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer,because the characters in the British books I readdrank ginger beer.Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.[JN13]
01:35(Laughter)
01:36And for many years afterwards,I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer.But that is another story.
01:43What this demonstrates, I think,is how impressionable and vulnerable [JN14]we arein the face of a story,particularly as children.Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign,I had become convinced that booksby their very nature had to have foreigners in themand had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.Now, things changed when I discovered African books.There weren't many of them available,and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books.
02:14But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and CamaraLaye,I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature.I realized that people like me,girls with skin the color of chocolate,whose [JN15]kinky hair could not form ponytails,could also exist in literature.I started to write about things I recognized.
02:35Now, I loved those American and British books I read.They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me.But the unintended consequencewas that I did not know that people like mecould exist in literature.So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this:It saved me from having a single story of what books are.[JN16]
02:58I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family.My father was a professor.My mother was an administrator.And so we had, as was the norm,live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages.So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy.His name was Fide.The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor.My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family.And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say,"Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing."So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family.[JN17]
03:42Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit,and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basketmade of dyed raffia that his brother had made.I was startled.It had not occurred to me that anybody in his familycould actually make something.[JN18]All I had heard about them was how poor they were,so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor.Their poverty was my single story of them.
04:12Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeriato go to university in the United States.I was 19.My American roommate was shocked by me.She asked where I had learned to speak English so well,and was confused when I said that Nigeriahappened to have English as its official language.She asked if she could listen to what she called my "tribal music,"and was consequently very disappointedwhen I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.[JN19]
04:41(Laughter)
04:44She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.
04:48What struck me was this:She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me[JN20].Her default position toward me, as an African,was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity.My roommate had a single story of Africa:a single story of catastrophe[JN21].In this single story,there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way,no possibility of feelings more complex than pity,no possibility of a connection as human equals.
05:20I must say that before I went to the U.S.,I didn't consciously identify as African.But in the U.S., whenever Africa came up, people turned to me.Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia.But I did come to embrace this new identity,and in many ways I think of myself now as African.Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country,the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flightfrom Lagos two days ago,in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flightabout the charity work in "India, Africa and other countries."
05:54(Laughter)
05:55So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African,I began to understand my roommate's response to me.If I had not grown up in Nigeria,and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images,I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes,beautiful animals,and incomprehensible people,fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS,unable to speak for themselvesand waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner.I would see Africans in the same way that I,as a child, had seen Fide's family.
06:34This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature.Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Locke,who sailed to west Africa in 1561and kept a fascinating account of his voyage.After referring to the black Africans as "beasts who have no houses,"he writes, "They are also people without heads,having their mouth and eyes in their breasts."
07:04Now, I've laughed every time I've read this.And one must admire the imagination of John Locke.But what is important about his writingis that it represents the beginningof a tradition of telling African stories in the West:A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives,of difference, of darkness,of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling,are "half devil, half child."