Ta’Shaki Ball
Mr. Meeks
Midterm
08 March 2013 Why one college course is more rewarding than the other There are a few different types of classes in college. First, there are the classes in my major, which is Biology, that are directly relevant to my field of study. Second, there are classes that are fun and interesting, but completely optional. Then there’s a third kind: required classes that don’t necessarily relate to anything I’m studying, usually called general education or in my case, First Year Experience. The other category is the most frustrating. These are the classes where I usually feel like I’m not having fun or learning anything useful. However, these classes aren’t always the huge waste of time and money that many students think they are. One of my general requirements turned out to be the most rewarding class I’ve taken so far in college. That class was Public Speaking! This class didn’t have things a standard college class would have. I learned far more than I would have in a traditional class were we did a lot of reading, bookwork, and homework assignments. There were no big reading assignments! Nobody likes reading textbooks all the time. They aren’t fun to read, and I usually don’t learn well when I’m bored out of my mind. Public Speaking wasn’t taught out of a textbook, so there were no huge reading assignments for seventy-five percent of the class to blow off. Sure, there were a few small readings, but they were painless enough that students could just share each other’s textbook. Thanks to that many of us didn’t have to buy the textbook. I always showed up to class and actively paid attention. There was no confining schedule. Having a plan isn’t necessary a bad thing, but it can be hazardous when a professor’s guesswork is wrong and an entire class finds the pace of a class too slow or too fast. Public Speaking was not confined to a schedule. The class was taught at our pace. The best part about it was that there were no papers! In a writing class of course writing makes perfect sense. However, there are other classes where writing is a tedious way to fill up the teacher’s little crate. Too many professors assign papers just because that’s a normal thing to do in college, even when there is no real benefit for the students. Not this class! I only had to write speech outlines and short reactions, which directly contributed to the quality of my speeches. That gave me time to focus on practicing a valuable skill instead of just writing about it. Many assignments weren’t graded. A big problem I find with education in general is that students are punished for being wrong from the beginning. Mistakes usually lower your grade, even though making mistakes is one of the best ways to learn. In Public Speaking, many of our speeches and assignments were not graded. Of course we had assignments for midterms and finals that were graded. My mistakes were a valuable learning experience rather than points of my grade! So what did I do in this class with no big readings, schedule, papers, and very few grades? I gave speeches. I gave lot of speeches. Only five of which contributed to seventy percent of my grade. The other 30% came from active participation and speech outlines. In a traditional class, I probably would have read a textbook about proper public speaking techniques, watched a bunch of videos of famous speeches, and written a paper about how an influential speaker changed society forever and then maybe given a short speech or two. The goal of this class wasn’t to learn about public speaking, the goal was to do public speaking, and it worked beautifully. This class helped me hone an important skill that I’ll be able to apply through much of my life, the ability to effectively communicate with a large group of people. It’s already helped me more times than I can count. This is why Public speaking is by far the most rewarding college course I’ve taken so far at Tougaloo College. You don’t always need a textbook and boring power point slides to learn how to do something. Sometimes you just need to jump right in and do it.

Reference Page
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