After completing a rather rough spring semester I finally got a chance this week to get back to giving speeches in my Toastmasters club, the Talk of the Town Toastmasters. After nearly a year of focusing on rebuilding the club I now have some time to work on advancing to my next public speaking certification. I’ll tell you more about what I’ve learned about leading and building a high performing club in another post. Today I’ll share my speech from this past Tuesday night.

I’m working on my Advanced Communicator Bronze pin. That requires me to work in two advanced manuals which each have five speech topics. There are fifteen advanced manuals to choose from. After you have achieved Competent Communicator status, you have your pick of any of the advanced manuals once you decide that you’re ready to move forward and become top notch at the various levels of advanced communication. The Competent Communicator designation requires you to give ten speeches out of your very first manual as a new Toastmaster. The Advanced Communicator Bronze, Silver and Gold also require ten speeches each, in addition to other requirements for the last two levels. You just get to pick your own interests from two of the five-speech manuals of your choosing.

Getting back to May 20th though, I gave my second speech from the Humorously Speaking manual. I decided to reflect on my childhood and how my next door neighbor Mr. Fred Fairbanks made his contribution – among many influences – to my going into the world of technology. His daughters were my earliest friends and it was a lot of fun reflecting on those years while writing and practicing the many drafts of this speech. So here it is. The text to my early childhood misconception on why friends’ dad was such a well dressed train driver…

—————————————————————————————

My Friends’ Dad is a Train Driver

Exposure is everything when it comes to our perceptions of the world. Let me give you an example from my life. When I was a kid I always wondered why my friends’ dad was such a well dressed train driver. If you were like me when you were younger you always understood an engineer to be a train driver, right? Well, unless you grew up in a middle class environment and had lots of neighbors and family friends in white collar professions, you probably had no idea whatsoever that engineering was also a technical career. Well, my next door neighbor was one of those types of engineer. But initially, I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why he went to work every day in a shirt and tie with a brief case.

Madame Toastmaster, fellow Toastmasters and guests, I guess I figured, “Hey, maybe the train guys like to dress nice like everybody else when they go to work.” (wait for laughter) That’s right. In my young kid’s mind I simply made it make sense to me. You know how you hear a song on the radio the first few times, never catch all the lyrics and make up phrases so that it makes sense to you every time you sing it the wrong way? That is exactly what I did with Mr. Fairbanks’s job. As far as I was concerned, he went to work, changed into his overalls and engineer’s cap, drove trains all day and then came home every night like all the other adults in the neighborhood.

Now, what did I know about trains and rail yards? Apparently, not a thing. But he was obviously a well dressed train driver. Of course as I got older and began to learn more about professions and careers and what adults really do for a living I also became more aware of what Mr. Fairbanks actually did for a living.

He was one of those military veterans who had parlayed his technical training into a post military career in the defense industry. I could tell you more about that, but Homeland Security agents might start popping out of the woodworks and take me away if I reveal too much, so we’ll just leave it at that. (wait for laughter)

I can tell you this though. He did help groom me into the engineering profession in his own way by teaching me how to repair lawn mower engines. And who knew that I would actually wind up working for Briggs and Stratton years later? If I had any patience as a child – and I’m sure I was showing early signs of ADD back then – I would have hung around his back yard more often and become more proficient at working on car engines. But what he did teach me was a sufficient spark.

My professional path started at the General Electric Co. where I learned to design appliance components. From there I moved on to planning their assembly in the production factory a few years later. It was around that time that I had a pretty good inkling that I was really more interested in pure science than engineering. I won’t bore you with the differences between the two but suffice it to say that mechanical engineering wasn’t as creative a profession as I had imagined. And the companies that I worked for over the years didn’t allow for much – O.K., ANY – creative latitude.

Remember now, I was the kid who thought my friends’ dad was a train driver so I had plenty of imagination and loads of creative energy. Even back then, at the GE of the 90’s, I was designing simple web pages with the basic Internet technology available at the time. That’s when the Internet and web first became available to the public back in ’95. But, because of my duties at that time, I never really had the opportunity to apply it there.

That same sense of creativity from years ago inspired me to go ahead and follow my passions. In fact it helped me to change direction and truly dedicate myself to the creative path. Today, I am pursuing the artistic and technical together with the chance, among other things, to program web applications, wouldn’t you know? These days the master plan is developing just as I had envisioned years ago. God knows it took long enough. But it’s all due, at least to some degree, because of my initial thought that my friends’ dad was a train driver.

—————————————————————————————

I had a blast giving this speech. From my evaluations and my comfort level at the lectern after such a long absence I can tell I’m improving. You should work on your speaking skills too. Not only will it begin to open up new opportunities for you but you may well find yourself moving up the ladder at work just because you communicate better than everybody else in the office, in the factory or where ever. Find your closest Toastmasters club, contact them for meeting time and make a visit to their next meeting. You absolutely will not regret it.

Here’s an interesting Associated Press story from WSB-TV Atlanta’s web site posted May 9th. Props to my SIAC conference competitor for a good read.

Finally, my brain can rest for a couple of weeks. The spring semester ended succesfully and it’s on to summer school. Discrete Structures (Java 2) and Discrete Math are both history now. It’s on to Algorythms and a golf class starting later this month. I’ll stretch my brain even more from May til whenever the summer session ends and I’ll get back to the links for the first time in, I think, three years.

I’ll be getting instruction from someone who really knows what they are doing as I get some mutch needed excercise and corporate prep doing my “Tiger Cub” Woods thing (LOL) a couple of days a week.

It’s been a stressful term and it ratchets up a notch with Algorythms. It puts true emphasis on “engineering” a computer program and not just throwing something together without putting a certain degree of analysis into it first. We’ll be using the team learning approach again so that should help as it did in Discrete Structures. It’s down hill after then though.

Just two more classes in the fall and I’ll finally be able to get into actual graduate courses. One semsester at a time though right? More posts coming at you for a little while in the interim before summer semester kicks in. Have a good one peeps.

From the latest issue of “Diverse, Issues In Higher Education”, see following article written by the Associated Press.

——————–

Nearly 60 percent of African-American children cannot swim, almost twice the figure for White children, according to a first-of-its-kind survey which USA Swimming hopes will strengthen its efforts to lower minority drowning rates and draw more Blacks into the sport.

Stark statistics underlie the initiative by the national governing body for swimming. Black children drown at a rate almost three times the overall rate. And less than 2 percent of USA Swimming’s nearly 252,000 members who swim competitively year-round are Black.

USA Swimming is teaming with local governments, corporations, youth and ethnic organizations to expand learn-to-swim programs across the United States, many of them targeted at inner-city minorities. One of the key participants is Black freestyle star Cullen Jones, who hopes to boost his role-model status by winning a medal this summer at the Beijing Olympics.

USA Swimming’s motives are twofold, executive director Chuck Wielgus said.

“It’s just the right thing to do making an effort so every kid can be water-safe,” he said. “And quite frankly it’s about performance. We’re something of a niche sport and for us to remain relevant, considering the changing demographics of the population, it’s important we get more kids involved at the mouth of the pipeline.”

As part of the initiative, USA Swimming commissioned an ambitious study recently completed by five experts at the University of Memphis’ Department of Health and Sports Sciences. They surveyed 1,772 children aged six to 16 in six cities two-thirds of them Black or Hispanic to gauge what factors contributed most to the minority swimming gap.

The study found that 31 percent of the White respondents could not swim safely, compared to 58 percent of the Black respondents. The non-swimming rate for Hispanic children was almost as high, 56 percent, although more than twice as many Hispanics as Blacks are now USA Swimming members.

The lead researcher, Professor Richard Irwin, said one key finding was the influence of parents’ attitudes and abilities. If a parent could not swim, as was far more likely in minority families than White families, or if the parent felt swimming was dangerous, then the child was far less likely to learn how to swim.

Irwin said this means learn-to-swim programs in minority communities should reach out to parents.

The minority swimming gap has deep roots in America’s racial history. For decades during the 20th century, many pools were segregated, and relatively few were built to serve Black communities.

John Cruzat, USA Swimming’s diversity specialist, said these inequalities were compounded by a widespread misperception fueled by flawed academic studies that Blacks’ swimming ability was compromised by an innate deficit of buoyancy.

“There are people who still give credence to these stereotypes, even in the Black and Hispanic community,” said Cruzat, who wants to break the cycle that passes negative attitudes about swimming from one Black generation to another.

“These long-held beliefs are still so potent,” he said. “If you don’t teach your children to swim, you’re putting your grandchildren at risk.”

Cruzat was pleased by one finding in the new study that most Black and Hispanic children do not disdain swimming as a “White sport.” The study also found that swimming ability, regardless of race, increased in relation to parents’ income and education.

——————–

School is almost out MartyBLOGs readers. This summer would be a great time to enroll your kids in a summer swimming class. Check your nearest rec center, Boy Scout or Girl Scout troop and help your youngsters learn a healthy, life enhancing and life saving skill.