Public Speaking – Nerves

After twenty eight years of teaching I have lost any of the classroom nerves I used to have. Not true of speaking in other situations. Today  I delivered a speech at a luncheon with over 100 people in the room. Every year we have a day where we open our campus to prospective families and their children take a test to qualify for a scholarship to our school. After the test we have a lunch where there is a student speaker who is a senior scholarship winner and we have a faculty speaker as well. This year I was honored with an invitation to speak. I am flattered to have been asked, but it meant that I had to actually script a speech because this does not feel like a place to just riff. I finished the speech a couple of hours ago and at this point I am mostly glad I am done, but I did receive a couple of nice remarks. The one that sticks with me is a comment by our new school head. He and his family joined our school this summer. He came up to me after the speech and he told me that my speech reminded him of why he wanted to come to our school and it made him happy that he did. Have to say that this made me feel pretty great.

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