MIDDLE SCHOOL FOCUS
OBSERVATIONS FROM A VETERAN COACH by George Tennison
T
he teacher called my name, and I awkwardly stepped to the front of the room to present my speech. My mother sat in the front row, anxiously awaiting my first word. It never came. Three minutes of silence. That was the pinnacle of my middle school public speaking experience.
When you’re extremely shy, with a speech impairment, you avoid public speaking at all costs—a strategy I mastered in middle school, high school, and college. For the most part, it wasn’t hard to do... until I decided to become a teacher. I became a speaker out of necessity: It’s hard to teach if you’re afraid to speak.
Once I started teaching at E. A. Olle Middle School in 1993, I wanted my students to have a better experience—a more comfortable experience—with public speaking. In my language arts classroom, speaking and listening received the same emphasis as reading and writing. My principal saw this, and in August of 2000, she asked me to start a speech team. I knew nothing about competitive speech and debate, but I said, “Yes.” Three months later, we attended our first tournament. Six students entered Oratory, and one student entered Poetry. After the tournament was over, I thought my work was done. It never occurred to me that there was more than one tournament each year. We attended six tournaments that year, and through wordof-mouth, my initial team of seven students grew to 32.
Life can be unpredictable. Twenty-three years later, I no longer teach language arts. I’m certified to teach speech, and I teach six speech classes every day. I have had opportunities to move to high school, but I have chosen to stay in middle school because I truly enjoy teaching middle school kids. It helps to teach in a school and school district (Alief ISD) where speech and debate are valued and supported. Naturally, my experiences have shaped the way I coach. With that in mind, here are some of my observations about middle school speech and debate.
Middle school is the perfect time to help students find their voice. Middle school students are explorers, trying to discover who they are. At the same time, they are dealing with incredible pressure, both social and academic. In an educational system that is becoming more standardized, speech classrooms may be the only place where students can
choose what they want to read and write. More importantly, changing graduation requirements make it difficult for students to take one year of speech in high school, let alone four. While we should fight for speech at the high school level, we must realize that middle school may be the only time when some students can take a speech class.
Every student’s speech journey is different. I begin each year by introducing the idea of a speech journey. I share my speech journey, and I share the speech journeys of former students. This mitigates the reality that some students initially will be more successful than other students, and it reminds students that every student develops their speaking skills at a different rate. Everyone’s journey is different, with ups and downs, and progress isn’t always linear.
The journey is more important than the destination.
Our team celebrates at the 2023 Middle School National Tournament in Phoenix, Arizona. The experience of traveling to Nationals is invaluable to our students. Three of these students had never been on an airplane before.
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ROSTRUM | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2023
Many of my students are used to being the stars of their classrooms. Speech tournaments may be the first time when they finish second (or worse). As coaches, we must model that hard work and learning are more important than the trophies. After a