Live Like a Laker Talk

All of the eighth graders at my school give a speech to the middle school student body.  A few years ago faculty started giving speeches that reflect on the school's core values, or essentially what it means or what it looks like to "live like a Laker." 

This year I was invited to give a talk.  I was very honored, but also quite terrified.  It's intimidating to speak to 150 people even if the majority of them are middle school students, but most intimidating was trying to figure out what on Earth I could talk to them about.  I wanted to make the speech a little personal, but didn't think that they would find me so very interesting.  Since I don't teach or work with middle schoolers on a regular basis I wondered what I could find to speak about that would hold their attention.

Just the week before my talk was scheduled, my school paired with the One Love Foundation and spent the better part of the day talking about relationship violence in the upper school, respect in the middle school, and living the golden rule in the lower school.  I just happened to be assigned to a middle school group for the day.  One of the boys in my group mentioned that a good way to show respect was not to judge what's on the outside of another person, but rather what's on the inside.  Going further with this discussion, he mentioned that one needed to get to know the other person in order to learn what's on the inside.

I started to think about how important it is to learn other people's stories, and how much I love stories.  This lead me into thinking about the Humans of New York Project, and all of a sudden my Laker talk was born.  Here is a link to the text of my talk.  I followed this with a short PowerPoint presentation.  It was a wonderful experience.