Well, I never knew that some universities required that students had to have a speech class. I would understand if it involved your major but not everyone needs it. But of course, St. John’s University has it as a core. When I had to pick my schedule for spring, I knew I could not avoid the subject so I decided I might as well just get it over with. I was horrified with getting a bad grade in the class because talking in front of a class is very different from speaking in front of friends of family because you are more comfortable. And then…there is a professor that is grading based on his standards so it is very scary.

So our first speech was just introducing ourselves and it was not graded so we can get a little comfortable with everything, but I honestly was so scared and just felt as if I was going to faint. Then we just moved up with grading and the speeches got longer and longer. Recently we had to do a 6 minute speech and we had to inform people about something so research was involved. I was really nervous because I thought that I would skp it all of my notes and have a speech that wasn’t even 2 minutes. That would have been horrible! BUT that wasn’t the case. It went fine actually and I became more confidant so it was good for me. Maybe speech classes will help us later in life.

I chose to inform people about smoking. Now I know that it is not a new issue but it just seems to me that people know what it can do but they still don’t do anything about it. I talked about the history of tobacco and that it started in the pre-Columbian Americas and I also talked about how it was used for medical purposes like to heal wounds and for toothaches. I also mentioned some health problems that come along with smoking which people know but somehow it doesn’t bother them enough to stop smoking or maybe they think that it wont happen to them…everyone thinks that until something bad DOES happen. The major problem is Lung cancer and lung cancer is the leading death cancer among men and women. Also heart attacks and strokes are increased from smoking. Now all these, people know but I felt like I needed to mention them in my speech because people need to hear it over and over until they stop. I will be posting about smoking because i believe the more people talk about it, maybe we can see changes.