Stanford Speech Class, Summer 2010: Final Dinner

Trafton B.

August 11, 2010 - 1:29 PM

Last night - Tuesday, August 10, 2010 - marked the 100th Demosthenes Banquet. Although, for the students in the class, it was better known as the Final Exam for speech class - CTL 119: Public Speaking, Romancing the Room.
The Demosthenes Banquet, named after the famous 3rd Century BC Greek orator and politician, is always a favorite amongst the professors and teaching assistants. It's the one night that we aren't in charge of anything.... aside from picking up the bill at the end of the night. No quizzes to hand out, no lectures to give, no critiques or suggestions for improvement. We just sit back, relax and enjoy the show.

As I watched each and every student speak throughout the night, I couldn't help but be extremely impressed.
There were roasts and toasts, reveries and meditations, introductions and farewells. We heard a testimonial to Charles Darrow, creator of the Monopoly board game, who was born precisely 121 years ago on August 10, 1889. We heard a eulogy for Leland Stanford who founded the Leland Stanford Junior University in honor of his son who passed away of typhoid at age 16.

We heard speeches of entertainment about the current generation's addiction to Facebook. We heard a speech about how one student now sees every interaction in his daily life as a speech. When his mother is asking him to clean his room..."Persuasive" Speech. When his father is telling him to work harder and get better grades.... "Call to Action" Speech. Every speech was incredibly well thought out. Somewhere near the end of the night, Mr. Wagstaffe leaned over and said quietly, "It looks like we actually scared them into preparing this time."

Maren, my sister and fellow teaching assistant, gave a speech about the importance of taking your work seriously, but not always taking your self seriously. Her story about how she fell, or flew rather, off the back of a treadmill at the gym was a nice, laughable change of pace. Matt, another teaching assistant, gave a speech on life after college. He proposed that if you live at your parents' house after graduating, just live with them for long enough so that your friends think that they moved in with you.

The most entertaining part of the dinner program was undoubtedly the roasts. I particularly enjoyed my two roasters. I was roasted for keeping this blog as well as my Baseball Road Trip blog in summer 2007. I was roasted for having a red beard and wearing plaid t-shirts to class every week, which apparently makes me a Canadian lumberjack. Surprisingly no one mentioned my embarrassingly cheesy portrait on the Oregon homepage, but I was accused of being clever yet extremely lazy because I managed to become a teaching assistant at one of the most prestigious universities in the nation without doing any work whatsoever during the course. If he only knew that I'd woken up at 6am that morning to drive all the way from Eugene to Palo Alto just to be at dinner last night.

Of course all roasts are meant to be respectfully comical jabs at each other. When that fails, however, the teachers are always prepared. For last night's dinner, I was given the task of rebutting the roasts. After hearing all the students make fun of the teachers, my job essentially was to roast all of the students back... respectfully of course. To tell you the truth, it was a fairly easy speech to prepare for because after seeing all 38 students give 5-6 speeches each over the course of 8-week term, I had plenty of material.

At the end of the night, weary from nearly 4 hours of speeches on top of 8 hours and 550 miles of driving, I was still smiling from ear to ear. I know that I was skeptical at first, but the class pulled through in the end. I'm pleased to say that each one of them has transformed into very talented public speakers.

Kudos to you all for the work you put in to this class. Thank you for an amazing summer, and I wish you best of luck in your future endeavors.