For those of who have never had the opportunity to take a glimpse at a State Officer's State Convention script binder, it is huge. Imagine a 2 inch binder jammed packed with stage set up, directions for awards ceremonies, and parts that have to be memorized. Without this "Bible" as we referred to it, State Leadership Conference wouldn't be possible.
However, the weeks and months before, we are given our memorized parts.
As daunting as it seems, I came up with a way when I was memorizing the creed, that makes it, at least for me, considerably easier to memorize.
Now for those of you who don't know me well, I love notecards. I probably went through a 100 pack all on my own from the time we got script to the time we finished Convention. And what I did with these notecards is I would have a progression of my part. So on the first I would have the whole part that I needed to memorize. On the second, I would have just the first letter of each word in the part. And on the third, fourth, fifth, I would have just the first letters, but as they went on, I would leave out letters, forcing me to memorize the words that were in those spaces. Soon enough I would have just a blank notecard with the title of the part at the top. Now if I messed up on more than once on one of the notecards, I would simply go back to the previous one and work on it more, till I felt comfortable to continue on.
I found that this method works especially well for parts like Opening Ceremonies, especially in high school when I was learning a new part every year. And for those longer speeches, like the creed, I would split it up into paragraphs and memorize a paragraph at a time and make it less daunting.
Here is an example of what I would do for my Treasurer Opening Ceremonies part
When I was National Leadership Conference for State Officers, one of our facilitators was the great Ryan Best. One comment that he made about National Office was that he figured out the best way to memorize. He said that he would put his need to be memorized parts in a gallon sized ziploc bag and then stick it to the side of the shower so he could memorize while taking a nice relaxing shower. Now I don't know about all y'all, but I do some of my best thinking and memorizing in the shower. For heavens sake that is where I learn a lot of the songs on the radio these days as I attempt to sing along. Well people, I tried his way of memorizing. My addition to his tip was I got little sandwich sized bags and put my second notecard in there with it. The water from the shower makes the bag stick, while your notecards stay nice and dry. Honestly, it is the most ingenious thing that I have ever came across.
My final advice to all those who are trying to memorize a speech especially, the iPhone has a voice memo app preloaded on it. Now, when I was memorizing my retiring address, I just read each paragraph and made a recording. I also made a recording of my entire speech. I figured that since I could learn a new song by just listening to it several times, there is no reason that I couldn't do the same with my speech. Not even kidding, I listened to that speech several hundred times. When I would be driving to FFA events or even home (which is a 4 and a half hour drive) I would have it plugged into my cars stereo system. That is all I would listen to. Soon enough, I was able to say the speech along with the recording.
Although memorizing has been semi-simple for me through my FFA career, I know that there is always difficulty when it comes to remembering all those little words. Relax. It will come soon enough and you will sound amazing.
Good luck to all those Utah FFA members who are competing at their State CDE's this week. Good luck to all of you who are memorizing something for whatever reason.
Talk at all y'all next week!
Peace, Love, and FFA
McKenzie
No comments:
Post a Comment