Experience #2 Speaking and Listening - Communications 200

One of the many joys of going to a four year university is the many classes that seem absolutely pointless to take until you actually take them. More than anything while taking the communication class that is required for education majors I practiced listening to discuss rather than listening to respond which was something that I had not really anticipated before taking the class. I think the idea behind the class is to learn how to make and memorize speeches/ presenting in front of an audience, which thanks to the many clubs I was a part of in high school I had already practiced giving speeches many times before. So for me, this class was more of just a stepping stone to get me closer to my degree and therefore wasn't taken very seriously by me... whoops. Other than putting the minimal efforts into passing the class I really didn't put much work into the class other than just showing up. Because of my laziness I was often really lost when listening to whatever powerpoint we were being lectured on and for that reason actually didn't do well on anything but the speeches themselves.This class taught me a lot about listening to lectures of obtain information rather than listening to every single word. I quickly learned that much like reading, sometimes all it takes is a little skimming of what you are learning to understand the material. It took me up until the middle of the quarter to figure out that just figuring out the key points from the lecture was important rather than learning every bullet point of every slide. From this experience, I learned and practiced effective note taking, listening, also some speech related terms and concepts. Because of these things I do genuinely feel like I could make a few different types of lesson plans for these things and be prepared enough to teach them.