演讲稿是一种实用性比较强的文稿，是为演讲准备的书面材料。现如今，我们都可能会用到演讲稿，相信许多人会觉得演讲稿很难写吧，这次为您整理了TED英语演讲稿：无所畏惧，学无止境优秀4篇，您的肯定与分享是对小编最大的鼓励。
Have you ever held a question in mind for so long that it becomes part of how you think? Maybe even part of who you are as a person? Well I’ve had a question in my mind for many, many years and that is: how can you speed up learning? Now, this is an interesting question because if you speed up learning you can spend less time at school. And if you learn really fast, you probably wouldn’t have to go to school at all.
Now, when I was young, school was sort of okay but I found quite often that school got in the way of learning so I had this question in mind: how do you learn faster? And this began when I was very, very young, when I was about eleven years old I wrote a letter to researchers in the Soviet Union, asking about hypnopaedia, this is sleep learning, where you get a tape recorder, you put it beside your bed and it turns on in the middle of the night when you’re sleeping, and you’re supposed to be learning from this.
A good idea, unfortunately it doesn’t work. But, hypnopaedia did open the doors to research in other areas and we’ve had incredible discoveries about learning that began with that first question. I went on from there to become passionate about psychology and I have been involved in psychology in many ways for the rest of my life up until this point. In 1981 I took myself to China and I decided that I was going to be native level in Chinese inside two years.
Now, you need to understand that in 1981, everybody thought Chinese was really, really difficult and that a westerner could study for ten years or more and never really get very good at it. And I also went in with a different idea which was: taking all of the conclusions from psychological research up to that point and applying them to the learning process. What was really cool was that in six months I was fluent in Mandarin Chinese and took a little bit longer to get up to native. But I looked around and I saw all of these people from different countries struggling terribly with Chinese, I saw Chinese people struggling terribly to learn English and other languages, and so my question got refined down to: how can you help a normal adult learn a new language quickly, easily and effectively?
Now this a really, really important question in today’s world. We have massive challenges with environment we have massive challenges with social dislocation, with wars, all sorts of things going on and if we can’t communicate we’re really going to have difficulty solving these problems. So we need to be able to speak each other’s languages, this is really, really important.
The question then is how do you do that. Well, it’s actually really easy. You look around for people who can already do it, you look for situations where it’s already working and then you identify the principles and apply them. It’s called modelling and I’ve been looking at language learning and modelling language learning for about fifteen to twenty years now.
And my conclusion, my observation from this is that any adult can learn a second language to fluency inside six months. Now when I say this, most people think I’m crazy, this is not possible. So let me remind everybody of the history of human progress, it’s all about expanding our limits.
In 1950 everybody believed that running one mile in four minutes was impossible and then Roger Bannister did it in 1956 and from there it’s got shorter and shorter. 100 years ago everybody believed that heavy stuff doesn’t fly. Except it does and we all know this. How does heavy stuff fly? We reorganise the materials using principles that we have learned from observing nature, birds in this case. And today we’ve gone ever further, so you can fly a car. You can buy one of these for a couple hundred thousand US dollars. We now have cars in the world that can fly. And there’s a different way to fly that we’ve learned from squirrels. So all you need to do is copy what a flying squirrel does, build a suit called a wing suit and off you go, you can fly like a squirrel.
No, most people, a lot of people, I wouldn’t say everybody but a lot of people think they can’t draw. However there are some key principles, five principles that you can apply to learning to draw and you can 2 actually learn to draw in five days. So, if you draw like this, you learn these principles for five days and apply them and after five days you can draw something like this. Now I know this is true because that was my first drawing and after five days of applying these principles that was what I was able to do. And I looked at this and I went ‘wow,’ so that’s how I look like when I’m concentrating so intensely that my brain is exploding. So, anybody can learn to draw in five days and in the same way, with the same logic, anybody can learn a second language in six months.
How: there are five principles and seven actions. There may be a few more but these are absolutely core. And before I get into those I just want to talk about two myths, dispel two myths. The first is that you need talent. Let me tell you about Zoe. Zoe came from Australia, went to Holland, was trying to learn Dutch, struggling a great deal and finally people were saying: ‘you’re completely useless,’ ‘you’re not talented,’ ‘give up,’ ‘you’re a waste of time’ and she was very, very depressed. And then she came across these five principles, she moved to Brazil and she applied them and within six months she was fluent in Portuguese, so talent doesn’t matter.
People also think that immersion in a new country is the way to learn a language. But look around Hong Kong, look at all the westerners who’ve been here for ten years, who don’t speak a word of Chinese. Look at all the Chinese living in America, Britain, Australia, Canada have been there ten, twenty year and they don’t speak any English. Immersion per se doesn’t not work, why? Because a drowning man cannot learn to swim. When you don’t speak a language you’re like a baby and if you drop yourself into a context which is all adults talking about stuff over your head, you won’t learn.
So, what are the five principles that you need to pay attention to; first: the four words, attention, meaning, relevance and memory, and these interconnect in very important ways. Especially when you’re talking about learning. Come with me on a journey through a forest. You go on a walk through a forest and you see something like this. Little marks on a tree, maybe you pay attention, maybe you don’t. You go another fifty metres and you see this. You should be paying attention. Another fifty metres, if you haven’t been paying attention, you see this.
And at this point, you’re paying attention. And you’ve just learned that this is important, it’s relevant because it means this, and anything that is related, any information related to your survival is stuff that you’re going to pay attention to and therefore you’re going to remember it. If it’s related to your personal goals then you’re going to pay attention to it, if it’s relevant you’re going to remember it. So, the first rule, the first principle for learning a language is focus on language content that is relevant to you. Which brings us to tools. We master tool by using tools and we learn tools the fastest when they are relevant to us.
So let me share a story. A keyboard is a tool. Typing Chinese a certain way, there are methods for this. That’s a tool. I had a colleague many years ago who went to night school; Tuesday night, Thursday night, two hours each night, practicing at home, she spent nine months, and she did not learn to type Chinese. And one night we had a crisis. We had forty eight hours to deliver a training manual in Chinese. And she got the job, and I can guarantee you in forty eight hours, she learned to type Chinese because it was relevant, it was important, it was meaningful, she was using a tool to create value. So the second tool for learning a language is to use your language as a tool to communicate right from day one.
As a kid does. When I first arrived in China I didn’t speak a word of Chinese, and on my second week I got to take a train ride overnight. I spent eight hours sitting in the dining care talking to one of the guards on the train, he took an interest in me for some reason, and we just chatted all night in Chinese and he was drawing pictures and making movements with his hands and facial expressions and piece by piece by piece I understood more and more. But what was really cool, was two weeks later, when people were talking Chinese around me, I was understanding some of this and I hadn’t even made any effort to learn that.
What had happened, I’d absorbed it that night on the train, which brings us to the third principle. When you first understand the message, then you will acquire the language 3 unconsciously. And this is really, really well documented now, it’s something called comprehensible input and there’s twenty or thirty years of research on this, Stephen Krashen, a leader in the field has published all sorts of these different studies and this is just from one of them. The purple bars show the scores on different tests for language. The purple people were people who had learned by grammar and formal study, the green ones are the ones who learned by comprehensible input. So, comprehension works. Comprehension is key and language learning is not about accumulating lots of knowledge. In many, many ways it’s about physiological training.
A woman I know from Taiwan did great at English at school, she got A grades all the way through, went through college, A grades, went to the US and found she couldn’t understand what people were saying. And people started asking her: ‘are you deaf?’ and she was. English deaf. Because we have filters in our brain that filter n the sounds that we are familiar with and they filter out the sounds of languages we’re not. And if you can’t hear it, you won’t understand it and if you can’t understand it, you’re not going to learn it. So you actually have to be able to hear these sounds. And there are ways to do that but it’s physiological training. Speaking takes muscle. You’ve got forty-three muscles in your face, you have to coordinate those in a way that you make sounds that other people will understand.
If you’ve ever done a new sport for a couple of days, and you know how your body feels? And it hurts? If your face is hurting you’re doing it right. And the final principle is state. Psycho-physiological state. If you’re sad, angry, worried, upset, you’re not going to learn. Period. If you’re happy, relaxed, in an Alpha brain state, curious, you’re going to learn really quickly, and very specifically you need to be tolerant of ambiguity. If you’re one of those people who needs to understand 100% every word you’re hearing, you will go nuts, because you’ll be incredibly upset all the time, because you’re not perfect. If you’re comfortable with getting some, not getting some, just paying attention to what you do understand, you’re going to be fine, you’ll be relaxed and you’ll be learning quickly.
So based on those five principles, what are the seven actions that you need to take? Number one: listen a lot. I call it brain soaking. You put yourself in a context where you’re hearing tons and tons of a language and it doesn’t matter if you understand it or not. You’re listening to patterns, you’re listening to things that repeat, you’re listening to things that stand out. So, just soak your brain in this. The second action: is that you get the meaning first, even before you get the words. You go well how do I do that, I don’t know the words, well, you understand what these different postures mean. Human communication is body language in many, many ways, so much body language.
From body language you can understand a lot of communication, therefore, you’re understanding, you’re acquiring through comprehensible input. And you can also use patterns that you already know. If you’re a Chinese speaker of Mandarin and Cantonese and you go Vietnam, you will understand 60% of what they say to you in daily conversation, because Vietnamese is about 30% Mandarin, 30% Cantonese. The third action: start mixing. You probably have never thought of this but if you’ve got ten verbs, ten nouns and ten adjectives you can say one thousand different things.
Language is a creative process. What do babies do? Okay: Me. Bat(h). Now. Okay, that’s how they communicate. So start mixing, get creative, have fun with it, it doesn’t have to be perfect it just has to work. And when you’re doing this you focus on the core. What does that mean? Well any language is high frequency content. In English 1000 words covers 85% of anything you’re ever going to say in daily communication. 3000 words gives you 98% of anything you’re going to say in daily conversation. You got 3000 words, you’re speaking the language. The rest is icing on the cake. And when you’re just begging with a new language start with the tool box. Week number one in your new language 4 you say things like: ‘how do you say that?’ ‘I don’t understand,’ ‘repeat that please,’ ‘what does that mean,’ all in your target language. You’re using it as a tool, making it useful to you, it’s relevant to learn other things about the language. It’s by week two that you should be saying things like: ‘me,’ ‘this,’ ‘you,’ ‘that,’ ‘give,’ you know, ‘hot,’ simple pronouns, simple nouns, simple verbs, simple adjectives, communicating like a baby. And by the third or fourth week, you’re getting into what I call glue words. ‘Although,’ ‘but,’ ‘therefore,’ these are logical transformers that tie bits of a language together, allowing you to make more complex meaning. At that point you’re talking.
And when you’re doing that, you should get yourself a language parent. If you look at how children and parent interact, you’ll understand what this means. When a child is speaking, it’ll be using simple words, simple combinations, sometimes quite strange, sometimes very strange pronunciation and other people from outside the family don’t understand it. But the parents do. And so the kid has a safe environment, gets confidence. The parents talk to the children with body language and with simple language which they know the child understands. So we have a comprehensible input environment that’s safe, we know it works otherwise none of you would speak your mother tongue. So you get yourself a language parent, who’s somebody interested in you as a person who will communicate with you essentially as an equal, but pay attention to help you understand the message. There are four rules of a language parent. Spouses by the way are not very good at this, okay? But the four rules are, first of all, they will work hard to understand what you mean even when you’re way off beat.
Secondly, they will never correct your mistakes. Thirdly they will feed back their understanding of what you are saying so you can respond appropriately and get that feedback and then they will use words that you know. The sixth thing you have to do, is copy the face. You got to get the muscles working right, so you can sound in a way that people will understand you. There’s a couple of things you do. One is that you hear how it feels, and feel how it sounds which means you have a feedback loop operating in your face, but ideally if you can look at a native speaker and just observe how they use their face, let your unconscious mind absorb the rules, then you’re going to be able to pick it up. And if you can’t get a native speaker to look at, you can use stuff like this: [slides]. And the final idea here, the final action you need to take is something that I call "direct connect." What does this mean? Well most people learning a second language sort of take the mother tongue words and take the target words and go over them again and again in their mind to try and remember them. Really inefficient. What you need to do is realise that everything you know is an image inside your mind, it’s feelings, if you talk about fire you can smell the smoke you can hear the crackling, you can see the flames, so what you do, is you go into that imagery and all of that memory and you come out with another pathway.
So I call it ‘same box, different path.’ You come out of that pathway, you build it over time you become more and more skilled at just connecting the new sounds to those images that you already have, into that internal representation. And over time you even become naturally good at that process, that becomes unconscious. So, there are five principles that you need to work with, seven actions, if you do any of them, you’re going to improve. And remember these are things under your control as the learner. Do them all and you’re going to be fluent in a second language in six months. Thank you.
When I was about three or four years old, I remember my mum reading a story to me and my two big brothers, and I remember putting up my hands to feel the page of the book, to feel the picture they were discussing.
And my mum said, "Darling, remember that you can't see and you can't feel the picture and you can't feel the print on the page."
And I thought to myself, "But that's what I want to do. I love stories. I want to read." Little did I know that I would be part of a technological revolution that would make that dream come true.
I was born premature by about 10 weeks, which resulted in my blindness, some 64 years ago. The condition is known as retrolental fibroplasia, and it's now very rare in the developed world. Little did I know, lying curled up in my prim baby humidicrib in 1948 that I'd been born at the right place and the right time, that I was in a country where I could participate in the technological revolution.
There are 37 million totally blind people on our planet, but those of us who've shared in the technological changes mainly come from North America, Europe, Japan and other developed parts of the world. Computers have changed the lives of us all in this room and around the world, but I think they've changed the lives of we blind people more than any other group. And so I want to tell you about the interaction between computer-based adaptive technology and the many volunteers who helped me over the years to become the person I am today. It's an interaction between volunteers, passionate inventors and technology, and it's a story that many other blind people could tell. But let me tell you a bit about it today.
When I was five, I went to school and I learned braille. It's an ingenious system of six dots that are punched into paper, and I can feel them with my fingers. In fact, I think they're putting up my grade six report. I don't know where Julian Morrow got that from. (Laughter) I was pretty good in reading, but religion and musical appreciation needed more work. (Laughter)
When you leave the opera house, you'll find there's braille signage in the lifts. Look for it. Have you noticed it? I do. I look for it all the time.
(Laughter)
When I was at school, the books were transcribed by transcribers, voluntary people who punched one dot at a time so I'd have volumes to read, and that had been going on, mainly by women, since the late 19th century in this country, but it was the only way I could read. When I was in high school, I got my first Philips reel-to-reel tape recorder, and tape recorders became my sort of pre-computer medium of learning. I could have family and friends read me material, and I could then read it back as many times as I needed. And it brought me into contact with volunteers and helpers. For example, when I studied at graduate school at Queen's University in Canada, the prisoners at the Collins Bay jail agreed to help me. I gave them a tape recorder, and they read into it. As one of them said to me, "Ron, we ain't going anywhere at the moment."
(Laughter)
But think of it. These men, who hadn't had the educational opportunities I'd had, helped me gain post-graduate qualifications in law by their dedicated help.
Well, I went back and became an academic at Melbourne's Monash University, and for those 25 years, tape recorders were everything to me. In fact, in my office in 1990, I had 18 miles of tape. Students, family and friends all read me material. Mrs. Lois Doery, whom I later came to call my surrogate mum, read me many thousands of hours onto tape. One of the reasons I agreed to give this talk today was that I was hoping that Lois would be here so I could introduce you to her and publicly thank her. But sadly, her health hasn't permitted her to come today. But I thank you here, Lois, from this platform.
(Applause)
I saw my first Apple computer in 1984, and I thought to myself, "This thing's got a glass screen, not much use to me." How very wrong I was. In 1987, in the month our eldest son Gerard was born, I got my first blind computer, and it's actually here. See it up there? And you see it has no, what do you call it, no screen. (Laughter) It's a blind computer. (Laughter) It's a Keynote Gold 84k, and the 84k stands for it had 84 kilobytes of memory. (Laughter) Don't laugh, it cost me 4,000 dollars at the time. (Laughter) I think there's more memory in my watch.
It was invented by Russell Smith, a passionate inventor in New Zealand who was trying to help blind people. Sadly, he died in a light plane crash in 2019, but his memory lives on in my heart. It meant, for the first time, I could read back what I had typed into it. It had a speech synthesizer. I'd written my first coauthored labor law book on a typewriter in 1979 purely from memory. This now allowed me to read back what I'd written and to enter the computer world, even with its 84k of memory.
In 1974, the great Ray Kurzweil, the American inventor, worked on building a machine that would scan books and read them out in synthetic speech. Optical character recognition units then only operated usually on one font, but by using charge-coupled device flatbed scanners and speech synthesizers, he developed a machine that could read any font. And his machine, which was as big as a washing machine, was launched on the 13th of January, 1976. I saw my first commercially available Kurzweil in March 19xx, and it blew me away, and in September 19xx, the month that my associate professorship at Monash University was announced, the law school got one, and I could use it. For the first time, I could read what I wanted to read by putting a book on the scanner. I didn't have to be nice to people!
(Laughter)
I no longer would be censored. For example, I was too shy then, and I'm actually too shy now, to ask anybody to read me out loud sexually explicit material. (Laughter) But, you know, I could pop a book on in the middle of the night, and -- (Laughter) (Applause)
Now, the Kurzweil reader is simply a program on my laptop. That's what it's shrunk to. And now I can scan the latest novel and not wait to get it into talking book libraries. I can keep up with my friends.
There are many people who have helped me in my life, and many that I haven't met. One is another American inventor Ted Henter. Ted was a motorcycle racer, but in 1978 he had a car accident and lost his sight, which is devastating if you're trying to ride motorbikes. He then turned to being a waterskier and was a champion disabled waterskier. But in 19xx, he teamed up with Bill Joyce to develop a program that would read out what was on the computer screen from the Net or from what was on the computer. It's called JAWS, Job Access With Speech, and it sounds like this.
(JAWS speaking)
Ron McCallum: Isn't that slow?
(Laughter) You see, if I read like that, I'd fall asleep. I slowed it down for you. I'm going to ask that we play it at the speed I read it. Can we play that one?
(JAWS speaking)
(Laughter)
RM: You know, when you're marking student essays, you want to get through them fairly quickly.
(Laughter) (Applause)
This technology that fascinated me in 1987 is now on my iPhone and on yours as well. But, you know, I find reading with machines a very lonely process. I grew up with family, friends, reading to me, and I loved the warmth and the breath and the closeness of people reading. Do you love being read to? And one of my most enduring memories is in 1999, Mary reading to me and the children down near Manly Beach "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone." Isn't that a great book? I still love being close to someone reading to me. But I wouldn't give up the technology, because it's allowed me to lead a great life.
Of course, talking books for the blind predated all this technology. After all, the long-playing record was developed in the early 1930s, and now we put talking books on CDs using the digital access system known as DAISY. But when I'm reading with synthetic voices, I love to come home and read a racy novel with a real voice.
Now there are still barriers in front of we people with disabilities. Many websites we can't read using JAWS and the other technologies. Websites are often very visual, and there are all these sorts of graphs that aren't labeled and buttons that aren't labeled, and that's why the World Wide Web Consortium 3, known as W3C, has developed worldwide standards for the Internet. And we want all Internet users or Internet site owners to make their sites compatible so that we persons without vision can have a level playing field. There are other barriers brought about by our laws. For example, Australia, like about one third of the world's countries, has copyright exceptions which allow books to be brailled or read for we blind persons. But those books can't travel across borders. For example, in Spain, there are a 100,000 accessible books in Spanish. In Argentina, there are 50,000. In no other Latin American country are there more than a couple of thousand. But it's not legal to transport the books from Spain to Latin America. There are hundreds of thousands of accessible books in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, etc., but they can't be transported to the 60 countries in our world where English is the first and the second language. And remember I was telling you about Harry Potter. Well, because we can't transport books across borders, there had to be separate versions read in all the different English-speaking countries: Britain, United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all had to have separate readings of Harry Potter.
And that's why, next month in Morocco, a meeting is taking place between all the countries. It's something that a group of countries and the World Blind Union are advocating, a cross-border treaty so that if books are available under a copyright exception and the other country has a copyright exception, we can transport those books across borders and give life to people, particularly in developing countries, blind people who don't have the books to read. I want that to happen.
(Applause)
My life has been extraordinarily blessed with marriage and children and certainly interesting work to do, whether it be at the University of Sydney Law School, where I served a term as dean, or now as I sit on the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, in Geneva. I've indeed been a very fortunate human being.
I wonder what the future will hold. The technology will advance even further, but I can still remember my mum saying, 60 years ago, "Remember, darling, you'll never be able to read the print with your fingers." I'm so glad that the interaction between braille transcribers, volunteer readers and passionate inventors, has allowed this dream of reading to come true for me and for blind people throughout the world.
I'd like to thank my researcher Hannah Martin, who is my slide clicker, who clicks the slides, and my wife, Professor Mary Crock, who's the light of my life, is coming on to collect me. I want to thank her too.
I think I have to say goodbye now. Bless you. Thank you very much.
(Applause) Yay! (Applause) Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. (Applause)
This is Tim Ferriss circa 1979 A.D. Age two. You can tell by the power squat, I was a very confident boy -- and not without reason. I had a very charming routine at the time, which was to wait until late in the evening when my parents were decompressing from a hard day's work, doing their crossword puzzles, watching television. I would run into the living room, jump up on the couch, rip the cushions off, throw them on the floor, scream at the top of my lungs and run out because I was the Incredible Hulk. (Laughter) Obviously, you see the resemblance. And this routine went on for some time.
When I was seven I went to summer camp. My parents found it necessary for peace of mind. And at noon each day the campers would go to a pond, where they had floating docks. You could jump off the end into the deep end. I was born premature. I was always very small. My left lung had collapsed when I was born. And I've always had buoyancy problems. So water was something that scared me to begin with. But I would go in on occasion. And on one particular day, the campers were jumping through inner tubes, They were diving through inner tubes. And I thought this would be great fun. So I dove through the inner tube, and the bully of the camp grabbed my ankles. And I tried to come up for air, and my lower back hit the bottom of the inner tube. And I went wild eyed and thought I was going to die. A camp counselor fortunately came over and separated us. From that point onward I was terrified of swimming. That is something that I did not get over. My inability to swim has been one of my greatest humiliations and embarrassments. That is when I realized that I was not the Incredible Hulk.
But there is a happy ending to this story. At age 31 -- that's my age now -- in August I took two weeks to re-examine swimming, and question all the of the obvious aspects of swimming. And went from swimming one lap -- so 20 yards -- like a drowning monkey, at about 200 beats per minute heart rate -- I measured it -- to going to Montauk on Long Island, close to where I grew up, and jumping into the ocean and swimming one kilometer in open water, getting out and feeling better than when I went in. And I came out, in my Speedos, European style, feeling like the Incredible Hulk.
And that's what I want everyone in here to feel like, the Incredible Hulk, at the end of this presentation. More specifically, I want you to feel like you're capable of becoming an excellent long-distance swimmer, a world-class language learner, and a tango champion. And I would like to share my art. If I have an art, it's deconstructing things that really scare the living hell out of me. So, moving onward.
Swimming, first principles. First principles, this is very important. I find that the best results in life are often held back by false constructs and untested assumptions. And the turnaround in swimming came when a friend of mine said, "I will go a year without any stimulants" -- this is a six-double-espresso-per-day type of guy -- "if you can complete a one kilometer open water race." So the clock started ticking. I started seeking out triathletes because I found that lifelong swimmers often couldn't teach what they did. I tried kickboards. My feet would slice through the water like razors, I wouldn't even move. I would leave demoralized, staring at my feet. Hand paddles, everything. Even did lessons with Olympians -- nothing helped. And then Chris Sacca, who is now a dear friend mine, had completed an Iron Man with 103 degree temperature, said, "I have the answer to your prayers." And he introduced me to the work of a man named Terry Laughlin who is the founder of Total Immersion Swimming. That set me on the road to examining biomechanics.
So here are the new rules of swimming, if any of you are afraid of swimming, or not good at it. The first is, forget about kicking. Very counterintuitive. So it turns out that propulsion isn't really the problem. Kicking harder doesn't solve the problem because the average swimmer only transfers about three percent of their energy expenditure into forward motion. The problem is hydrodynamics. So what you want to focus on instead is allowing your lower body to draft behind your upper body, much like a small car behind a big car on the highway. And you do that by maintaining a horizontal body position. The only way you can do that is to not swim on top of the water. The body is denser than water. 95 percent of it would be, at least, submerged naturally.
So you end up, number three, not swimming, in the case of freestyle, on your stomach, as many people think, reaching on top of the water. But actually rotating from streamlined right to streamlined left, maintaining that fuselage position as long as possible. So let's look at some examples. This is Terry. And you can see that he's extending his right arm below his head and far in front. And so his entire body really is underwater. The arm is extended below the head. The head is held in line with the spine, so that you use strategic water pressure to raise your legs up -- very important, especially for people with lower body fat. Here is an example of the stroke. So you don't kick. But you do use a small flick. You can see this is the left extension. Then you see his left leg. Small flick, and the only purpose of that is to rotate his hips so he can get to the opposite side. And the entry point for his right hand -- notice this, he's not reaching in front and catching the water. Rather, he is entering the water at a 45-degree angle with his forearm, and then propelling himself by streamlining -- very important. Incorrect, above, which is what almost every swimming coach will teach you. Not their fault, honestly. And I'll get to implicit versus explicit in a moment. Below is what most swimmers will find enables them to do what I did, which is going from 21 strokes per 20-yard length to 11 strokes in two workouts with no coach, no video monitoring. And now I love swimming. I can't wait to go swimming. I'll be doing a swimming lesson later, for myself, if anyone wants to join me.
Last thing, breathing. A problem a lot of us have, certainly, when you're swimming. In freestyle, easiest way to remedy this is to turn with body roll, and just to look at your recovery hand as it enters the water. And that will get you very far. That's it. That's really all you need to know.
Languages. Material versus method. I, like many people, came to the conclusion that I was terrible at languages. I suffered through Spanish for junior high, first year of high school, and the sum total of my knowledge was pretty much, "Donde esta el bano?" And I wouldn't even catch the response. A sad state of affairs. Then I transferred to a different school sophomore year, and I had a choice of other languages. Most of my friends were taking Japanese. So I thought why not punish myself? I'll do Japanese. Six months later I had the chance to go to Japan. My teachers assured me, they said, "Don't worry. You'll have Japanese language classes every day to help you cope. It will be an amazing experience." My first overseas experience in fact. So my parents encouraged me to do it. I left.
I arrived in Tokyo. Amazing. I couldn't believe I was on the other side of the world. I met my host family. Things went quite well I think, all things considered. My first evening, before my first day of school, I said to my mother, very politely, "Please wake me up at eight a.m." So, (Japanese) But I didn't say (Japanese). I said, (Japanese). Pretty close. But I said, "Please rape me at eight a.m." (Laughter) You've never seen a more confused Japanese woman. (Laughter)
I walked in to school. And a teacher came up to me and handed me a piece of paper. I couldn't read any of it -- hieroglyphics, it could have been -- because it was Kanji, Chinese characters adapted into the Japanese language. Asked him what this said. And he goes, "Ahh, okay okay, eehto, World History, ehh, Calculus, Traditional Japanese." And so on. And so it came to me in waves. There had been something lost in translation. The Japanese classes were not Japanese instruction classes, per se. They were the normal high school curriculum for Japanese students -- the other 4,999 students in the school, who were Japanese, besides the American. And that's pretty much my response. (Laughter)
And that set me on this panic driven search for the perfect language method. I tried everything. I went to Kinokuniya. I tried every possible book, every possible CD. Nothing worked until I found this. This is the Joyo Kanji. This is a Tablet rather, or a poster of the 1,945 common-use characters as determined by the Ministry of Education in 1981. Many of the publications in Japan limit themselves to these characters, to facilitate literacy -- some are required to. And this became my Holy Grail, my Rosetta Stone.
As soon as I focused on this material, I took off. I ended up being able to read Asahi Shinbu, Asahi newspaper, about six months later -- so a total of 11 months later -- and went from Japanese I to Japanese VI. Ended up doing translation work at age 16 when I returned to the U.S., and have continued to apply this material over method approach to close to a dozen languages now. Someone who was terrible at languages, and at any given time, speak, read and write five or six. This brings us to the point, which is, it's oftentimes what you do, not how you do it, that is the determining factor. This is the difference between being effective -- doing the right things -- and being efficient -- doing things well whether or not they're important.
You can also do this with grammar. I came up with these six sentences after much experimentation. Having a native speaker allow you to deconstruct their grammar, by translating these sentences into past, present, future, will show you subject, object, verb, placement of indirect, direct objects, gender and so forth. From that point, you can then, if you want to, acquire multiple languages, alternate them so there is no interference. We can talk about that if anyone in interested. And now I love languages.
So ballroom dancing, implicit versus explicit -- very important. You might look at me and say, "That guy must be a ballroom dancer." But no, you'd be wrong because my body is very poorly designed for most things -- pretty well designed for lifting heavy rocks perhaps. I used to be much bigger, much more muscular. And so I ended up walking like this. I looked a lot like an orangutan, our close cousins, or the Incredible Hulk. Not very good for ballroom dancing.
I found myself in Argentina in 2005, decided to watch a tango class -- had no intention of participating. Went in, paid my ten pesos, walked up -- 10 women two guys, usually a good ratio. The instructor says, "You are participating." Immediately: death sweat. (Laughter) Fight-or-flight fear sweat, because I tried ballroom dancing in college -- stepped on the girl's foot with my heel. She screamed. I was so concerned with her perception of what I was doing, that it exploded in my face, never to return to the ballroom dancing club. She comes up, and this was her approach, the teacher. "Okay, come on, grab me." Gorgeous assistant instructor. She was very pissed off that I had pulled her from her advanced practice. So I did my best. I didn't know where to put my hands. And she pulled back, threw down her arms, put them on her hips, turned around and yelled across the room, "This guy is built like a god-damned mountain of muscle, and he's grabbing me like a Frenchman," (Laughter) which I found encouraging. (Laughter) Everyone burst into laughter. I was humiliated. She came back. She goes, "Come on. I don't have all day." As someone who wrestled since age eight, I proceeded to crush her, "Of Mice and Men" style. And she looked up and said, "Now that's better." So I bought a month's worth of classes. (Laughter)
And proceeded to look at -- I wanted to set competition so I'd have a deadline -- Parkinson's Law, the perceived complexity of a task will expand to fill the time you allot it. So I had a very short deadline for a competition. I got a female instructor first, to teach me the female role, the follow, because I wanted to understand the sensitivities and abilities that the follow needed to develop, so I wouldn't have a repeat of college. And then I took an inventory of the characteristics, along with her, of the of the capabilities and elements of different dancers who'd won championships. I interviewed these people because they all taught in Buenos Aires. I compared the two lists, and what you find is that there is explicitly, expertise they recommended, certain training methods. Then there were implicit commonalities that none of them seemed to be practicing. Now the protectionism of Argentine dance teachers aside, I found this very interesting. So I decided to focus on three of those commonalities. Long steps. So a lot of milongueros -- the tango dancers will use very short steps. I found that longer steps were much more elegant. So you can have -- and you can do it in a very small space in fact. Secondly, different types of pivots. Thirdly, variation in tempo. These seemed to be the three areas that I could exploit to compete if I wanted to comptete against people who'd been practicing for 20 to 30 years.
That photo is of the semi-finals of the Buenos Aires championships, four months later. Then one month later, went to the world championships, made it to the semi-final. And then set a world record, following that, two weeks later. I want you to see part of what I practiced. I'm going to jump forward here. This is the instructor that Alicia and I chose for the male lead. His name is Gabriel Misse. One of the most elegant dancers of his generation, known for his long steps, and his tempo changes and his pivots. Alicia, in her own right, very famous. So I think you'll agree, they look quite good together. Now what I like about this video is it's actually a video of the first time they ever danced together because of his lead. He had a strong lead. He didn't lead with his chest, which requires you lean forward. I couldn't develop the attributes in my toes, the strength in my feet, to do that. So he uses a lead that focuses on his shoulder girdle and his arm. So he can lift the woman to break her, for example. That's just one benefit of that. So then we broke it down. This would be an example of one pivot. This is a back step pivot. There are many different types. I have hundreds of hours of footage -- all categorized, much like George Carlin categorized his comedy. So using my arch-nemesis, Spanish, no less, to learn tango.
So fear is your friend. Fear is an indicator. Sometimes it shows you what you shouldn't do. More often than not it shows you exactly what you should do. And the best results that I've had in life, the most enjoyable times, have all been from asking a simple question: what's the worst that can happen? Especially with fears you gained when you were a child. Take the analytical frameworks, the capabilities you have, apply them to old fears. Apply them to very big dreams.
And when I think of what I fear now, it's very simple. When I imagine my life, what my life would have been like without the educational opportunities that I had, it makes me wonder. I've spent the last two years trying to deconstruct the American public school system, to either fix it or replace it. And have done experiments with about 50,000 students thus far -- built, I'd say, about a half dozen schools, my readers, at this point. And if any of you are interested in that, I would love to speak with you. I know nothing. I'm a beginner. But I ask a lot of questions, and I would love your advice. Thank you very much. (Applause)
i'd like to share with you a discovery that i made a few months ago while writing an article for italian wired. i always keep my thesaurus handy whenever i'm writing anything, but i'd already finished editing the piece, and i realized that i had never once in my life looked up the word "disabled" to see what i'd find.
let me read you the entry. "disabled, adjective: crippled, helpless, useless, wrecked, stalled, maimed, wounded, mangled, lame, mutilated, run-down, worn-out, weakened, impotent, castrated, paralyzed, handicapped, senile, decrepit, laid-up, done-up, done-for, done-in cracked-up, counted-out; see also hurt, useless and weak. antonyms, healthy, strong, capable." i was reading this list out loud to a friend and at first was laughing, it was so ludicrous, but i'd just gotten past "mangled," and my voice broke, and i had to stop and collect myself from the emotional shock and impact that the assault from these words unleashed.
you know, of course, this is my raggedy old thesaurus so i'm thinking this must be an ancient print date, right? but, in fact, the print date was the early 1980s, when i would have been starting primary school and forming an understanding of myself outside the family unit and as related to the other kids and the world around me. and, needless to say, thank god i wasn't using a thesaurus back then. i mean, from this entry, it would seem that i was born into a world that perceived someone like me to have nothing positive whatsoever going for them, when in fact, today i'm celebrated for the opportunities and adventures my life has procured.
so, i immediately went to look up the online edition, epecting to find a revision worth noting. here's the updated version of this entry. unfortunately, it's not much better. i find the last two words under "near antonyms," particularly unsettling: "whole" and "wholesome."
so, it's not just about the words. it's what we believe about people when we name them with these words. it's about the values behind the words, and how we construct those values. our language affects our thinking and how we view the world and how we view other people. in fact, many ancient societies, including the greeks and the romans, believed that to utter a curse verbally was so powerful, because to say the thing out loud brought it into eistence. so, what reality do we want to call into eistence: a person who is limited, or a person who's empowered? by casually doing something as simple as naming a person, a child, we might be putting lids and casting shadows on their power. wouldn't we want to open doors for them instead?
one such person who opened doors for me was my childhood doctor at the a.i. dupont institute in wilmington, delaware. his name was dr. pizzutillo, an italian american, whose name, apparently, was too difficult for most americans to pronounce, so he went by dr. p. and dr. p always wore really colorful bow ties and had the very perfect disposition to work with children.
i loved almost everything about my time spent at this hospital, with the eception of my physical therapy sessions. i had to do what seemed like innumerable repetitions of eercises with these thick, elastic bands -- different colors, you know -- to help build up my leg muscles, and i hated these bands more than anything -- i hated them, had names for them. i hated them. and, you know, i was already bargaining, as a five year-old child, with dr. p to try to get out of doing these eercises, unsuccessfully, of course. and, one day, he came in to my session -- ehaustive and unforgiving, these sessions -- and he said to me, "wow. aimee, you are such a strong and powerful little girl, i think you're going to break one of those bands. when you do break it, i'm going to give you a hundred bucks."
now, of course, this was a simple ploy on dr. p's part to get me to do the eercises i didn't want to do before the prospect of being the richest five-year-old in the second floor ward, but what he effectively did for me was reshape an awful daily occurrence into a new and promising eperience for me. and i have to wonder today to what etent his vision and his declaration of me as a strong and powerful little girl shaped my own view of myself as an inherently strong, powerful and athletic person well into the future.
this is an eample of how adults in positions of power can ignite the power of a child. but, in the previous instances of those thesaurus entries, our language isn't allowing us to evolve into the reality that we would all want, the possibility of an individual to see themselves as capable. our language hasn't caught up with the changes in our society, many of which have been brought about by technology. certainly, from a medical standpoint, my legs, laser surgery for vision impairment, titanium knees and hip replacements for aging bodies that are allowing people to more fully engage with their abilities, and move beyond the limits that nature has imposed on them -- not to mention social networking platforms allow people to self-identify, to claim their own descriptions of themselves, so they can go align with global groups of their own choosing. so, perhaps technology is revealing more clearly to us now what has always been a truth: that everyone has something rare and powerful to offer our society, and that the human ability to adapt is our greatest asset.
the human ability to adapt, it's an interesting thing, because people have continually wanted to talk to me about overcoming adversity, and i'm going to make an admission: this phrase never sat right with me, and i always felt uneasy trying to answer people's questions about it, and i think i'm starting to figure out why. implicit in this phrase of "overcoming adversity" is the idea that success, or happiness, is about emerging on the other side of a challenging eperience unscathed or unmarked by the eperience, as if my successes in life have come about from an ability to sidestep or circumnavigate the presumed pitfalls of a life with prosthetics, or what other people perceive as my disability. but, in fact, we are changed. we are marked, of course, by a challenge, whether physically, emotionally or both. and i'm going to suggest that this is a good thing. adversity isn't an obstacle that we need to get around in order to resume living our life. it's part of our life. and i tend to think of it like my shadow. sometimes i see a lot of it, sometimes there's very little, but it's always with me. and, certainly, i'm not trying to diminish the impact, the weight, of a person's struggle.
there is adversity and challenge in life, and it's all very real and relative to every single person, but the question isn't whether or not you're going to meet adversity, but how you're going to meet it. so, our responsibility is not simply shielding those we care for from adversity, but preparing them to meet it well. and we do a disservice to our kids when we make them feel that they're not equipped to adapt. there's an important difference and distinction between the objective medical fact of my being an amputee and the subjective societal opinion of whether or not i'm disabled. and, truthfully, the only real and consistent disability i've had to confront is the world ever thinking that i could be described by those definitions.
in our desire to protect those we care about by giving them the cold, hard truth about their medical prognosis, or, indeed, a prognosis on the epected quality of their life, we have to make sure that we don't put the first brick in a wall that will actually disable someone. perhaps the eisting model of only looking at what is broken in you and how do we fi it, serves to be more disabling to the individual than the pathology itself.
by not treating the wholeness of a person, by not acknowledging their potency, we are creating another ill on top of whatever natural struggle they might have. we are effectively grading someone's worth to our community. so we need to see through the pathology and into the range of human capability. and, most importantly, there's a partnership between those perceived deficiencies and our greatest creative ability. so it's not about devaluing, or negating, these more trying times as something we want to avoid or sweep under the rug, but instead to find those opportunities wrapped in the adversity. so maybe the idea i want to put out there is not so much overcoming adversity as it is opening ourselves up to it, embracing it, grappling with it, to use a wrestling term, maybe even dancing with it. and, perhaps, if we see adversity as natural, consistent and useful, we're less burdened by the presence of it.
this year we celebrate the 200th birthday of charles darwin, and it was 150 years ago, when writing about evolution, that darwin illustrated, i think, a truth about the human character. to paraphrase: it's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor is it the most intelligent that survives; it is the one that is most adaptable to change. conflict is the genesis of creation. from darwin's work, amongst others, we can recognize that the human ability to survive and flourish is driven by the struggle of the human spirit through conflict into transformation. so, again, transformation, adaptation, is our greatest human skill. and, perhaps, until we're tested, we don't know what we're made of. maybe that's what adversity gives us: a sense of self, a sense of our own power. so, we can give ourselves a gift. we can re-imagine adversity as something more than just tough times. maybe we can see it as change. adversity is just change that we haven't adapted ourselves to yet.
i think the greatest adversity that we've created for ourselves is this idea of normalcy. now, who's normal? there's no normal. there's common, there's typical. there's no normal, and would you want to meet that poor, beige person if they eisted? (laughter) i don't think so. if we can change this paradigm from one of achieving normalcy to one of possibility or potency, to be even a little bit more dangerous -- we can release the power of so many more children, and invite them to engage their rare and valuable abilities with the community.
anthropologists tell us that the one thing we as humans have always required of our community members is to be of use, to be able to contribute. there's evidence that neanderthals, 60,000 years ago, carried their elderly and those with serious physical injury, and perhaps it's because the life eperience of survival of these people proved of value to the community. they didn't view these people as broken and useless; they were seen as rare and valuable.
a few years ago, i was in a food market in the town where i grew up in that red zone in northeastern pennsylvania, and i was standing over a bushel of tomatoes. it was summertime: i had shorts on. i hear this guy, his voice behind me say, "well, if it isn't aimee mullins." and i turn around, and it's this older man. i have no idea who he is.
and i said, "i'm sorry, sir, have we met? i don't remember meeting you."
he said, "well, you wouldn't remember meeting me. i mean, when we met i was delivering you from your mother's womb." (laughter) oh, that guy. and, but of course, actually, it did click.
this man was dr. kean, a man that i had only known about through my mother's stories of that day, because, of course, typical fashion, i arrived late for my birthday by two weeks. and so my mother's prenatal physician had gone on vacation, so the man who delivered me was a complete stranger to my parents. and, because i was born without the fibula bones, and had feet turned in, and a few toes in this foot and a few toes in that, he had to be the bearer -- this stranger had to be the bearer of bad news.
he said to me, "i had to give this prognosis to your parents that you would never walk, and you would never have the kind of mobility that other kids have or any kind of life of independence, and you've been making liar out of me ever since." (laughter) (applause)
the etraordinary thing is that he said he had saved newspaper clippings throughout my whole childhood, whether winning a second grade spelling bee, marching with the girl scouts, you know, the halloween parade, winning my college scholarship, or any of my sports victories, and he was using it, and integrating it into teaching resident students, med students from hahnemann medical school and hershey medical school. and he called this part of the course the factor, the potential of the human will. no prognosis can account for how powerful this could be as a determinant in the quality of someone's life. and dr. kean went on to tell me, he said, "in my eperience, unless repeatedly told otherwise, and even if given a modicum of support, if left to their own devices, a child will achieve."
see, dr. kean made that shift in thinking. he understood that there's a difference between the medical condition and what someone might do with it. and there's been a shift in my thinking over time, in that, if you had asked me at 15 years old, if i would have traded prosthetics for flesh-and-bone legs, i wouldn't have hesitated for a second. i aspired to that kind of normalcy back then. but if you ask me today, i'm not so sure. and it's because of the eperiences i've had with them, not in spite of the eperiences i've had with them. and perhaps this shift in me has happened because i've been eposed to more people who have opened doors for me than those who have put lids and cast shadows on me.
see, all you really need is one person to show you the epiphany of your own power, and you're off. if you can hand somebody the key to their own power -- the human spirit is so receptive -- if you can do that and open a door for someone at a crucial moment, you are educating them in the best sense. you're teaching them to open doors for themselves. in fact, the eact meaning of the word "educate" comes from the root word "educe." it means "to bring forth what is within, to bring out potential." so again, which potential do we want to bring out?
there was a case study done in 1960s britain, when they were moving from grammar schools to comprehensive schools. it's called the streaming trials. we call it "tracking" here in the states. it's separating students from a, b, c, d and so on. and the "a students" get the tougher curriculum, the best teachers, etc. well, they took, over a three-month period, d-level students, gave them a's, told them they were "a's," told them they were bright, and at the end of this three-month period, they were performing at a-level.
and, of course, the heartbreaking, flip side of this study, is that they took the "a students" and told them they were "d's." and that's what happened at the end of that three-month period. those who were still around in school, besides the people who had dropped out. a crucial part of this case study was that the teachers were duped too. the teachers didn't know a switch had been made. they were simply told, "these are the 'a-students,' these are the 'd-students.'" and that's how they went about teaching them and treating them.
so, i think that the only true disability is a crushed spirit, a spirit that's been crushed doesn't have hope, it doesn't see beauty, it no longer has our natural, childlike curiosity and our innate ability to imagine. if instead, we can bolster a human spirit to keep hope, to see beauty in themselves and others, to be curious and imaginative, then we are truly using our power well. when a spirit has those qualities, we are able to create new realities and new ways of being.
i'd like to leave you with a poem by a fourteenth-century persian poet named hafiz that my friend, jacques dembois told me about, and the poem is called "the god who only knows four words": "every child has known god, not the god of names, not the god of don'ts, but the god who only knows four words and keeps repeating them, saying, 'come dance with me. come, dance with me. come, dance with me.'"
thank you. (applause)