There is a one-minute TikTok video from Nicole at TeachingLittleWonderz titled Teaching my students an important lesson using a piece of paper. John Zimmer wrote about it an article a at Manner of Speaking on January 3, 2023 titled The Power of a Prop. She crumples that sheet and says:
“I want you, and it’s going to sound silly, say something mean to this piece of paper. You look ugly. You smell bad. I hate you. You’re the worst one ever. You don’t deserve to be here. Now I want you to apologize. Everybody say sorry. Will this paper ever go back to the way it was when we first started? No. Right? It’s never going to go back to the way it was in the beginning.
And the reason I’m doing this with you today is because this week we’re talking all about how our words and our actions affect other people. Your words affect people so much, even after you leave them, even after you say sorry. They can stay inside that person for a really long time. So, we need to think about how our words and the things that we’re saying to each other are affecting each other. And that’s why it’s important that we use nice, kind words.”
And back on August 22, 2008 in a post titled Give ‘em props I said that:
“Ellen Hermens describes a speaker who just placed a paper circle on the floor and stood on it to show that ‘this is my point of view’. Then he stepped away and took a critical look at that point of view from another angle.”
You also could fold that sheet of paper to make an airplane or an origami crane, as shown above.
Chapter 37 of the Advanced Public Speaking book by Lynn Meade is titled Props: It is more than just setting stuff on a table. There are 16 embedded videos and 23 references!
Images of a paper airplane and origami crane came from Wikimedia Commons.
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