<p>Have you had really motivational speakers attend your high school and lots of people liked him/her and how did it go? Did most people like him?</p>
<p>It you have seen Chris Herren speak, what did you think?</p>
<p>We had one toward the end of last year. </p>
<p>He gave a fairly run-of-the-mill uncontroversial speech in school during the day, but he spoke again later that night, and during that time he was selling books with overtly religious messages. (I’m not sure if religious stuff was actually part of the speech or not.) </p>
<p>It sort of bothered me because I don’t think public schools should endorse evangelists like that (not sure if “endorse” is the right word, but you know what I mean). And he must have known that because he was very good at keeping it hidden in his speech during the day.</p>
<p>I’m assuming Chris Herren will talk about drug abuse/drug usage. My school doesn’t usually have speakers, except for Baccalaureate. A lot of them tend to be evangelistic.</p>
<p>We had some former drug addict come speak to us. I think I bailed on the speech that day because I don’t ever remember hearing what he had to say.</p>
<p>We’ve had three that I remember.</p>
<p>Calvin Terrell - very good speaker. He had the entire school completely captivated. He talked about discrimination/racism/prejudice/acceptance.
I don’t remember the name of the second, but his speech was about alcohol. He was a student at a school nearby and ended up with a lot of brain damage and is essentially paralyzed on the right side of his body after an accident. This one wasn’t bad, but his brain damage affected the areas responsible for speech and he was really hard to understand so a lot of people zoned off.
The third was also local. She was mom of a student that died in a car crash because of a drunk driver. She said “uh” every five seconds… needless to say no one really paid attention.</p>
<p>Oh, and we had this woman with AIDs come in and speak when I was in seventh grade. I think we were too young for that speech…the kids were really stupid about it. They were all like, “I stayed really far away because I didn’t want to catch it.”</p>
<p>Last year we had some former drug addicts come and speak. They were probably supposed to be talking about how terrible drugs were and how you should never use them, but instead they basically said they had a lot of fun and didn’t regret anything. That was a train wreck.</p>