Step #1: Preparing for My Pitch

Introduction:

Let me first explain what these blog posts are all about. In my "Individuals and Societies" class, we have been studying the topic of sustainability. If you are unsure on what Individuals and Societies is, it is basically a class where we deeply learn about history and geography. Throughout my whole website, I will refer to it as I & S which is how my classmates and I talk about it in school.

The Pitch:

For this assignment, each student had the privilege to choose an environmental issue that they are passionate about. This is such an amazing opportunity because instead of just learning the standard curriculum (which isn't always interesting for everyone), we can expand, see what actually interests us, and what we are curious about. By doing this, people will end up with more detailed work, and presentations that are on a different level, because the student is actually interested in what they are learning about. Now, back to our pitch topics. It could've been anything. From the overpopulation in China, to animal extinction, to pros and cons of GMO food products, or even the innovations to conserve water, which was my topic. Let me rewind a bit and say that it didn't have to be an issue per say, it could've been a way to fix the issue, such as "Going Paperless" fixing the problem of wasting paper.

We had class time to research different components of our issue. My topic was pretty broad and I had to critically think about what I wanted to include in my 90 second pitch. I started off by thinking about my background knowledge, and why I chose to deeply learn about the innovations in saving water. My family and I went to Israel this past summer for the first time and as I was touring around, my tour guide, Hugie always pointed out the ways that the Israelis conserve water on a daily basis. Israel recycles 85% of their waste water making it the leading country in water reclamation. They use a system called drip irrigation to provide water to crops in desert landscapes when it never rains. This was where I started my research and then slowly expanded to other innovations that are used. I learned a lot about the innovations that I included in my pitch, but made sure to save some more detailed information for my 4-6 minute TED-like talk that would be later in the month.

As I was creating my pitch I had to seriously consider how I was going to hook everyone and get them interested in this issue. I started off with a question that relates to something we do on a daily basis. Flushing the toilet. Everyone does it (hopefully), and several times a day. If you are reading this now, think about how much water an your toilet uses when you flush it.

When I started off my pitch, I asked my class if anyone knew how much water an average toilet flush uses, and not one person raised their hand. This was a good start, because it got people interested. I then continued by saying the shocking answer which was 13.6 litres. Throughout the presentation I spoke clearly and had a variety of slides to aid the audience in the visual picture.

After finishing the pitch, I am very confident about the TED-like talk, and am so excited for what there is to come in this unit.

Dive in to my next blog to read deeper about my experience during the TTalk and more!