On Thursday, Jan. 21, Plainfield South hosted motivational speaker Jessie Funk, who started the assembly by singing the famous Bruno Mars song “Uptown Funk.” She was on American Idol and is now a motivational speaker.
As she began the assembly though, we were wondering what she was really trying to say. She was all over the place, telling story after story and not really connecting any of her points together for us to make sense of it. It doesn’t help that most of the gym was filled with students mumbling among themselves out of pure boredom. We were wondering why she there to talk to us nor did we care.
At one point, she told a story about a toxic relationship she was in and quieted down a few people, mostly because it was relatable to a lot of the students. Her story was defiant, proving anyone could be strong, and she gave us the clear message of washing the toxic people out of our lives. We considered it to be an important lesson and definitely valuable for the future. Her stories all had meaning and a definite purpose, but that did not mean we could understand her on a personal level or even find it relevant.
That does not imply that the rest of the assembly was decent, though. Although she had strong points here and there, it still wasn’t an interesting, nor helpful, motivational speech. We could not understand why we were there to listen to some stranger tell us about her life (along with promoting her music). She even called someone on stage to drink Windex, which was blue Gatorade mixed with chocolate milk, and we could not tell you what her point was in doing so. Later we realized it was supposed to be about not allowing toxic people into your life.
The part that really stumped a lot of us was her message that conveyed one simple, toxic idea. Her message was “fake it ‘til you make it.” Her point was that if you smile for long enough, you’ll eventually become genuinely happy. There were a lot of heads shaking in disagreement. Why was a motivational speaker telling us to pretend to be happy instead of actually being who we are? That was an off setter for a lot of the students who were already slightly disappointed. Not to mention it is dangerous to say something like that to a room full of high school students.
As the “speech” came to a close, every person was once again distracted by the people around them and she started singing “Fight Song,” by Rachel Platten. We were more than ready to finally exit the hot gym and no longer have to listen to her while we would have rather been at home sleeping once that ended.
Motivational speakers generally have good intentions like passing valuable lessons on so others don’t make their mistakes. Ultimately, though, we think it would have benefitted everyone more if we could have had a speaker we could follow along with and be entertained by. We would have liked a healthy message instead of a confusing one.