Um, Like, I'd Rather Do Push-Ups

In the first-ever Monta Vista Business Boot Camp using filler words such as um or like while speaking publicly proved to be a punishable offense.

“Can I do push-ups instead,” asked one girl who said a few too many “likes” during her unrehearsed talk on a business topic doled out to her randomly via a DECA vocabulary flashcard.

The push-ups were in lieu of the more entertaining punishment of drawing out letters of the alphabet in the air using one’s (ahem) posterior.

Other groups posed fun questions for challengers, such as one all-girls group that instructed an all-boys group to discuss mascara.

"I don't even know what mascara is," said the boy tasked with speaking about it as if he knew it intimately.

After a little help thrown his way he began: "Mascara makes your eyelashes longer. It makes everyone prettier. If I was a girl I would wear mascara."

The playful exchange of the serious matter of business and marketing was evident Wednesday in the quad of Monta Vista High School where more than 70 incoming freshman took their licks for pausing more than a second or two for, like, um, not knowing what to say about a given topic, such as “Discuss the nature of debtor-credit relationship.”

It was part of an exercise they called “speech baseball.”

“You don’t have to know about (the subject) but you have to pretend you know it,” said one of the teen counselors to her charges.

Such is the world of business and marketing, the two focuses of the boot camp taking place this week at Monta Vista High School.

Speech baseball is played by way of a student counselor—one who has experience in business or marketing classes—selecting a card from a stack of DECA flashcards, giving it to the boot camper to read and think about for 30 seconds or so before being asked to speak on the subject at hand for a solid 30 seconds.

The idea they say, is to teach students how to speak on any subject—whether they know anything about it or not—with confidence.

Organized by graduated senior Hung-Jen Wu and others, the intense training program is a collaboration of two Monta Vista High School organizations, National Technical Honor Society (NTHS) and Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA) which are “dedicated to instilling business interest and knowledge in high school students,” according to the program’s material.

Wu, who is off to George Washington University in the fall, founded NTHS and helps oversee the boot camp.

“I consider this to be a milestone effort,” Wu says.

The idea for the boot camp floated around for a few years in the brain of Carl Schmidt, the school’s business and marketing teacher and DECA adviser. But it was Wu who pushed to make the week-long camp happen this summer.

Next up for campers, a visit Friday from Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist of Apple, and author of Art of the Start, a book guiding the boot camp.