Teaching Kids Choice Lessons

"Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it were."

Teaching Kids Choice Lessons This article on James was featured in the Miami Herald on Friday, May 21, 1999.

It's spring, with less than four weeks to go till school is out. The auditorium at Parkway Middle School in Fort Lauderdale writhes with the youthful energy of hundreds of seventh-graders held tenuously in check. Principal Vernon Beard soothes the standing-room-only crowd and introduces a guest speaker.

Seventh-graders? Weeks before summer vacation? Is this guy crazy? They're not going to listen to some hotshot tell them about the ``Challenges of Life.''

But James Amps III, motivational speaker and showman extraordinaire, shouts from the back of the auditorium and all heads turn. He runs up the aisle chanting ``Give it up!'' and pumping his arms in the air, and the kids' applause picks up a rhythmic cadence.

He taps the restless energy in the room, using it to focus all eyes on stage.

First, Amps gets them laughing. With much animation, he tells of growing up black in an all-white school. When his family moved, he had to learn to stop talking, walking and dressing "white.''

He acts out how he taught himself to walk "black'' by imitating the exaggerated cool-daddyo-shuffle of "Huggy Bear," the pimp on the old Starsky and Hutch TV series. The kids are rolling with laughter.

With more entertaining anecdotes, Amps begins to bring home a deeper message: Personal accountability. Making choices.

Taking responsibility for those choices. He talks comfortably with them about their choices -- friends, drugs, cigarettes, racial attitudes. He stresses "getting out of your racial comfort zone.''

His most poignant story recounts how he refused to rat on a guilty friend in the Navy. Amps received a bad-conduct discharge for his misplaced loyalty.

Now the students sit at rapt attention. Amps tells them that no one wanted to hire him then. The discharge devastated his life and his dreams.

"My dream was pulled from me,'' he says. "I let another person mess with my vision. Don't let others mess with your vision.''

Amps used that lesson to rebuild his own life. He eventually began making high school recruiting pitches for technical institutes. Then he attended a national speaker's convention in 1995. A born performer, Amps was hooked.

"I didn't know it [speaking] was there,'' he recalls, sipping coffee after his presentation at Parkway. "It opened up a whole new industry for me.'' Today the dynamic Amps is president and CEO of Amps Communicators, co-founder of the Young Speakers Association, and of the National African American Speakers Association.

Married, with a son, 23, and daughter, 16, Amps and his family live in Pembroke Pines after moving from Washington, D.C., when his wife was transferred to Miami.

Besides speaking in schools, Amps conducts training sessions and workshops, most recently with the federal Office of Civil Rights and the U.S. Postal Service, and consults with businesses. He has co-written two books to be published this summer.

His dream now is to start a youth speaking organization to teach young people better communication skills.

His most fervent message, one he lives by and includes on his correspondence, is simply this: "If you want something that you have never had, you've got to do something that you have never done.''

Written by Columnist: Sue Reisinger
e-mail: sreisinger@herald.com
Published: Friday, May 21, 1999
Original Article:
http://www.herald.com/herald/content/digdocs/opinion/columnists/reisinger/035801.asp
Copyright 1999 Miami Herald