The Final Class

The Final Class

Two weeks ago, on a cold and rainy night, I attended the final Critical Thinking class. It was a continuation of the week before, where we all gave our individual business presentations to Bonni and the class. For some reason, the second week's presentations fared generally much better than the first week's.

For the first week, I would say that about half the students failed to prepare their material. A number of them didn't even bother to make a PowerPoint slide show. PowerPoint was not required, but my suggestion to those who didn't bring it would have been to bring handouts, or at a bare minimum, write on the board.

The second week, people came prepared and used good techniques, like keeping their presentations on point, employing graphics, and injecting some humor into the talks. My talk was the last one of the evening. I deliberately waited to the end, so I wouldn't have to make Bonni rearrange the entire classroom just so I could get up in the front of the class. The aisle was just too narrow for me to easily navigate, especially with the projector in the way.

I think, from what I've seen so far, the Extension classrooms are poorly designed for writing classes. I intend to speak to Tania about it. I'm surprised that the writing instructors have not demanded better!

Anyway, my talk came after a really atrocious, rambling, off-point presentation by a student who had given basically the same awful speech to our Document Design course last summer. I anxiously watched the clock tick down as the speaker sought out her topic, but never quite discovered it. Finally, and thankfully, Bonni cut her off and let me do mine. I enjoyed giving my presentation very much; I kept it to exactly seven minutes (the required limit) and injected enough humor into it that everyone seemed to enjoy it.

An overall weakness of this kind of thing, was the "why we should care" problem. That is, it's hard to keep an audience interested in a topic they know nothing about, especially when it's a dry subject, like the need to add more employees to an unknown company's technical support staff. I can't really say what the solution to that problem is--more's the pity, because giving presentations is indeed a skill anyone in business should cultivate.