| And Your Point Is...? |
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| October 2005 | |
| Written by Manuel Gonzalez-Luna | |
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Missing the Point, Loosing the Poetry Too many times I have sat in a lecture hall staring blankly at a screen and a professor while getting the same information from both and inspiration from neither. Granted, imparting unto students the desire for higher learning and academic exploration is about as easy as it is to stay awake in Econ115, but professors only make their work more difficult by using PowerPoint as a crutch. Of course they have useful—and even interesting—information, but they put it all up on the same blue screen as they stumble with the words to make the subject clear to students. The primary problem with PowerPoint is that it promotes the delivery of unrehearsed lectures. Professors, despite their best intentions, put what they consider important information on a slide and consider their work done. A lecture, however, is a performance, and I personally am tired of watching Toby McGuire deliver my econ lecture with the same monotony and emotional sophistication of an exhausted six-year-old. This I-have-everything-on-the-screen-so-I-don’t-actually-have-to-be-engaging syndrome is more common in Group III courses—the Pseudoscience Group in terms of the new undergraduate distributional requirements—but I have witnessed the demise of great works of the western cannon and the asphyxiation of scientific theories, too. Group IV courses generally avoid the issue because no one actually wants to type the mechanisms behind G-proteins and then put them on a slide. For these professors, it actually is much easier to just put up a picture, a small caption, and then elaborate in the actual lecture (i.e. the proper method of using PowerPoint). The possible down-side to this system is that attendance is necessary, but at least it will be worthwhile. Groups I and II, on the other hand encompass that sector of learning that requires lengthy discussion and eloquent elaboration, neither of which are particularly flattering as whizzing words on a tepid blue screen. Once again, lectures are practically mandatory, but they would be anyway since most Group I and II professors do not bother posting their slides online. Group III, though, has that combination of statistics and diagrams that is so suited to PowerPoint that most professors would not think of leaving home without the talking paperclip Office Guide and a laser pointer. The more information on a slide, the more a student will rush to try to write it all down. The result is a lecture in which students go from one slide to the next, anxiously awaiting the black “End of Slide Show” screen so that they can stop writing and relieve their carpel tunnel syndrome. These people are the same ones that have trouble with classes in which professors actually speak to the class rather than shoving slides down its throat. More importantly, PowerPoint is brutal. Why is that people complain about having trouble seeing the screen? Is it glare? Is it their eyesight? Their real problem is that their eyes are closed and they are stuck in another bad dream with dialogue inspired by last week’s episode of the The OC. How anyone focuses for an hour and fifteen minutes on introductory microeconomics while the professor drones on and the slides pile up is a miracle, especially since the graphs normally appear as multicolored piles of confetti. To better demonstrate the PowerPoint-induced death of academics, take the following poem:    Professors have a job: to teach students. Teaching, however, means more than words that pop out of a projector because it involves students who may not want to learn and whose attention spans can hardly outlast the general announcements. In short, PowerPoint has its place, but not that of the professor. Manuel Gonzalez-Luna is a sophmore in Branford College. |
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