I spent the day staring at my third class, a presentations class. It’s a great idea, this class. Students have to give presentations. It’s like public speaking, but all online, and you have to prepare and present accompanying slides. It’s not my class, in the sense that I didn’t build it. The person in charge of it is making great strides with dialing it in. I also didn’t have this class initially this term, but things change and merrily we will go through the semester, offering feedback and hoping it is helpful.
It’s useful for students who think they know everything there is to know about computers and using them in these most basic ways. (I should keep count of the technical problem complaints I receive. Some of them are hilarious.) Also, it is a terrifying class for people who have a fear of public speaking. This class substitutes for the public speaking course in everyone’s curriculum, which is nice. It is up to each person to make a choice of which they’d rather do.
I think the public speaking class would be easier for a couple of different reasons, but that’s just me.
When I took public speaking, we were pretty new into the idea that everyone should have the course. They were still explaining it thusly to students: The one thing all of the employers say when we survey them is that their new hires need to be better at giving presentations as in a work meeting or board room, and that’s why everyone must take this class. So, when I did it, we met a few times in this very large lecture hall and you spent most of the semester in a smaller room, a lab, with a grad student running the lab and 12 or 15 nervous people besides. There was, I remember, one guy that was unusual in our lab. He’d spent a career in the Army. He was a paratrooper. He’d just retired. His son was in school and he figured it’d be nice to go back to school with his kid, so here was this dad, this man who talked about how one time his chute failed and the only thing that saved his life was that, at the last second, he remembered his training. He talked about how his body was broken, and the depression he left in the earth when he hit the ground. I don’t recall how high up he said he was on this jump, but it sounded both plausible and unbelievable at the same time. But, you could take one look at that guy and know two things simultaneously: he’d been through some stuff, and he could beat you up if he needed to. Nice fella.
I can’t remember anything about the grad student that ran the class, which is unfortunate. I do remember after the first time we met that person I went downstairs to a payphone and called home. I did not wait to get back to my place. I said: send me that file filing system of all of my speeches. I’m going to use them in this class. And I did.
I think I finished with something like a 114 in that class.
So I’m not usual in that sense. Just hammy enough, just desperate enough to be perceived as credible, and I stumnbled and walked and bumbled through four years of public speaking with Douglas Caddell. I hung out with some of the best young speech-makers in the state, dated a state champion, and competed in just about every contest I could get into.
Anyway, that unusual lane in high school left me well prepared for a basic public speaking class, and was probably helpful, eventually, in broadcasting career.
The best thing about public speaking back in the dark ages was that we didn’t have to make presentations. There was no PowerPoint back then. Some rooms didn’t have power. My slides today are nothing great. I built and use a university-branded template, and try not to put too many words on the slides. What you put on your slides isn’t where the game is won, but it can be where the game is lost.
I can’t give all of the good advice away for free here. If you want to know more, enroll in my class.
This is what should be on all of my slides, I’m told. The cats say if they have a weekly check-in here they should be in every slide deck I make, too. Phoebe would make great points about any topic from her hammock.
She lately went through a kitteh noir period.
You can almost hear her thinking in hard-boiled cat detective narration.
“You tell some tall tales, kid. But my tail is taller. A cat’s greatest weapon, though, is a keen eye, and her greatest ally is the dark. That’s how I came to find your man, lingering in the shadows. He’s been singing to me for weeks. If he was any more of a rat he’d sprout whiskers and a tail, but his info’s always good and it brought me here, to you. And I know you’ve been thinking that while the cat’s away, the mice will play, but the cat’s back. Playtime’s over. Hands up. I can say it with a smile, sure, the smile is free of charge. You need a smile in my line of work. The smile says ‘hello’ while your trigger finger waves goodbye … ”
Poseidon is more of a chaos comedy fan. He’s been working on his Will Ferrell impression.
“Hey mom! The meatloaf! We want it now. The meatloaf! Ma, the meatloaf!”
A few days ago he changed up our mid-day routine. I have a little bite to eat and he waits patiently. Then, I grab a protein bar and a glass and sit in a corner in the living room. He waits patiently for this. As soon as I sit down he’s in motion, and then on my lap, or curled up beside me, or climbing up my chest for a snooze. But on this particular afternoon, he insisted I would not spend those few minutes reading.
And so I did not.
Storms blew through this evening. The forecast was for rush hour. They arrived at about 7 p.m. Weather forecasting, it ain’t what it used to be. That was a choice. Apparently there was a tornado to our west and a waterspout or tornado to our southeast. Here, it just rained. We had some lightening, but the wind never really picked up. It was an oddly timed thing, as the clouds on the back end of the system lingered, the sun started it’s regular dive to the horizon. This is the view from my office just now, looking off to the north-northwest.
And now I’ll get back to work. Because there is always work.
