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Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

My son is finally to the age where he needs to submit/present PowerPoint presentations for homework assignments. After walking him through the best practices for presenting + making sure his presentation was ship-shape, he received a C. His teacher sent a rubrick for the next assignment with criteria like: must have at least one animated transition; must use at least two backgrounds; must use at least 3 text animations; must not be in outline format; use complete sentences.

I was floored, but in the end explained to him that he's doing something for a grade, not for it to be good, and that there is a right and wrong way to do a PowerPoint presentation.

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A little bit of my soul died when I read that. Teaching how to convey information is so difficult and especially to children, because they don't have the exposure to other examples to refer to what worked and what didn't. Add to this that children are often taught to not question what teachers teach is a recipe for disaster.

I'm not surprised at all. My observation has been that teachers - even ones who are brilliantly good as teachers - are abysmal PowerPoint users. Every one I've seen has made the same kind of mistakes:

  - Way too many slides for the time available
  - Numerous slides that with both paragraphs of text and elaborate diagrams
  - Slides that cannot be read at all by the audience because everything is too small
  - Reading verbatim from slides in the presentation
  - A firehouse of information that is impossible to remember or even follow
  - Zero narrative flow, no sense of what are key points

[edit: fix formatting]

They were teaching him how to use powerpoint's features and get used to finding things. Making it good with those limitations would leverage the creative aspect.

It wasn't about making a cookie cutter corporate presentation that doesn't make you look out of touch.

That is a microcosm for how awful (and non-educating) school can be.

Maybe present yourself as a seasoned presenter and business veteran and offer to help the teacher prepare a top-notch lesson plan for next year's PP segment?

I cause enough trouble at school as it is.

The teacher is probably also just using a formula, judging the presentation by technical points instead of contents or as a thing to make the actual presentation better. A shame, I'm sure your son will be able to do presentations that aren't judged by technical points soon enough.

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