Just sitting around, planning, readying myself for the largest anticlimax of my life.
Dan Meyer
Previously
Introduction
Your first slide is crucial. Cru. cial.
Your first slide establishes your presentation’s identity and even if you only fire up a projector three times a semester or present at only one conference, your presentation needs an identity. If you plan on presenting your lessons every day for a year (as has been my m.o.) this is quintuply important.
The reason is simply this: you don’t want your audience distracted by what your presentation looks like at the expense of what it’s about. No matter what my slides are about, they share a similar look.
This is priceless. In a matter of days, my students forget that the body text (Tahoma) looks different from problem information text (Gill Sans). They could tell you that the slide backgrounds are light blue but they forget that I use a gradient. I set problem answers to a darker shade of the background blue, but after a week, the look of the slide becomes so transparent, half the class would tell you it’s black. They never noticed the line breaks (always 10 points) or the reliable indentation (headers always 12% off the side; body text 3% more) or a dozen other elements I painstakingly built into the template with the express intention of rendering them totally, and completely, invisible.
We talked about this, you know? Four classes, four discussions.
Four times I told them a student in Washington had been suspended for 40 days and invited speculation into his crime. He stabbed somebody? He hit a teacher? He sold drugs?
Four times through that video, which was pretty cruel in some places and probably didn’t do enough justice to the utter lameness of the teacher in others. Four times I told the class, look, you’re going to find this funny but this isn’t like the other times we play videos in class. Four times I told them I wanted their thoughts on What All This Means.
I made a four-day weekend out of it, drove down south, and cleared my head. We still have two-and-a-half weeks out here at SLVHS so keep your crowing low, ‘kay?, but I’ve got a good exit strategy and inspiration struck me several times on my way to Los Angeles. (Better inspiration than a semi in the oncoming lane, I always tell my kids, nyuk.)
Here’s the fun stuff that’s been happening since:
Introduction
Jonathan, Jackie, and Sara have been asking sharp questions in the comments about how I assess students. They’ve found a lot of soft spots on an otherwise leathery-tough assessment strategy and I’d like to address them here.