Early Days
The story happened when it was the dawn of teaching with PPT, and when I was a new teenager. The teacher I admired so much said, “A good teacher never looks at a book or PPT while teaching,” and he never let us open our textbooks or any teaching materials. All we had was a notebook. The situation may have looked normal (it is), but when I was that age, I used to get easily manipulated by the words of people I respected due to my authority bias. From that day on, anytime I saw a teacher using PPT and just reading from it, I thought, “That teacher doesn’t know anything; they’re just teaching to live.”
I know it was a stupid thought, but I was a stupid kid. I got it all wrong.
The University life
It’s common for every student who goes to university to tend to be more mature, and their thought process is mostly based on their life experiences (at least to some extent). I was no different. Whenever I saw a teacher using PPT, I thought, “That teacher doesn’t know anything; they’re just teaching to live,” and I was so sure that I was right that I never used PPT in my class.
Some bad teachers also contributed to this thought process, which made me even more sure that I was right.
Honestly, this feeling stuck with me until my 6th semester, and I have never looked back to fix this mistake in my mind.
Because of this feeling, my presentations never included text. All I had was a bunch of images, some pretty animations, and headings and subheadings.
Look at this slide i made. I’ve covered at least two pages of a topics in one presentation slide.
Listen, if you were present when I presented something like this (forgive me), I was a fool.
The Ppt Remorse
Recently I was studying so many new topics from YouTube and conferences and they use the presentation to teach or convey something and there I caught myself reading the line in the slide before I listen to the speaker, I was like “What the hell am I doing” and I realized that I was doing the same thing I hated so much, but after some time I realized:
“when a person doesn’t know anything about a topic they tend to read the slide first to understand briefly about what they going to hear about and then they listen to the speaker”. ( it happens like a subconscious thing )
This makes sense because knowing the topic is the first step to understanding it. The key element of any presentation is to convey the topic to the audience, and that was always missing in my presentations.
I regret all the things I said to myself.
The line ‘A good teacher never looks at a book or PPT while teaching’ means that a good teacher tries to deliver the topic in a way that the audience doesn’t need to read the book or PPT to understand the topic, and I was so wrong to think that a teacher who uses PPT doesn’t know anything about the topic.
MORAL: “Do go thinking you are right about something before some background work, you may be wrong” 🫠
That cat above is me after realizing my mistake.