The other day when I was walking past some classrooms, I heard a student giving an end of the semester presentation. If you’ve gone to school in the past several years, you know precisely the kind of presentation it was: PowerPoint, loaded with statistics and numbers, given in a monotone, and probably thrown together the day before.

It made me wonder: why don’t students actually think before creating presentations. They give presentations that are simply a compilation of statistics and dry facts, guaranteed to put their audience to sleep within a few minutes.

Yet the students who create such dust dry presentations seem to be the students most likely to complain about the teacher, and how boring the class is. I don’t think it’s hypocrisy, because I’m pretty sure that they don’t even realize the contradiction, though about five seconds into the presentation one begins to wish they would.