Jimmy Pan

Dear Professors, Educators, and Presenters,

I've come to realize what I do like and don't like about lectures. You may have heard this before, but as someone with an extremely short attention span, I would like to once again add my thoughts into the pool in the case that you decide to cater your lectures to me. It takes a very good presenter to have me not fall asleep; and when I say good I mean about 5% of the presenting populace. Here are some pointers for you to join their elite ranks:

• GRAPHS! I hate slides of text fervently. If I want statements of facts, I can read textbooks, or I can listen to a lecturer. I expect powerpoint presentations to provide me with something the other two don't. Treat me like a 2 year old; if the picture to text ratio is less than 3:1, expect me to hurl excrement around the room
• STORIES! You have a lot of experience in this subject. If you don't, my rant may not apply anyways. Please convey this experience! Wikipedia can provide me with a much more up to date population of Nepal than you ever will, but it cannot contextualize that information in terms of experience and real-world applications. Percent quality consistency of printer cartridges will rouse nary a soul, but I swear I won't forget the time you were walking down the 2nd floor to human resources and saw your secretary Cheri seizing in a toxic pool of deadly Cyan #5.
• BREAKS! People have ridiculously short attention spans, on the scale of 15-30 minutes. We need time to reinvigorate ourselves physiologically, as well as discuss the matter with our neighbors. This will encourage us to think more actively about the topic, as well as a quick chance for you to field informal questions. I'm really not going to focus on talk about drosophila midguts if I've got the Amazon River ready to flood out of my bladder.
• QUESTIONS! "Men must be taught as if you taught them not" Posing questions to the crowd like: "How many people think that bats originated in Africa? How many say South America?" will pique the crowd's interest in an otherwise mundane subject. If you then show them the picture of the first ever batcave, which interestingly enough was found to be connected to the New York sewer system, you will have a rapt audience for the rest of the hour.
• RAPIDITY! Nothing bores people more than rehashing the same subject over and over, especially stuff they learned previously. If you have to give background, do it as concisely as possible. Go as fast as you can, and take questions later. I know people will are afraid that they will be going too fast, but if you tell stories and show good graphs, there really shouldn't be much confusion.

I realize that this doesn't really apply to things like science and math too well, but I think that every teacher, no matter what subject, could benefit from at least 1 of the aforementioned items. Do you love science? Tell us more stories about science. I guarantee more students want to know about the time you accidentally snuffed liquid nitrogen than about the by-product of C-3-P-O.

No thats not a real chemical.