The Present of Presence: How To Make Your Classroom Presentations Actually Bearable
Sitting through school presentations. Wordy power-point slides coupled with quiet voices, fast talking, fidgeting hands, wide panicking eyes, painfully awkward pauses, and of course, acne.
This is a scene most of us can recognize; that time of the school year when you realize either you have way too many pals in one class or are painfully affronted with your lack of social connections as everyone absorbs into clumps so you’re outed as friendless in seconds. It’s Public Presentation Project time!
I have come to figure out over the years (after hours upon hours of my school days spent watching sweaty kids with cracking voices read paragraphs off slides with default presets) is that 99.9% of us public school teens suck at presentations.
But honestly, what can you expect? I’m in my senior year of high school, and never in my life has a teacher actually given real advice on how to present in an engaging and entertaining way.
What have they given us?
“Don’t read off your slides.”
“Add pictures.”
“Speak up.”
“Make eye contact.”
Right before they hand us a checklist of the number of slides we need, the number of pictures we need and how many minutes each person in groups has to talk for.
W h a t t h e f r i c k i t y f r a c k a m I s u p p o s e d t o d o w i t h t h a t ?
It’s hardly our fault that almost all of our presentations are trash, most of us have never seen a good one and most of our teachers sure ain’t teaching us how to give one.
So, basically what I’m saying is if you don’t have a natural affinity for public speaking you’ll always be trash and should just stop speaking in general forever starting right now.
Kidding.
It’s actually super easy to put together a presentation that will put you miles ahead of most of your classroom buddies. Actually, it’s probably easier than what most school kids do now.
Let me tell y’all how.
Step One: Make People Want To LISTEN
OK, you and I both know the topics that you are given for high school power-point projects are BORING.
But that doesn’t mean that you have to be.
There’s a lot of ways to engage an audience, and yeah having an interesting topic helps. But that is FAR from the most important part.
The most important thing? How you relay information.
Even if you have the coolest topic in the world… if you’re monotone, motionless, and staring straight down at your Air Force Ones? NOBODY is going to want to listen to you.
Here are the main things you need to keep in mind when you present :
1: Start Strong
Why should your audience care? This might be hard if you’re talking about the motif of loss in The Catcher and the Rye, but find your main points and why they matter. Then use those implications to reel in your audience.
Why should you care about the Japanese Shogunate? SAMURAIS. Why should you care about the US Constitution? WAR! REBELLION! PERSEVERANCE!
Hype up this topic like how an elderly mother sells her single, middle-aged son off to random women.
sOmEthiNg has to be at least a bit interesting about your topic, so talk a little about it first so you have your audience’s attention.
Be a little vague as to not spill all the juicy deets (ie maybe instead of saying “samurais” talk about how “there were once warriors so noble that they would slit their own stomach if they made a mistake, but eventually just turned into bureaucrats. But today were talking about when they were still sword wielding”), but make the thing you're talking about seem like something your peers want to listen to.
2: HIGH ENERGY !!!
If you don’t sound like you care about the topic, why should your audience? If you have stand up there and talk about taxation for ten minutes, then you better make it the most HYPE taxation talk your classmates will ever hear!
Get excited! Get LOUD! Have dramatic pauses and exuberant explanations! Move your hands! Walk to different sides of the room! Make scanning eye contact!
(Don’t forget to breathe though)
Bring that personality and energy because even if the audience doesn't know or care at all about what you’re talking about, their eyes are going to be on you because you are being interesting.
3: Speak slower than you think you should
Go watch some great public speaker giving a TedTalk. Write down a sentence they say. Then, replay the video and say those words the same speed that the speaker does.
It seems so slow. But that’s the best speed to speak at so your audience can understand all your key points. So slow down a little, kid.
A good way to practice this skill is just read stuff out-loud (a book, article, song lyrics) and record it to figure out a pace that sounds good.
If you want to make this a skill just to keep in your back pocket, over the course of a week or two practice talking at that pace by just talking out-loud. Soon you will be able to make a comfortable switch from normal to presentation mode.
4: End with IMPACT
End your presentation with an actual conclusion. No more of those “ok so… that’s about it”, weirdly trailing off, and just staring at the audience in silence until they start clapping.
Reaffirm at the end that all that stuff you just said actually matters.
If you're talking about US Government, end it like “and these events have lead to all the rights and privilege each and everyone of us enjoys today”.
Just a little something that ties the smaller examples and things you just spent all of this time talking about back into your biggest, most impactful idea. So you're basically ending with a bang.
Step Two: Make Visual Aides That Enhance Your Presentation
1: Keep it simple
Nobody is going to read the seventy bullet points or three paragraphs of quoted text that you’re putting on your slides. The only thing those blocks of text are doing is pulling attention away from you.
Put one picture. One quote. One statistic.
Nothing that will take extended amounts of time to read. The things on your slides should tie in directly with what you're talking about. The statistics or quotes purely reinforce what you're saying. Anything more will just distract and /or confuse your audience.
2: Keep it clean
Make it look good. They're visual aides. Make them visually appealing.
Don’t take some low-res photo off of Google that’s going to look like its made of 5 pixels when its on the projector. Try websites like Unsplash that have photography specifically to use for things like presentations.
Make sure that the colors you use for your text are easily visible. Darken an image if you want white text to stand out more. Have a continuous theme by doing things like keeping text the same font and the background images with similar colors.
But don't, for the love of god, use default themes.
Giving high quality school presentations is great. For school. But it’s uses extend far beyond your boring classrooms.
School presentations serve as a perfect practice for giving any actual presentation later on in your life. If you can engage a group of bratty, half awake teens that don’t care about who you are or what you're saying at all, who can’t you engage!
Maybe one day you have to pitch business ideas. Market a company. Try and persuade a buyer. And for all those things and more, being comfortable with and GOOD at presenting is an invaluable skill.
So yeah, your English project is boring and it sucks. But take it as an opportunity to challenge yourself and build skills that could help you for the rest of your life.
