If you’re a student, you probably know the feeling: you’ll be sitting in class, waiting for your classmate to start giving a presentation, when you notice them over by the door, poking the wall and glancing back into the room with a confused look on their face.

And it hits you: they have a PowerPoint presentation. As you scream inside, “The humanity! Dear God, the humanity!” your classmate finally pushes the button on the wall the right number of times, the projector turns on, and they walk over to the computer and load up the presentation.

If you’re lucky, the PowerPoint will be a simple set of slides with a small amount of text or pictures to complement the spoken presentation. But luck is rare.

More often, the presenter walks to the front of the room, hits the mouse button to get past the first slide with the presentation’s title, and says, “As you can see from this quote, my blah blah blah…”

On the screen at the front of the room is a solid block of text, a black squirming mass of academia like the the throng of carnivorous bugs that swarm out of a mummy’s tomb, devouring all in their wake. As your eyes finally wade through the mass, you key back into the actual presentation just in time to hear, “…which is why Jesus was an alien love-child.”

What? That didn’t follow at all. If only they hadn’t thrown up a long and convoluted quote to distract you while they continued talking! But that is the beauty of PowerPoint. Even if the presentation has no need for it, it’s there to divide the audience’s attention.

The gravest sin: transitions

Although bad, the quote block is not the worst affront that is thrown by projectors onto the front walls of classrooms across campus. Far worse than the quote block is the single thing dreaded by college students trapped before PowerPoints everywhere: the transition.

At least at Whitman I haven’t seen too many egregious uses of transitions. In high school, of course, text flew in, zoomed in, typed itself letter by excruciating letter, and otherwise made what would have been a simple presentation into an experience akin to watching grass grow, except with more unnecessary visual effects.

Perhaps the presenter felt they should show some class, and put a nice fade effect on every piece of text on the slide. As they talk through each slide, they click the mouse, and behind them the text ever-so-slowly fades in. By the time they’ve finished one bullet point, it has only half-shown up on the screen, so they click the mouse a bunch of times, hoping to get to the second. By the time they’ve finished what they wanted to say for this slide, the bullet points are still fading in, one by one, ever so slowly, so they stall for time and start elaborating on one of the points. As they’re speaking, the last bullet point shows up and the PowerPoint immediately jumps to the next slide. Except now the presenter is just getting into talking about one of the previous slide’s bullet points, so they try to surreptitiously move to the previous slide.

Of course, the wireless mouse is finicky, so it takes several tries before they are able to get the contextual menu up and click the “previous slide” option. By the time the next slide has come up, the class have their heads on their arms and are drooling onto their desks. The presenter sees that the slide doesn’t have any bullets, so they start clicking the mouse.

And the travesty continues.

Level of pain: oh, the burning!

There’s really no excuse. Most presentations don’t need a multimedia element in the first place, but students persist in throwing up long quotes, verbatim outlines of what they’re going to say, and then reading them off the screen. Sure, the overall quality of the presentations has risen slightly, the information on them is a bit less inane, but the same painful mistakes are being perpetrated against hapless students everywhere and my soul hurts a little more every time.

Apologies for the late posting! Check back next week for the low-down on that heinous figure of Whitman’s past: Maxey!