Yesterday I had to spend some time listening to new PhD students presenting their first-year work. It's part of the job: not only to figure out whether they are making a good start, but also to see if they need advice about presentation skills. And we do a fair amount of presenting ourselves: one-hour lectures two or three or six times a week, speaking in ten-minute slots at big conferences, presenting research talks, advocating cases for research grant applications, fifty minutes to persuade sixth-formers and their parents that our department is a good place in which to learn, five-minute sudden-death presentations in the department (one of the tallest toughest meanest professors there to chair the session, counting down the last 10 seconds on his fingers, and boy are you in in a whole new world of trouble if you over-run). And for me, once each year, the closest I get to stand-up comedy; a presentation to a cohort of 80 statistics PhD students on "How not to give a presentation". First time I gave it, the most distinguished statistician I know told me afterwards how he had heard "it had gone badly." I smiled and said "yes, very badly." He smiled too. "You must do it again next year, but make it even worse."
You could almost say, we talk for our living (if you miss out all the other stuff that comes across our desks, but that's a story for another time). It's not just teaching. I don't think any talking is "just teaching", even teaching itself. There's always elements of crowd control, persuasion, stand-up, oratory as well; it's just the proportions that vary.
And we tell our students: you can learn a lot from a good presentation, because the information flows freely. But you can also learn from a bad presentation; figure out what is going wrong, and ask yourself whether you do it too.
Why are presentations important to us mathematicians? Apart from the obvious cases (when one has to persuade, or to advocate), we know there is another vital point. You don't learn how to do sums by just sitting there and listening; you have to do them yourself on your own so that the answers become part of you. And you don't really know you can do them yourself until you can get up in front of friends and explain how the sums get to be done. In the talking is the doing and the learning as well.
Over the years, I've come to the conclusion that quite a lot of academic talking could be done better. It isn't that the talking is bad as such; but things get in the way. The speaker doesn't look at the audience; or they start with an apology ("so if you are beginning with an apology then why waste my time by starting at all?"); or they speak too quietly, or too monotonously, or they use jargon inappropriately; or they run over time (curiously, the very worst people for over-running are the mathematical cosmologists - almost as if they've spent so long thinking about the life-span of the universe that they've lost all sense of human-scale time). Consequently it's good to coach early PhD students in presentation skills; in the long-term that might be the single best thing one does for science and for humanity.
So I thought long and hard when I had the opportunity to talk to almost all UK statistics PhD students on presentation skills. Some people think the way to get people to give good presentations is to give them a template, a list of rules as to what to do, and a course on the use of powerpoint. Good practice has its place, but one should keep it firmly under control. In the end an effective presentation, whether it's a lecture, or a sales pitch, or advocacy, or a sermon, whatever it is, it is ultimately about you the presenter, relating to them the hearers, and it's about your personal integrity concerning the subject on which you seek to speak. And each one of these three factors changes from occasion to occasion, and always it depends on you and your personal integrity. So there can't be any general rules on how to do it well; it all depends, it's all individual, it's all very very personal.
On the other hand one certainly can set down ways in which to do the job badly. So I decided the best way to convey presentation skills to the PhD students was by way of an awful example; a session within which I would pack as many ways of going wrong as I could, break as many rules as I could think of. I reckoned I broke twenty discrete rules. At the end of the session, when everyone had stopped laughing, I invited the audience to list as many of these as they could manage. We stopped counting at thirty ...
And maybe if each of those 80 students learns as a result to save 5 minutes in the hour of presentation time, and gives 2000 presentations overall, to average audiences of 30 people, then each of my stand-up comedy routines will save about 45 person-years of time. Each time I make a fool of myself that way, allowing for sleep-periods, I've saved the equivalent of a human life. Not bad for 60 minutes of idiocy.
So you'll be wondering what this has to do with wardening, or with church. Have another read. Just about everything I've said is relevant to preaching - which also mixes persuasion with teaching and which is also deeply personal and all about integrity. And Christian truth is just like mathematics; You don't learn it by just sitting there and listening; you have to do it yourself on your own so that the truth becomes part of you. And you don't really know you can do it yourself until you can get up in front of friends and explain how the truth works out for you. I'm not saying every Christian needs to be a preacher - there are many different ways of explaining how the truth works for you. But in the talking is the doing and the learning as well.
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