Today, my students were giving speeches. Their presentations were to be on a trend, issue, or problem that is facing us in the business world. There were many interesting presentations on a variety of topics, such as the Enron scandal, the bank bailouts, etc.
In my Period 7 class, while helping one of my students make sure that his PowerPoint slide show was properly loaded, I noticed some illustrations that I did not think were ones that I wanted shown in class.
It seems that this individual was doing a presentation on the issue of health care reform. The student, a real character, had included a very racist image of our President on his title slide. (Oh, dear!) In sliding through the rest of the slides, everything else was fine, and actually made sense, until I reached the conclusion slide, where he had compared what he referred to as 'Obamacare' with socialism. However, the image he chose to use to illustrate socialism was a Nazi logo with a swastika. (Oh, crap.) What do I do now?!
My first thought was that I couldn't have him illustrate his speech in this way, so I suggested that we delete those images. Click. Delete. Gone.
My second thought was that he or his parents would call Fox News and report me for censoring their darling's sincere report.
My third thought was that we had not done a very good job in our school if at this age he did not know the difference between socialism and national socialism. Sigh.
Well, after some arguing, little Johnny gave his presentation. He did a fine job, even if he didn't have a proper title slide.
At the end of class, I called Johnny to the side and we had a little discussion of appropriate ways to get our messages across. I also suggested that he learn a little more about economics and politics.
Johnny did thank me for helping him to understand. Yet, if the caller ID says Fox News, I just won't answer.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment