Who Let The Owls Out, Who, Who, Who

My last semester included two environmental classes. First was the parks course from which the Wrigley presentation was posted. The other was pols340, politics and the environment. The professor was the same as the essay-heavy Comparative/Race professor, so I was perhaps asking for trouble, but the lockdown turned all of those expectations upside-down pretty quickly.

There were a few essays for the course, and a monster presentation that was required to be a group thing. This is not a good “group” story. First of all, one of our trio completely bailed on the project. COMPLETELY. As in, days before the whole thing was due, this guy peaced out. The other guy and I had to scramble, with him writing the middle section of the report and me filling in the middle portion of the presentation. Everything was so down to the wire, I’m not even sure the prof wound up seeing the completed video- the first upload was just the beginning/end because it didn’t look like there’d be time to get a complete submission put together in time, and I wanted to make sure we had some kind of mark for the work we’d done.

I wasn’t particularly proud of my writing for the course, lockdown was a rough semester. An early paper was on the spotted owl, so I rode that fucker as hard as I could. That owl had a starring appearance in at least three papers that semester, more to avoid having to research other situations than for any other reason. I suppose I could quibble, but between the haphazard presentation and the owl repetition, I probably earned the ‘B’ I got. Considering the near-trainwreck that semester became, it could have gone much worse.

Anyway, I’m not posting the report or presentation because 1) my contributions were only partial and 2) the finished products really weren’t very good. The exception of course is in slide design; I was never gonna let that suck. But there’s some good style comparisons available.

The first third of the slides were done by the other guy, but I wrapped my slide design around the whole thing. His submitted slides were text. Just text. Nothing but text. Images, background, all me. His narration was essentially just reading what he’d put on the screen. Verbatim. That discussion slide at the end of his portion? The guy talked for a solid three minutes, with nothing going on on-screen beyond that chunk of text just sitting there, nothing to look at or engage with.

And that was the standard. There were a half dozen or so such slide presentation assignments across CSUCI, and in ALL of those from every class in which they were assigned, I saw maybe two capable presentations that weren’t mine. Which simply boggles my mind. How does the generation that grew up on media and imagery and content have so little skill with the concepts in practice?

I was honestly disappointed. I was expecting to be the old guy in the room, with the boring old-school shit that everyone else would be running surrealist rings around. I was really looking forward to getting beat, I wanted to see where ‘style’ had progressed to. Instead it had clearly taken a massive step backwards.

An acquaintance used to rail against the conditioning influence of public education, insisting that creativity and inventiveness were being stifled. I never really bought her argument. In my experience, the mind that wants to create, will find a way to create. Maybe not to its fullest potential in whichever given direction, but its never fully silenced by external influences. Every kid is born with an imagination, but more often than not that spark simply dies, or fades into the ambient noise of society. Schooling doesn’t DO that, the individual lets it happen.

Tl;dr, the kids aren’t alright. And the spotted owl isn’t doing so hot either.