Professor Barzun must have turned over in his grave when I said the following during my presentation a couple of months ago:
“Dr. C, our director, is here today. I would like to thank her for gracing this morning’s presentation with her presence. I hope I will not disgrace myself with my presentation or my paper, which is poorly written and fraught with vague generalities. But I need not worry. With my colorful PowerPoint slides, my presentation will probably assume some semblance of rigor, clarity, and order.”
What does Professor Barzun say about electronic visual aids? In his book, Begin Here, published in 1991, he writes:
“Next came the audio-visual panoply of the seventies—the tape player and recorder, the slide-and-movie projector, the overhead reflector that threw on the screen whatever the teacher wrote or drew at his desk—quite ‘“exciting”’ the first couple of days. All machinery is exciting when new; it soon loses its charm, for the mechanical does not stimulate thought, and as a wise man said: ‘“Most important ideas aren’t exciting. Most exciting ideas aren’t important. Not every problem has a good solution.”’ Of all the school gadgets, the film-strip projector is the chief survivor, and not because it teaches well, but because looking at a movie gives the class and the operator a break from real work” (J. Barzun, 30-31).
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