Those of you who were on Twitter Sunday night know that I had to give a presentation in my English class Monday. I was complaining about it quite a bit, I'll admit it. The presentation had to take up the class period and I was basically leading the discussion. My presentation went really well, but it got me thinking about the role of presentations in classes.
I personally don't feel like I learn that much from speeches or presentations done by students, so spending a whole semester on them seems kind of ridiculous to me. For example, this week in my class has been all presentations. Since everyone has different things they want to talk about and some people don't spend that much time on their presentations I feel like we're skipping over a lot of important things in the book. We're finishing the book this week too so this is really the only chance we have to discuss the book. So the downside to these presentations is that I don't feel like I'm learning the much.
The upside to these presentations is possibly that each student has to give a presentation which gives them experience? Yeah, notice the question mark. I know most classes don't spend an entire semester on presentations, rather people give short presentations and multiple people go each day. Have any of you been in a class that spent a lot of time on presentations? What were the upsides and downsides? Do you think it gives you any real world experience?