Presentation

We had to make an oral presentation for the class, for which I had done mental preparations since the day this task was given. The problem was that most of interesting material resides at external hard disks, but here I had only the few things I had on the laptop's hard disk.

So I planned to speak about a little science project I have done since last spring, basically about observing bats near where I live.

My mouth dropped open when, by blind chance, on Tuesday a classmate made a presentation also on bats. So I was upset for a while, as I could not just create a new presentation from scratch in two days, if not it was the one I made at an earlier language course, about Alex the parrot, in a neat PowerPoint presentation, but it would have required a major rewriting of its text and well, it would have been reusing an old presentation, too. So I had to shift the emphasis a little from the biology and physiology (where the classmate was definitely a better specialist) to the behaviour, my observation methods and findings.

And, while the Tuesday presentation only mentioned a bat detector, I could show mine!

The teacher told that over the years in the school she had heard about 1500 presentations, but not once about bats, not speaking of two at the same course.