Belgium Part Deux

Afterwards, each week exchange students from one country do a presentation about their homeland. This week was France, only one students showed up to do it. She had a PowerPoint presentation, which I thought was quite good, definitely better than my PowerPoint presentation about KLK. Later, though, I heard people saying it sucked, very unprofessional, and I got a little worried about what they would think of mine. It was the first PowerPoint of my life. The schedule of my presentation to social work students wasn’t set yet, though, so I figured I would have plenty of time to spruce it up.

We went to lunch, which was very good, especially the soup. One guy at our table, Jean-Paul, is a professor of philosophy, and he happens to teach a philosophy of social work class. He said he was meeting the students I was looking for that afternoon, and would I like to do my presentations then? Well, I couldn’t very well say “No, I’m not ready, I flew here unprepared.” So I just said “Okay, that'd be fantastic.”

I had about an hour. I went to the library and fixed it up a bit, which was not easy because they had these stupid French keyboards with all the letters mixed up. It slowed me down, plus their right-clicks didn’t do anything, plus everything was in Flemish, which was a problem since, as I said, it was my first PowerPoint projects. I wasn’t familiar enough with the commands to recognize them by their placement in the menus.

It went off totally well. The visual bit was a little basic, but what I said was good, and the students had lots of questions, which means they’re interested: mission accomplished. Saying something good wasn’t easy either, since I don’t really know anything about our social work program, it’s not even part of the Faculty of Pedagogy where I work. I seem to be pretty good at coming up with appropriate answers off the top of my head, or bull shitting my way through them if I actually have no idea.