Let me apologize for how long it has been since my last entry. End of the year stuff has kept me from blogging about how I did when the tables got turned on me. It will be officially two weeks since my students, finished their presentations where they had their chance to lie to me and the class in their presentations. I had 9 presentations to view and identify the lies. As mentioned in my previous post I told them how many of these presentations I've seen over the last 10 years and told them they would really have to bring the "heat" if they wanted to sneak a lie past me (my challenge). Needless to say I failed miserably! Now this is an omission I may with pride because they did a fantastic job from top to bottom and I'm very proud to have made this challenge and "lost". I will admit, it was difficult, to say the least, identifying the lies of my students, it was obvious they took my challenge very seriously! They did a fantastic job masking their deceptions and one of the students used the no lie trick I got them with multiple times throughout the semester. As mentioned, I did a lousy job in finding the lies, in fact, I was able to identify 1 (sort of) lie in the 9 presentations. Not very good for the self proclaimed “expert”. After this little experience, I can clearly say that I can see the difficulty in what I was doing everyday with my class but I also see the value.
What I found valuable about being lied to is this:
1. I paid very close attention to the presenters and my mind was not able to stray, for if it did I would surly miss the lie.(as we know now that didn't matter)
2. When I went and researched the information to find the lies I found I learned more about the topic then previously known because the requirement to dive into the information to find the lie. (I researched some of them and found the answers but technology wasn't part of the deal for identifying their lies)
Now the lie I was able to find (sort of) was a contradiction in the presentation I picked up and had the student not contradicted himself I would have not identified the lie. Though my explanation of what the lie was wasn’t the best I felt it was adequate and as I see them from now until they graduate roaming the halls that I didn’t get skunked by their lying (sort of)…
Lesson: I don't know if this is a lesson but I did notice that the presentations were much better this year. It could be because they wanted to get the lie past me and did a great deal of research on their topic or something else but for whatever the reason is way they were the winners!
Next Entry: Final entry (recap and analysis)
*Note about Final entry: I had the students do anonymous surveys about the class, my techniques, interest, and will be looking over and summarizing this information for the next few weeks. The last entry for this blog will be June 23rd.
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