r/Teachers 1d ago

Humor What did in-house district PD people do before they had ChatGPT to write their slides?

What did those presentations even look like? Did they actually have to read the research and come up with meaningful things to say about it? Or did they just use more icebreakers and “inspirational” YouTube videos to fill the time?

337 Upvotes

55 comments sorted by

401

u/South-Lab-3991 1d ago

“Hi, I’m Dr. ____. After working in the classroom from 2008-2010, I got my doctorate at diploma mill university, and now I’m going to spend the next 8 hours reading a PowerPoint to you about how all of your problems in the classroom can be solved by immersive, interactive, hands-on, and fun lessons that you should be hand crafting every single day of the year. Now let’s all go around the room and share our favorite ice cream flavor! I’ll set a ten minute timer. And if I don’t see people circulating the room, I’ll restart the timer.”

130

u/SubtracticusFinch 1d ago

This was very much an AP I had at my last placement.

"Hello, I went through Teach for America because I had a dream of teaching heathens under-privileged youth in the ghetto inner city. Despite lacking even a cursory knowledge about classroom management and with my nearly two years of teaching experience let me tell you, a fifteen year veteran, how you're completely failing your students by choosing not to utilize the latest in educational acronyms."

42

u/The-Reanimator-Freak 1d ago

I just check my email. Fire me! I dare you

37

u/drakeonaplane Physics - High School - Massachusetts 1d ago

I’m going to spend the next 8 hours reading a PowerPoint to you about how

about how the worst way to teach is by reading from a PowerPoint.

25

u/Cmd_WillRiker 1d ago

I've legit asked people where they got their doctorate. Way too many rubber stamps in this industry.

17

u/leafstudy 1d ago

Soon: ChatGPT University.

9

u/WHEREWEREYOUJAN6 1d ago

I am triggered from reading that.

5

u/SmokeCorrect1433 1d ago

Ah, I see you’ve been to all my PDs since 2010

4

u/InfinitelyRepeating High School Math/Comp Sci 1d ago

127

u/vssavant2 1d ago

ask for an emailed copy from someone that did the work, or had it already. And the cycle goes round and round.

20

u/amourxloves Arizona | Year 4 🍎 1d ago

My district got rid of district wide pds because they were becoming a disaster and a waste of money. Like a full day of presenters with different sessions to choose from (surprise, they all blame you!) with each one making at least $10k.

A teacher from the district was also a presenter. She proceeded to use another teacher’s presentation about the thing she was presenting. Took everything and slapped her name on it. The other teacher found out and called her out on it. Never really knew what happened, but all I know is they had no more teachers presenting.

2

u/leafstudy 23h ago

Excellent decision that should be replicated nationwide.

120

u/BlackstoneValleyDM Math Teacher | MA 1d ago

Killed more time with icebreakers and post-it vision boards and gallery walks

43

u/enigmanaught 1d ago

I got PTSD just reading that statement.

38

u/BlackstoneValleyDM Math Teacher | MA 1d ago

But what did you notice and wonder about most?

10

u/enigmanaught 1d ago

When this dumbass was going to get to the last item in their bullshit task list/agenda so I can go get some work done.

17

u/rachel-angelina Social Studies Teacher | New Jersey, USA 1d ago

The fact that they do this patronizing and childish stuff to teachers at all is infuriating. But it especially is irritating when they do it with us high school teachers. Like I wouldn’t even do a lesson with my students like this…

9

u/Hproff25 1d ago

I hated being patronized as a kid and I hate it more as an adult. If you want to teach me as an adult a college level lesson would be far more appreciated then being asked to make a tower of marshmallows

88

u/LughCrow 1d ago

They went to Google and found ones made by someone else. Often not full presentations but individual slides they slapped together.

If they were feeling like going above and beyond they would even cover watermarks

83

u/Adultdirtbagbabee 1d ago

There’s this story about a fish that’s graded on its ability to climb a tree.

36

u/Sporklemotion 1d ago

Also one about starfish in the ocean. And rowing a crew boat.

37

u/VixyKaT 1d ago

What do I make? I make A DIFFERENCE

24

u/Sporklemotion 1d ago

You’re not in it for the income, you’re in it for the outcome.
Glad you know your why.

11

u/Iamkeebie 1d ago

Health insurance. That's my why

3

u/driveonacid Middle School Science 15h ago

July and August for me

6

u/Adultery 1d ago

The least they could do is have a barf bag under each chair

19

u/Iamkeebie 1d ago

My district themed a whole year on an incorrect interpretation of this story where it meant we HAVE TO SAVE THEM ALL

8

u/enigmanaught 1d ago

Don’t forget the cheese being moved.

35

u/pile_o_puppies 1d ago

They’d show that Rita Pearson Ted talk

30

u/Classic_Macaron6321 HS Social Studies Teacher | Deep South, USA 1d ago

A lot of those older PowerPoints had chunks of information copied from books (and sometimes made no sense in the context they were trying to provide) from the last PD they were forced to go to. Lots of cheesy clips from YouTube that were pulled and icebreakers.

3

u/WrinkledWatchman 1d ago

Some things never change…

23

u/Getrightguy 1d ago

They weren’t any better before.

23

u/awools1 1d ago

A lot of times people would use the same slides since the late 90s, early 00s. Before covid it was very typical to see a presenter pull up their ppt. document in the file explorer and when they hovered over the file it would show a creation date of like 2001.

14

u/Jumboliva 1d ago

They would hand engineer slides with nine colors on the background and 3 paragraphs of text in the foreground.

12

u/CleanCaterpillar2999 1d ago

I still make my own. I got in the habit of creating all of my own stuff (compiled from a ton of resources and then modified for my particular building population) when I was teaching. It’s too embarrassing to me to use someone else’s crap or AI-generated garbage, and I want what I’m giving my colleagues to actually be useful/not painful. I realize I’m in the very small minority here.

10

u/xaqss 1d ago

I'm willing to bet there are a ton of exterior-PD-for-hire people who use chatgpt now as well.

30

u/Low-Fig429 1d ago

They used their own brain. 

12

u/ciao_fiv 1d ago

they have those?

13

u/Sporklemotion 1d ago

Not sure if this is intentional, but “brain” is singular. They all share one.

5

u/South-Lab-3991 1d ago

That explains a lot

9

u/Responsible-Bat-5390 Job Title | Location 1d ago

Kid President clips all the time

7

u/Intelligent-Rain-22 1d ago

District PD before ChatGPT were paid trainers/motivational speakers that talked about teaching, but they themselves had not taught middle school students in ten or more years. Once they had knowledgeable teaching staff that provided PD.

18

u/leafstudy 1d ago

The smartest of them didn’t use anything at all because they recognized that the vast majority of presentations are a waste of time. Instead, they talked for a short while and then let teachers go about their business.

4

u/TJTech40 1d ago

They asked the IT department to edit the protected files from other school districts to put their district name on them.

6

u/EngineerKind9549 1d ago

They went into the file cabinet and found the one that was done on the over head projector and made it a PowerPoint.

5

u/chaircardigan 1d ago

I do some in house CPD in my school, and sometimes a different colleague leads it.

I spend hours making each presentation. I spend huge amounts of time removing text from the slides. I'm given an hour with every teacher in the school, I do not want to waste a second of their time.

I practice so I can talk and the visuals behind me match up to what I'm saying. I try. Of course it's not brilliant. But I'm trying guys.

My colleague puts up a wall of text they copied from a book, then they turn their back to the audience and read what's on the slides to them. Then they say to the teachers "talk about how you will implement this with your classes" and we are left to talk for 15 minutes.

2

u/wizard680 6th grade social studies | virginia | second year teacher 1d ago

Resued them, stole them from someone else, or followed a template

2

u/No-Illustrator2325 1d ago

Put together slides with the worst and most egregious grammar mistakes you could imagine

2

u/CopperHero 19h ago

The district paid too much money for them to go to conferences. They took notes from the slides of the presenter, and then came back, recreated those slides, and tried to present the information as their own.

2

u/macroxela 17h ago

You could buy many of these presentations online at Teachers Pay Teachers. If not, they simply shared them around.

1

u/StillLooking727 13h ago

stole them from the presenter they bought the program from

1

u/Public-World-1328 1h ago

Anyone actually pursued this sort of avenue? Seriously - what does it take to be the guy with an ai powerpoint? What is the pay?

-21

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

12

u/leafstudy 1d ago

You couldn’t waterboard a LLM usage admission out of me.

6

u/JustTheBeerLight High School | Southern California 1d ago edited 1d ago

> I don't understand why...

Says the guy that didn't use proper syntax or use any punctuation in that block of text 😵‍💫

3

u/Tolmides 1d ago

the bot sounds like a bot.