How Old is Too Old? - When to Refresh Student & Facutly PCs

It does not give one confidence when an educational bulletin doesn't know how to use a spell checker.

I know it happens.  I know that I notice typos more than most, but it is still annoying.

In the past, when I spotted a typo I'd send a message to an editor suggesting that if they put someone's liver on a pike I'd bring the fava beans and a nice chianti.  I used to paraphrase Dick the Butcher in ''Henry VI" (Let's kill all the proofreaders) until I realized that few proofreaders were left.

Typesetting is gone.  A piece is written electronically, sent, and then posted without the mediation of experience.  It impresses me that mistakes, obvious mistakes, mistakes underlined in red get through.  I've seen it myself in my PowerPoint presentations.

I'll be in front of the class when -- Ooop!  I stop the presentation, fix the spelling error, save the file, and continue where I left off.  Sometimes its worse: a real error of fact gets through.  Ooop.  That's wrong.  Very embarrassing.  I take time to tell the class that they should pay attention and try to think about what they're being told because some of what they'll be told may be wrong.  The instructor may misspeak.  In editing, a "not" gets misplaced.

One of my PowerPoint techniques is to duplicate a slide or group of slides and then edit them.  Occasionally stuff gets left lying around: stray text, an extra slide, or the wrong reference in the notes.  I would have thought I'd learn my lesson, but I don't.

(This might be the appropriate point to quote someone to the effect that education is the process by which knowledge is passed from the notebook of the instructor to the notebook of the student without passing through the mind of either.  Unfortunately the provenance is unclear (quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/17/lecture-minds/).  An updated version might say that knowledge flows seamlessly from the publisher's PowerPoint presentation to handouts stuffed into student Trapper™ portfolios.)