Presentations and completely missing the mark

I’m upset at myself.

I have this presentation to prepare on The Irish Famine and, more importantly, the events leading to it and the consequences it had… and I read a lot of literature about the Irish Famine… but I only just realised that I went way too deep on “The Troubles” and not enough on the actual topic with my notes.

So, I know a lot if questions come up about the conflict and why there aren’t enough historical texts on the famine… and I know a lot about the sloppy work that some historians did, especially because of the revisionist school of thought…

And I find it all incredibly interesting even if the actual topic of my presentation isn’t about any of this.

So, I spent most of the past two weeks preparing these resources and getting my notes done… When it came to the actual presentation and sorta trying to fit everything into a ten to twelve-minute “talk”, I noticed that a lot of it misses the mark. A lot of the stuff I read about now isn’t supposed to be in the presentation.

Either way, I have a lot of notes now… and I started preparing a presentation that completely misses the mark of what I was supposed to do. So, I’ll probably spend tomorrow working these notes into something new.

I’ll probably lead with a question about Great Britain’s responsibility – and then I’ll talk about History, Economics, Ireland’s climate and location, as well as Capitalism and the Potato as the “main crop” for most of the population.

Eventually, I’d talk about the consequences… and at last, I’ll probably end with how historians have been self-censoring a lot of their work because of the revisionist school of thought.

Since I read a lot about The Troubles and not the actual consequences of The Famine, I’ll need to work even more on that… and honestly, for today, I’m done. I’ll figure this out tomorrow.

To be frank, I should have paid more attention to the actual topic of the presentation is… and what sources actually were required as literature for these. I read maybe 500 pages in total (well, ten different files with about 40 to 60 pages each) for this and didn’t realise until just now that all of this is too much for ten minutes of time allotted to my presentation. I have to cut my notes down drastically and then see how much I can talk about in ten minutes.

It will be a challenge and a huge headache but I’m a huge idiot for not only working on the wrong topic… but also only realising how big of a topic I was reading up on without actually realising how little time I have for the presentation.

Sorry about the rant. I’m upset at myself, that’s all.

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.