February 25th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
No class today, but everyone was strongly encouraged to come the day before to make sure their computers will handle the software I’m teaching.
This morning the classroom was used for a safety meeting. Someone asked why they needed the projector, and sensing the joviality of the crew, I said, “so he can hook his laptop up and read the slides to you.” The leader admitted that was the case. 
Safety meetings provide an instructional quandary: if the employees know how to be safe, the safety meeting is pretty boring. If the employees didn’t know how to be safe, they’d better be new hires! Unsafe people get themselves and others hurt as well as reflect poorly on the company.
Most safety meetings try to overcome the quandary by being bombastic. Turn your cell phones off while pumping gas or you could burst into flames and die! While that possibility may or may not be true, the huge fonts and crazy clip-art of the slide or the reenactment video can border on the ridiculous. The audience becomes focused on the medium rather than the message.
Teaching what should be a review should contain the mandatory material, of course, but it should contain the occasional point where the discussion gets deeper. Challenging the audience to think what they would do in a certain situation is an effective device. Some people open with a bizarre statistic or story, but that tends to get old pretty quickly. Jokes tend to be less effective if you have a repeat audience. If you must use slides or a projector, only turn the lights off near the screen, but never turn the lights off for the whole venue. Let the audience know they are being watched.
Incidentally, there is a parallel between the corporate safety meeting and the church sermon, with the exception being that a lot of church “safety meetings” miss the chief safety points of original sin and justification by faith in what Christ has done for us. The rest of the analogy is left as an exercise to the reader.
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