Bear with the ramble below... I promise it has a point.

Interesting you talk about teaching Jr. High students. I'm almost entirely self-taught. I began getting really serious about photography in 1968, in 8th grade. I made most of the candids and sports photos for our yearbooks until I graduated high school 4-1/2 years later. I subscribed to three photo magazines, and read the entire Time-Life Library of Photography as the books came out in the early 1970s.

In the mid-1970s, those slide shows you mentioned would have been controlled by early computerized multi-image projection systems. AVL, ClearLight, Arion, Spindler & Sauppe, and some others were cranking out digital dissolve controllers and programming computers as fast as they could engineer them. You could use them "live" by pre-programming sequences of slide changes, and then triggering them with a key on the controller. Or, you could program them to tape (paper tape early on, then magnetic tape) and synchronize them to narration, music, and sound effects.

Kodak did a bang-up job on their presentations. So did Dean Collins, a photographer, trainer, and photo educator. He had nine Hasselblad projectors and used medium format slides. Nikon School had a traveling road show as well. The Association for Multi-Image grew rapidly. There were 800+ attendees in Orlando in 1983, when I saw 123 multi-image programs in five days (anywhere from two to 30 projectors, plus 16mm film and video!). The guy with a two-projector show in black-and-white (Jim Richardson) won the top award that year for Reflections from a Wide Spot in the Road. It probably brought all 800 of us to tears a couple of times.

I got into the yearbook and school portrait business in 1979, as an AV producer. I joined AMI, and produced and programmed multi-image shows for our creative services group for 8 years. It was the most fun job I ever had. But I don't miss cleaning six surfaces for each glass mounted slide (two pieces of glass and a piece of film). And I don't miss schlepping a truck load of 12 projectors, four speakers, two amps, and three large screens to a sales meeting, only to spend a day setting it all up for three 30 minute shows!

These days, everything is digital. We can do — with a digital camera, some mics, a Mac, and software — what used to take millions of dollars worth of high end film and video gear to do in 1980.

My advice to you is this: Cover a little bit of everything, with an emphasis on access to information and resources. Be sure to touch on ICC Color Management (monitor calibration and profiling, printer profiling, matching papers and profiles to printers...).

The subject of photography is broad and deep. There is no one right way to teach it, learn it, or do it.

If I have one mantra for students, it is to concentrate on the "message" you are "sending" to a viewer. The medium should be transparent to the message. BELIEVE that Marshall McLuhan was wrong. The medium isn't the message. The message is the message! That was the lesson I took from Jim Richardson's slide show winning top honors over million dollar productions.

When a photo is so appealing a viewer just falls into it, you know you have a winner. We used to say, "When they cry, they buy," about customers viewing proof shows of senior portraits.

Photos can teach, inform, record history, remind, move people emotionally, even change lives and the *course* of history. Having a point and a point of view counts. Technology is neat, but what we do with it to produce compelling images is where the action is. Knowing that at an early age was enough to inspire me to work on my "technical chops".

Sometimes, monkeys see and then do. So encourage students to view a gazillion good photos. Look through photo books, go to exhibits, watch YouTube videos on photography, and do whatever is possible to feed your head good images.

Classrooms are nice places to learn, but immersion is required to put that structured knowledge to good use. As the late Frank Zappa said, "If you want to learn about sex, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library and educate yourself." (I said, "Where's the college library?")

Dive into your craft head first and learn to swim. Surface, go to class, then dive in again.

I met a friend of my wife today who is 91. She was neat as a pin, drove herself to our meeting, and runs a number of things such as religious groups and a local festival. Most people seeing her would think she is 60ish.

She was fully up on the news of the day local and National (the latter with disgust: this is Idaho 🤪).

And then there are those you see at Walmart...

Something sent to me last week on my 73rd: https://youtu.be/yc5AWImplfE

I shared it with my skiing buddy.