Book Banning in Texas Showcase (2024)
33Originally finished April 29, 2024
This was my final project for our Texas Government class in college. We had to pick an aspect of Texas Public Policy, and create a presentation about it to show to the class. I chose to cover book banning since it’s a subject I’m passionate about.
As soon as I saw that rubric allowed videos as a form of presentation, I knew that was what I would go with. I realized pretty quickly that doing a video was a mistake, though. With a slideshow presentation, you can just make quick edits and adjustments if you get something wrong or need to add something. With a video presentation, I had to rewrite the script and record a completely new voiceover just to fix small mistakes.
This ended up being an exhausting project to work. I worked on it for about three weeks in total, but that last week was spent doing almost nothing except for working on the project. Even when I tried keeping the visuals simple and cutting corners, I still had to spend all of my spare time working on it. On the morning that it was due, I woke up at 4AM and worked on it for nearly 7 hours straight. I ended up turning it in at 10:35, 25 minutes before the due date.
I was disappointed in the final product at first because I felt that it lacked polish and visual flair, but apparently I was being too hard on myself. The group I presented to all thought mine was the best of the group, so my presentation was chosen to be shown in front of the whole class. My professor was apparently impressed by my video, as when he walked by our group watching my video, he had asked me if I had made the video myself. I got a 100 on the project, and my professor even told me afterwards that he “appreciated” the jokes I made about Governor Abbott. So I guess this was a case where I set my standards for myself way too high.
Chapters
0:00 - Introduction
0:29 - Definition and Process of Book Banning
1:17 - Book Banning Throughout Texas History
3:16 - Texas Book Bans in the 2020s
5:47 - H.B. 900
7:45 - My Thoughts of Book Banning
8:35 - How Book Bans Could Be Fixed
9:33 - Closing