Presenting to Teens such as yourselves about a subject they probably don't care about

[Zinos]

It's easy

23 minutes is a good length. I'm sure students have had to sit through worse.

Use a LOT of slang and say DUDE and WHAT'S UP. Stuff like that. If that doesn't work then text it to them. That way maybe a little of your speech might just sink in. Also if they don't care about your speech why waste your time????

Now this depends on the audience some teens are great listeners.

 

[Bigboi]

Zinos, that would not work at all. If it doesn't sound like he normally says things like that, and he's going out of his way to say it, it's just dumb sounding, and almost insulting to the people he's talking to.

 

[Mystic]

Honestly, as hard as this is to do, the only real way to hold the attention of most people when talking about an uninteresting subject is to be humorous. I don't mean contrived, forced humor, either. I mean being a genuinely funny person. It makes such a huge difference when my professor can crack a joke every once and a while or have fun at his own expense when a mistake is found in his slides.

 

[Digiku]

Not sure if it's too late, but Lifehacker cited this article that makes total and correct sense:

How to make sure people will remember your ideas: Use the acronym SUCCESs: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and a Story. The stronger each attribute, the stickier the idea.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is…
Simple: incompetent people are overconfident, and competent people are too humble in their self-appraisal.

Unexpected: common sense would dictate that experienced people realize their strengths, and the incompetent should be aware of their weaknesses.

Concrete: it’s not just an abstract notion like “zeitgeist”, but instead something very real that we can experience in our everyday lives.

Credible: it was discovered by two researchers.

Emotion: hearing about it heals our self-esteem. Maybe we’re better than we give ourselves credit for! Indeed, not giving ourselves credit where credit is due is a cognitive error dismissed by Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy.

Read the whole article, but the most important advice is this:

But if you’re an author communicating an idea, all that matters is that your concepts fit into your audience’s schema (or their view of the world.) If they don’t, you must begin your discussion within a familiar schema before gradually introducing more complex schemas. The “curse of knowledge” refers to the tendency for someone with an advanced understanding of an idea to no longer be able to identify with the schemas of a person whom he is addressing, leading to communication problems.

So basically, it's as others say: Be humorous, emotional, and tell a story that's familiar with the kid's schema, or sense of the world. And yet, be unexpected, so the story sticks. Given all these factors, I bet you'll do just fine. I wanted to try this out, myself.

 

[Cue]

Day 1.

That went remarkably well, they gave a fairly good response, I responded well to questions and improvised things based on the scenario and what was said. Handed out all but one of my business cards and may well have some business on the way, who knows? And yeah, they were impressed by my 2010 turnover forecast. :3

Now to do it again tomorrow.