Dr. Jorge Washington, history professor, claims that his use of multiple fonts helps students soak up knowledge from his PowerPoint presentations.
Washington chooses a different font for each title and sentence on the screen. His favorite fonts are Comic Sans, Papyrus and Wingdings.
“For the most important words, I use a different font for every letter,” he said. “I also sometimes play with the letters’ sizes, as well as the bold, underline, and italic functions to grab students’ attention.”
Washington turned his love for fonts into a teaching method, installing 672 new fonts on his computer and writing a book, When You’ve Got it, Font it. The book gives detailed descriptions of each font’s history and use in the classroom. It has become a bestseller among home boarding school teachers.
No student has ever fallen asleep in Washington’s class, a statistic the professor takes pride in as a history teacher.
“Dr. W’s font choices often give me little brain seizures and/or waves of anxiety,” said Brenda McMurphy, engineering junior. “When he emails us the slides, I can download them to my computer and change all the fonts to Times New Roman, but otherwise, I’m screwed.”
Leonard Smith, exercise science sophomore, said he got an A in the history class, but not because he actually learned anything.
“I could never read Dr. Washington’s slides properly, so I mostly read a normal textbook and winged it,” Smith said. “When I didn’t know an answer on a test, I usually just wrote down some crap in a bunch of different fonts, and Dr. W gave me bonus points for style.”
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