A few words about talking in class…

First of all, you have to remember that this is your class, not mine. I get to be here as many times as I am assigned this course, but you are only here once. Make it count!

Get involved! Speak up! Ask questions! Volunteer!

Not only will you directly improve your grade by increasing your class participation scores, but you will also indirectly improve it by increasing your focus and understanding. Sitting back and listening is great, but becoming a part of the discussion is so much better. Y get to shape the class as you want it to be, helping to ensure that the places we go are the places you need to go. That doesn’t happen if you let others do it for you (or if, God forbid, you let me do it for you).

How do discussions work?

There are no rules for discussions that cannot be violated (and will not be violated), but in general here are a few good guidelines:

• It isn’t a discussion until someone else is participating. (Having one by yourself just makes you look weird.)
• There are no stupid questions or answers. (Sure, there are wrong answers, but who cares? If you were expected to know this stuff already, you’d be teaching instead of me.)
• Show respect for your peers (and, um, your teacher too).
• Side conversations do not help the discussion; get involved in the general discussion if you want to talk.
• Raising hands helps for organization but is not always critically necessary. Just don’t talk over someone else.
• Keep the language clean. (It is school, after all.)

Why are there so many digressions?

Because we are all human beings, that’s why. People were not built to think like computers in a nice linear fashion. If we were, we’d learn things a lot more efficiently but we’d be a whole lot less creative. It’s got to do with the subconscious mind and left brain/right brain theory. In a nutshell: we create with our right brains and organize with our left brains. Once we have knowledge, we store it in the left brain to call up when needed (if we can remember where in the left brain we put it—which is most of the problem). But in order to know it in the first place, we have to puzzle it through with the rambling creative chaos of the right brain, and sometimes that means working through connections that some part of the subconscious mind thinks may be important but may at the same time not be very obvious.

With that in mind, we may/will/must have digressions if we are to begin to understand things. My discussion philosophy is to allow digressions if they seem possibly to be taking us somewhere even if I am not certain where that journey leads. If I see that the tangent is going nowhere, I’ll pull us back to the topic, but most of the time I find that we uncover unexpected truths and ideas (and arrive at a better understanding of things) if we just allow our minds to be free to think.

Note: Nothing in the above should be construed to mean that you should consciously attempt to get us off track; that is never helpful for the same reason that trying to keep us solidly on track isn’t: you just can’t force the subconscious mind to work the way you want it to.