how to be positive

Although with business classes you are used to early morning or late evening classes, at the university you feel you have a choice and so do students. At the beginning of a semester, I  was shocked to realize that Scholarly Writing, the most difficult course I held, was scheduled early in the morning. By "difficult" I mean for the students. The course promised to be painstaking, because it involved a serious, creative process, writing -- both on the spot and in the form of home assignments. And students tend to agree with the quote, from Dorothy Parker, I like starting the course with:

"I hate writing. I love having written."

Foreseeing the troubles students were going to have, with the nature of the course and with the early hour (which at this age is a very serious problem), I decided to apply some of the methods I use in non-academic classes. I spent a couple of days brainstorming to find the appropriate warm-up activity that students would like and the course could use as a start. Eventually, I picked the popular and broad concept of music. The idea was that we start each class with a short piece of music (up to 5 minutes) that one of the students brings. This way, we get to know each other a bit better, we can build a stronger community, and we would overcome the problems specific to the start of the class, namely sleepiness corrupting concentration and late arrivals interrupting the flow. I tested the idea among my student-aged friends and it was approved.

You might ask how I integrated this task into the classes. Most of the times we had some short writing task connected to music, so students could feel this intro was not only about fun but also about work.

By now you must be dying to know how it went. I must say, it had a huge success. Students remembered and recalled it as a pleasant experience even way after the course ended. Because, as many students admitted, they "couldn't live without music." Apparently, I found a soft spot. 

Of course, I wouldn't be fair if I hadn't acknowledged that, while overall my choice was a success, it involved some less fortunate moments as well. It was just when I was exposed to its operation in practice that I realized how risky it was. Imagine, you have 15-20 students, each one different, with a different taste in music. And I handed the power of starting the class (that is, defining the tone of the class) to someone, whose mood and personality will influence us a great deal. For example, one student brought "Smack My Bitch Up" from Prodigy. It was not a positive start, but due to its extreme and well-known violence many people could isolate themselves from it, so the class was not wasted. One other time, however, someone's choice was a beautiful but devastatingly heart-breaking soundtrack. It killed us all. This was when I asked the group to pick something "positive" for the sake of all of us. Next class this is what one of them gave us as a positive start:

I love this song ever since. :-)