Don't ask me how I stumbled upon this website for training cellists in mastering their instruments, but stumble I did...and my mind began to wander. Wouldn't it be fun to teach a class using activities like these?

The Puppet: Pretend to pull a student's head up with an imaginary string.

Cello Song: While hugging their instruments and swaying back and forth, the students sing "I love my cello very much. I play it every day. I love to watch the spinning strings, as my hands fly away." At this point the students extend their arms away plucking the strings.

Charlie Brown's Teacher: By sliding the hand up and down the fingerboard, have the students carry on a conversation with each other.

Hide The Keys: A student is asked to leave the room while another student hides a set of keys. When the first student returns, the class plays a piece, playing louder as the student nears the hidden keys.

Creative activities from courses outside of my discipline (or even those that target age groups other than the traditional college-aged student) always inspire me to borrow and steal and try something unique in my own classes.

Here's how I process it. Once I see the pleasure attached to an activity from another discipline, I start to think about the subtle ways that the course content might intersect. Training students to "sound out" in a music class must be a lot like teaching sound-sensitivity in poetry, for example. So I could get my poetry writing students to have non-sensical conversations using sound alone, like the "Charlie Brown's Teacher" exercise above. Another approach might be to reframe the very exercises themselves through the lens of my discipline. I could, for example, invent a creative writing prompt that asks students to set a story in an imaginary but amusing posture training class. Or sometimes the applicability of outside activities lies in their unique technique. Could I create a "hide the keys" sort of game, asking students to hum louder and louder as I move a pointer around on a projected map or other image, I wonder?

This is why it's great to sit in on other people's classes, too. Teaching is just one of those arts where you unconsciously adapt and borrow structures from other teachers, but there's nothing stopping a teacher from doing it consciously and creatively, too.

I'll have to ponder that "puppet" trick for awhile.

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