This morning I read about an interesting classroom activity called the "Friday Shout-Out" on music professor Coyotebanjo's great edublog series called In the Trenches, which chronicles the reality of his work in the classroom. The Friday Shout-Out technique addresses the student exhaustion over a week of tough classes and their eagerness to get on with the weekend. If I read his description correctly, this is not so much a chance for students to share annoucements. No, instead, the technique seems relatively simple: to let students scream at the top of their lungs at the beginning of class!

Cool idea, if the physical plant can handle it. And Banjo's can (as you'll see below). But what makes this entry so compelling is how Coyotebanjo muses over some interesting psychology regarding why this works so well for his students (and it's not simply because screaming provides a purging catharsis, but because students depend on different teaching approaches from High School as a template for college learning -- this is an artfully written point).

Coyotebanjo's most recent blog entry sports a photograph of the parking lot outside of his office window: it has the hash marks of a football field painted on the tarmac. This is the practice field for the marching band, right below his window. Worse than car engines, it apparently produces a lot of background noise when he's trying to work. Coyoteprof claims to have become desensitized to this noise, but the photo affected me. I tend to have difficulties writing and thinking when there is music playing; hearing a marching band run over the same drills over and over again while I'm trying to write would drive me to madness (should I have said "park me to madness"?).

So I will try to remember this snapshot whenever I feel that the hallway is getting too noisy with student conferencing, whenever I feel like the athletics dept has overstepped its boundaries on our own campus, or whenever I groan about the parking lots being so far away from my office building.

Otherwise, in the mean time I will continue to write my crazy stories -- I've already started, imagining a world where cars played football, and humans are advertised during their Super Bowl. "22MPG, 15MPG...hut, hut...brake!"

Visit Coyotebanjo's weblog for some great edublogging.

You can ping this entry by using http://blogs.setonhill.edu/mt/mt_tb-awoisdlkfj.cgi/11459 .