LivingDeb suggests: "Take something you're good at or even still officially learning, and offer classes in it to your friends."
For some people, this would generate ideas that many people would be really interested in. For example, among their many diverse talents, my sister could cover yoga and dancing and my brother-in-law has mad baking skillz to share.
For others of us, this advice is more difficult to apply, not because we lack expertise, but because this knowledge is boring/useless or hard to teach explicitly (or at all) or both.
What class could you offer that people might find appealing? What class would yield the most yawns? What talent do you have that would be hardest to teach others?
Mine might be:
Potentially appealing - Become a Boffo Birder Bit By Bit
Boring - Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology ... oh wait, I already teach that. I need an idea for a new class, and I am deciding to avoid psychology-related topics that I will quite possibly actually be teaching eager or resigned young undergraduates in the future. This makes things somewhat more challenging since most of us probably have highly specialized knowledge that relates to our career/profession that outsiders would find mind-numbing. I'm going to go back to hard-won, unexciting stuff from my previous life.
Boring - Designing, Executing, and Analyzing a Direct Mail Campaign Based on Crappy, Inconsistent Data Sets
Hard to Teach - Unconsciously Monitoring the Passage of Time
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2 comments:
I could teach some kind of math, but that's definitely boring (if not downright unpleasant) for most people. I don't really have any crafty or artistic skills to share.
I could teach magic tricks in Excel, but again, kind of boring.
Hrm. About the only thing I can think of where I know something not everyone knows and it's moderately fun would be maybe my technique for coming up with something to say in a literature essay and/or reading tarot cards, which is pretty much the same technique. If done correctly (a cross between a class and a comedy improv show), it could be moderately entertaining, if not actually useful.
I had a friend who asked for lessons instead of regular gifts for her birthday. I thought it was a great idea, but the first year I couldn't think of anything to teach her (she already knows how to ballroom dance). This year I realized I could give her an hour-long lesson in Hebrew if she knows nothing at all about it.
And a bunch of friends of mine used to give short lectures on their work, which was sometimes kind of fun and sometimes over my head. I didn't want to talk about how to make something print in a pre-printed box on a manually-fed page (of which you have only one copy) or any other boring typing stuff, so my talk was about fire ants instead. I totally cheated. (Well, one of the professors I typed for studied fire ants which motivated me to research them more.)
In this new context of teaching a group activity, I also don't have any ideas. Most of my friends are just as good as or better than me at physical skills.
But in the past, I have taught reading, days of the week, trig, fire building, lashing and knot tying, first aid, swimming, canoeing, statistics, degree audit interpretation and coding. I've also had people over to carve pumpkins, but there wasn't much to teach.
Appealing - many things aren't that appealing as you learn them but only after you get it like reading, ballroom dancing, playing an instrument, swimming. How about:
* History Via Historical Fiction
* Comparative Biology for Nonmajors
Wait, those would require major review and more learning first. How about:
* One-bowl baking
* Frugality (with recipe tasting and a field trip to a thrift store, and a refashion fashion show)
Most yawns - statistics, typing, budgeting, degree audit. Actually, I tend to explode people's heads when I teach about the degree audit system. Sort of like math--keep stuffing things in until there is no room.
Hardest to teach - invisibility, doing well on standardized tests
Tam, I want magic tricks in Excel!
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