Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles looks good so we are going to go ahead and start um... one quick i guess word of introduction to the workshop today this is technically the first of two parts uh... next week we're going to talk about taking better lecture notes it's really hard when the teacher is talking full-speed and that's pretty much how they all talk to know what to write and how to write it and just gets very confusing one of the reasons that this is part one is because if you're not mentally in the room listening carefully you can't take good notes and so many people struggle with their concentration with their uh... listening skills so the idea is i want to try to get that stronger today and then if you're able to be back next week i'll teach you how to actually physically write notes in a way that might be different than what you do now and might be better might be more helpful okay so that's kind of the idea here's what i want to say to begin with whenever students see the title of this workshop improving your listening skills i get some really interesting responses from people people look at me and they say you're gonna teach us how to listen and i said well actually yes and people say well i already know how to do that been doing that all my life and hearing and listening are not the same thing at all and most people as i said are really not good at it and we're gonna talk about that to start with but here's my little uh... quick introduction to this whole thing and that is um... i talk to students really often and i don't know if this is gonna sound familiar to you but i talk to students and i go up to one and i say do you ever have a hard time concentrating when somebody's talking to you and here's their answer...wh..what yeah okay good you come to me with me to the workshop uh... people's ability to concentrate is kinda scary and so what we're gonna do is we're gonna start with problems we don't want to think about those too much but there are a lot of reasons why people have a hard time concentrating we're gonna talk about three of them really fast and then we're going to focus on solutions it's always nice when there are twice as many solutions as problems too bad life isn't quite like that but anyway that's sort of encouraging so um... out of all the reasons you might think of why a person has trouble concentrating some of those are going to be addressed over here but i wanna show you three of them and what i'd like to have you do while i'm explaining these is to figure out something for yourself i'm not going to actually ask you i just want you to think about it which one of these three are you guilty of the most often in other words it's your personal weakness and one thing i know for sure this might surprise you i know even though i don't know anybody in here really i know that all of you suffer from all three of these and how can i know that's it's 'cause you're a human being you'll understand as i go through 'em ok so the first one which is a major problem for a lot of people is what's usually referred to as pseudo listening okay and what does pseudo mean yeah it means false or fake okay so the question is do you ever fake listen okay and if you say no then you're either the greatest listener of all time or you don't understand what that means yet but let me give you an example of it and then you'll realize oh yeah i do that whether it's some or a lot when i teach a class at any given moment everybody in the room is in one of three categories related to this issue and so i'm gonna make some of you nervous here in a minute but that's okay uh... some people when i'm talking and i don't just stare at my notes i kind of make eye contact with people as i teach sometimes i look at a person and they're looking at me like this and i can tell right away when i look at 'em they're locked in on me and they're paying really good attention to me do i like to see that uh... yes it's nice to know somebody's listening so i tend to look at those people more often than anybody else okay and then there are some people and i hope none of your ever like this because it's pretty disrespectful who sit in class and are just like this and all that and their advertising the fact i'm not listening i don't care who cares if i'm being rude i'm not listening that doesn't happen very often but every once in awhile and then there's the third group all of you are in this group every once in awhile but some of you and when i describe this you realize that i almost live there and i gotta get out of there these are people like this as i'm teaching i look at somebody and i see them doing this everything looks really good on the outside but when i look deep in their eyes there's nobody there they're gone on what i call a mental vacation and if you saw this from the front of a room it's it's it's like a science-fiction movie like somebody sucked them right out of their body they're just sitting there like that and i know they're not listening to one word i'm saying ok when somebody goes on a mental vacation that's normal but the question is for you and don't answer me how often do you go on vacation and how long are you gone when you go and i'll let you in on a little secret sometimes i've looked at somebody in class and i see them and i know that they're not listening so i look somewhere else and talk then i look back and they're still on vacation so i look over here and i then i look back and a few minutes later they're still on vacation and so i've always wanted to do this and i'm really big on respect so i would never do this but this is sort of a dream weird dream i would go up to 'em like this right in the middle of class and i'd lean over and say where are you take me with you wherever they are it's obviously a lot more interesting that what we're doing there on the beach somewhere i don't know what they're doing if you're the type of person who let's your mind wander and then it comes back after a few seconds and then it wanders later welcome to the human race but if you take frequent-flyer vacations and you're gone for like ten minutes at a time that's not good obviously you're missing a huge amount of uh... of the work i've uh... i don't know if this has happened to you before but when i was a student i tried so hard to concentrate but sometimes it's hard ok you know that and every once in awhile i'd drift away and go on vacation and then a couple minutes later i would come back into my body and i'd start listening again and the first thing i heard the teacher say is okay so don't forget that all right and i'm thinking i have no idea what you're talking about so does that again don't answer me does that sound like a constant nagging problem or an occasional one just depends on you ok the second one is something that a lot of students misunderstand when i write this down but i want to try to give you a little example of this too it's called uh... selective listening ok now selective listening usually means you listen to what you want to hear you tune out the rest right that's sometimes a problem but that's not exactly what i mean by this what i mean by this is this word and that is distractions ok so the question for you is how easily are you distracted and as a result you don't listen carefully to the person talking to you this could be in a conversation this could be in a classroom and i'm gonna give you this example uh... and again this will either sound very familiar to you or you'll think uh..not so much i had a student last semester who came up to me after class one day and uh... said something i haven't heard to often from students he said can i talk to you for a second and i said yeah sure what what's up and he we went off into my office which is right here and he said could you do something about the noise in the classroom now the reason that was so strange is that class he was in was one of the quietest classes i've ever had in my life you could hear a pin drop and that's on the carpet so that's really quiet everybody just sat there what noise i'm trying to get people to talk more and here's what he said he said well i'm trying to listen to you i'm trying to concentrate but the person over here is chewing gum the person over here is clicking their pen this person's chair is squeaking and they're giving me a catalog of every sound going on in the room i never heard any of those some other people sitting near them might not not have heard 'em but some people are so hypersensitive they're so easily distracted by anything that it just takes the smallest thing to completely have them lose focus other people are really good at tuning everything out and focusing and barely notice anything around them well if you're the type of person who is really easily distracted gonna talk about some things over here about how to overcome that a little but that's the second one and again out of these two probably one of them sounds a little more common to you then the other but the third one is major problem for at least some people and this has two meanings too including one that i don't mean so i wanna make sure i got this and that's critical listening there is a type of critical listening that's actually good that's when you listen to something like a sales pitch and you don't automatically believe it but you analize it critically that's a good thing but that's not this what i mean by this and this might help you to remember it is this and that is to write another word that comes from the same one which is the word criticize so what that means is you are thinking something about the person talking to you whether it's in a conversation or a class and it's not something really that just distracts you it's something that bothers you a lot and as a result you end up spending all your time focusing on that instead of listening to what the person is saying two examples of this for you so you understand it the first one is this i had a student a few semesters ago who came to me with a really odd story i hear strange stories but this is one of the all-time best he came to me and he said you know i've got a major problem in one of my classes and i don't know what to do about it can you help me and i said i'll try and he said well it's my political science class and he said everytime i go to that and then leave i have no memory of anything that went on in there i said well you have to remember somethingd he said i remember nothing it's like a giant eraser on my brain i said that's really odd when was last time you were in the class he said i just got out about twenty minutes ago i said okay let's try an experiment and i had him sit down and i said close your eyes so he closed his eyes and i said picture yourself in the classroom and tell me all that you can remember and seriously this guy sat there for probably twenty thirty seconds it seemed like twenty or thirty minutes and he was like this and i was looking at him and thinkin' oh my gosh then he opened his eyes and he said see and i thought man this is like amnesia i mean this is unbelievable and i started to teach him what i'm about to teach you and then all of a sudden his eyes lit up and he said wait a minute wait a minute i remember something that's good you were worrying me what do you remember and i thought he was going to tell me something he learned in class that day instead here's what he said seriously he said this he said i remember clearly i said yeah yeah that that guy talking about the teacher wore the same shirt that he's worn probably the last four or five times we've had class and i said that's what you remember oh he said oh yeah said when he's talking i don't really remember what he's saying but i'm looking carefully i'm thinking is it the same shirt or does he have a bunch of the same shirt just so stupid but once you get bothered by something you understand it just takes over your mind and you can't listen he said when he writes on the board he starts writing i don't really know what's up there i'm lookin right here and i'm thinkin' it it's the same one it's the same exact one as last time well if you allow some thing that's really stupid or something really extra kinda bad too bother you you have no hope of listening the way you need to some of you have had teachers before who did something like this they expressed a really strong opinion about religion about politics about something that wasn't even really related to the class and it really was not only the opposite of what you believe but it bothered you kind of offended you and people who do that they spend the rest of the class meeting like this and they completely lose the ability to just put it away and to concentrate i hope you're the type of person who doesn't automatically get really critical of people about everything but it's human nature and it's not that hard to do so the trick is being able with all three of these to figure out how to eliminate them or at least minimize them ok so again you want to try to settle on one of these three that you think is your biggest struggle and then once you do that that's part of the solution ok so we're going to talk about the six solutions there are more than that but these are the ones we're to focus on for the rest of the workshop the first one is really easy but it has great power to it this doesn't seem like a big deal to a lot of people but it really really helps and that's the word awareness ok and what i mean by that is now that you know these three problems and you're aware of what they look like in action the next time you start doing one of those you should be able to recognize right away oops i'm doin' that and then as soon as you recognize it what are you able to do yeah stop it okay you're talking to somebody and you're looking at 'em and you're thinkin' uh-huh and then suddenly you think i'm psuedo listening then you stop ok so being sensitive it's like i always describe it like this way uh... don't raise your hand i don't know if anybody in here bites their nails it's a bad habit that a lot of people have been doing for years if you bite your nails and i walk up to you on campus and i never would do this but i walk up to you and say your uh... biting your nails and you're just chewing away you know what you'd probably say no i'm not and then you'd look and think how did that get in there but if you get to the point where you do this and then you realize i'm about to bite my nails it's over it kinda breaks the cycle okay so this is very simple but it can work really well okay now the second one that i'm gonna give you is uh something that kind of is a long thing to write i'm gonna abbreviate it this is a common sense thing but most people are not so good at it and that is two parts and that is be physically and mentally prepared to listen okay so i'm gonna ask you a couple of questions feel free to just call out the answer what do you need to do physically physically in order to be ready to listen really well in a classroom yeah get enough sleep not during class but the night before right what else you need to do yeah eat not during the class but before everybody in here and this is probably a bad thing for me to say cuz its twelve fifteen if and if there's anybody in here who is really hungry right now goodluck trying to concentrate on me if you're really tired good luck trying to concentrate if you're tired and you're hungry i'm not even sure why you're here but it's tough okay and everybody here has had the experience before of sitting in a class and five minutes after it starts your eyes are starting to close already cuz you hardly got any sleep the night before and most college classes are an hour and fifteen minutes to three hours or whatever it's exhausting to sit there and try to concentrate for a long period of time when things are perfect but when you're tired or you're hungry it's almost impossible so as much as is within you you go ahead and take care of this ahead of time i've had students say that when they got really hungry and again i don't know how what you're like but you'd be the weirdest human being i've ever met if this wasn't true usually when you get hungry and time passes what happens you get hungrier i don't think people get less hungry and so i've had people say that they were looking at the teacher listening and taking notes and then as the time went on after a while they were getting little hullicinations they were looking at the teacher and the their face was turning into a pizza or a hamburger or a taco and they were just starting to fantasize about what they were going to eat well it's all over at that point okay and so this is the physical part and um.. by the way think about one thing for me and that is and again not to shout out to me if you have one class this semester that is the hardest for you to be interested in or to stay awake in and for example that class meets on uh... tuesday and thursday at whatever time then what are you supposed to do on monday and wednesday night yeah go to bed at a decent hour so that when you walk in there you're at least rested cuz' if the class is sort of boring to you and you walk in and the teachers taking role and one eye is already closed it's gonna be a long long class meeting so you're just doing what you can now for the mental part all i'll say about this is that this could mean many things but it mostly has to do with problems ok if you have no problems whatsoever that you're dealing with that's nice ok i've had a few people say i don't have problems at all i say i'll talk to you tomorrow there must be one then problems are common okay the question is how often during the class meeting when you're sitting there trying to listen does your mind float away to something you're worried about to some problem and that is natural and normal if it happens a little but if you spend twenty thirty minutes of every class meeting just sitting there staring off into space and thinking about a problem you're missing a huge amount of the lecture so what do you do to solve that well one is don't have any problems that's about the worst advice i could ever give you know that but the other one is this be aware of it i always tell people this it's a stupid sounding thing but it can work i used to walk up to a classroom when i was in college and i had problems like you and i would imagine leaving them outside the door kind of like leaving an umbrella out there and then when i walked in i would look at all four walls and i just say for the next hour how ever long this is the world this is all that exists is in here nothing else exists and i would sit there and i'd listen and then when all those problems start coming i'd say oh no-no-no that doesn't exist i'd try to push 'em out and sometimes it was like ping-pong back-and-forth but again you're just trying to do the best you can rather than letting that sort of take over you ok so that's the idea of being physically and mentally prepared to listen the third one which is a pretty simple idea too but most students uh... i find have the wrong approach here is to set a goal alright so i'm gonna ask you this every time you walk into a college classroom and you sit down and you get ready to listen to the teacher what is your goal supposed to be related to the topic of the day understanding is good but how about with this how how a carefully are you supposed to listen uh... you know what some people say i say what percent of all the time that you're in class are you supposed to listen to the teacher like a laser beam and i've had people say well maybe fifty one or fifty two percent if they're good that day what's the answer supposed to be what percent yeah people are saying ninety like aren't you impressed with that no that's not it it's hundred-percent are you ever gonna be able to do that no okay but the idea is this and again think about it the way you live your life okay almost everybody since we live in an entertainment age when you sit down to be entertained by watching t_v_ for example and you wait you turn to a program you're excited about it if it's not good at all it's boring you what do you do yeah you either change the channel or you turn it off right um... some people look at teachers like entertainers like they're coming to a comedy club or watching something on t_v_ hope he's good today hope she's interesting today and so they just sit back okay let's see entertain me and if after five ten twenty minutes you're thinking boy this is just not doing it for me then you can't do this ok uh... that would be nice huh everybody turn to the teacher like that and then they have to leave and another teacher come in... that's never gonna happen you have to stick it out and again i've had people just say well i couldn't pay attention today why it just didn't interest me so your whole point is i'm gonna go in there and i don't care what i have to do i'm gonna pay attention perfectly a hundred percent of the time and if you end up aiming for this and you fall a little short which you will and you end up paying attention eighty or ninety percent that's better than almost everybody else in the class if you're whole thing is well depends on them it's all up to the teacher then you're gonna be all over the place so it's your personal responsibility to go in and do what you can to get interested even if the lecture is not i know that sounds hard sometimes and i know it is okay uh... i'm gonna go ahead now while i'm getting into the next couple and i'm gonna give you one of these and can you pass one two or three rows back um... front half and back half ok so when this gets to you i want you to keep listening to me this is a listening workshop but with one eye and one ear i want you to go and fill that out and pass it on to the next person okay the fourth one of these solutions is this it's more than one word but here's the question where is the best place to sit in a classroom to have the best chance to pay really good attention the front and oftentimes i get somebody in the back of the room front front yeah front ok so all the people in the back are experts yep there it is there's the best place right up there some people almost look like well i'd sit in the front but i can't afford the really good tickets so i'm in the back you can sit in the front okay uh... the idea is to sit in the front and center so i would ask you really quick question first before i explain why what's the main reason why people who don't sit up here don't sit up here could be lazy but there's something else well texting well yeah all that's true but i'm not hearing the main one yeah they don't want to get picked on right and so people think man if i'm right here the teacher can kr..kr.. all the way through the class right well you-know-what that's possible but you know who tends to get picked on the most yeah people in the back i wanna show you something see if i can demonstrate this when i'm looking around for somebody to answer a question a lot of times the people near the front are you know raising their hand or whatever but i see as im kinda walking around and i'm looking i see sometimes a person in the back row doing this like that and what are they doing yeah they're they're trying to stay behind the person in front of them so they'er kinda doing this little dance in their chair if i see that who am i going for now i'm gonna run up to them and pick on them so it's a kind of a lame excuse to say i don't sit in the front cuz i don't want to get picked on because again it's usually the opposite what are some of the good reasons for sitting in the front well first of all let me ask a quick question how many of you have at least one class this semester that's in a room that's bigger than this one ok, i'm assuming some of you do if you don't you will some rooms have big theater seating if you're in the front usually you can hear better especially the teachers kinda quiet you can see better that's pretty obvious uh... i love when teachers do this i write everything in capital letters so it's pretty easy to see and even if you're in the back you're not that far from me but if you were twice as far back and i said ok do not forget that word and everybody's like what you can't even see it so uh... that's important but also here's another thing uh... people in the back let me ask this uh... how nosey are you ok if some people say very much so thank you uh... if you're nosey where should you sit here ok here's why students have told me i sat in the back and i tried to listen to you and i just couldn't and i said why and they said there's so many people to look at in front of me and these are nosy people so they're looking at me and they're listening and then they're like this that's a nice jacket i'll have to find out where she got that i would'nt have worn that with that i don't know what she's thinking just nosy just in everybody's business except where you're supposed to be focused i've had students before say they sat in the middle to the back part of the room and they said once class started they didn't even notice anything around them it's like everything went black except for the teacher and they concentrated great so if that's you you can sit wherever but if you're the type of person again who's distracted really easily and it's just one little movement i've had people say that somebody all they had to do was just adjust their glasses and they looked at them and they are sort of all over the place this is where you should stit and also here's the last thing about sitting front center that we're gonna get to our kind of our our big solution that hopefully i'll have a little bit of fun with we're gonna do a activity in a minute how many of you have ever had a class before where participation was part of the grade i'm assuming quite a few ok if you're an outgoing person no problem but if you're really shy or nervous at all about like speaking in class that's terrifying well you have two choices if you're really shy and you never like speakin in front of the class or answering a question or anything else you can either say well i'll just get a zero on all those points and try to do well on the rest which is not so good or you have to figure out a way to get some courage going best way i know to get courage sit in the front what is the person who is sitting in the back and who starts to talk and is being brave what are they most afraid of yeah people turning around and looking at em well iv'e had people in my class say okay first time they've ever raised their hand in like twelve weeks i'm so excited and i say yes and they say uh... the answer i... and then they look around and everybody's doing this and it never mind and then they practically go into a shell when you're sitting right here and the teacher asks a question you can kind of pretend like it's just the two of you now if the teachers really scary that dosen't help at all but if the teachers okay and i know you hear everybody coughing and breathing behind you but if you can't see em it tends to build courage and so in a class like that it really tends to help to move up for that reason okay and again harder to fall asleep when you're in the front row iv'e had a few people prove me wrong on that i'm talking and they're right there like that but usually it's harder okay you feel kinda more like you have to pay attention in the front which is a good thing okay so here's the big one for the day okay one thing i want you to get out of all of this today is that even though you've been hearing all your life listening is not the same it's a skill just like playing an instrument or playing a sport or anything else and if it's a skill then that means you can get better at it how do you get better at anything in life what do you have to do you have to practice right now if you don't know the right way to do something you could practice ten hours a day you'll never get any better but if you learn the right way to practice you're almost guaranteed to get better well this is the big one and that is practice i want you to practice listening i've had people look at me and say practice listening how do you do that you go up to somebody and say go and then like practice like how do you practice well we're going to do a little activity now and i want you to treat this as a real challenge i want to have fun with this but i want you to see if you can do it it's not easy at all i want you let's see for the sake of time today i want you to go ahead and number on your paper from one to four just from one to four and i'm going to do a little exercise with you and if anybody can do this whole thing perfectly i'll be very impressed okay what this is called is something that most of you maybe have never done or even heard of before it's called dictation and what that means is i'm gonna read a sentence to you and i want you to have your pen or your pencil ready okay but one rule during this exercise is you're not allowed to write anything while i'm speaking that's cheating ok so i want you to listen to me read the sentence and then as soon as i finish saying it i want you to write it on your paper okay but here's the other rule you have to write it exactly word-for-word the way i say it not your own version of it or anything else it has to be one hundred-percent perfect and so that puts a little pressure on you the first sentence i read to you is actually going to be very easy every other one after that is going to get harder how does it get harder yeah longer ok so it's like i'm taking your brain and i'm trying to stretch it like a rubber band okay having you hold the words in there long enough to be able to then write them down perfectly okay and i want to again just ask for total silence during this cuz it requires concentration so here we go and i'm gonna only read it once i can't repeat anything 'cause it's a listening exercise so listen first and then try to write it fairly quickly but exactly ok here's number one everyone at the game wore a red shirt ok now that should have been pretty easy now this next one is a little bit longer requires a little bit more concentration still shouldn't be too bad but we'll see number two the power went out due to a big storm last monday morning okay number three still a little bit longer so again concentrate and uh... do the best you can at being perfect with this here's number three he usually eats two soft tacos and a burrito whenever he goes to taco bell ok before we get to number four i'm actually gonna tell you two things one i want you to go ahead and add a number five i know you don't want to but i'm gonna have you add a number five i'm gonna really give you a workout here and then the other thing i'm gonna ask a really really big favor on number four and five those are the longest sentences so they require a lot of energy effort i want everybody to do this and that is be totally silent ok and the reason for that is when i've done this with classes before i get to the fourth or fifth one and somebody listens and they start writing and their brain dies and they sit there ahhh...guh.. uh... and then everybody looks at him and everybody forgets okay so if you blank out just sit there like this but be quiet okay just out of courtesy for everybody so that they can do the best they can okay so again you're trying to be perfect with this not easy but we'll go for it number four the four children spent the whole afternoon playing on the swings and slides at the local park ok you did a good job of being quiet on that one that's good one more this is the longest one and if you're already saying that i'm out thank you have a good attitude toward this try to do the best you can here's number five after running four miles on the beach the young woman walked another mile in order to cool down and then went home before we go back over these so you can see how you did i want to just tell you one thing i love watching you do this i used to do things like this on your end it's much more fun up here and one of the things that i usually notice and i'm gonna exaggerate it a little sometimes by number five here's what a student does they listene to me say it it's a long sentence and they start writing and then they do this and they just start creative writing their writing this wonderful story it's not what i said but they're just kind of writing creative writings good except not on this and i'm going to tell you why in a couple minutes so i'm gonna go back and read the sentences again i want you to look carefully at what you wrote you have to be a hard grader on yourself ok so if you made one mistake if you put a instead of the it's wrong gotta be exactly right ok so number one everyone at the game wore a red shirt number two the power went out due to a big storm last monday morning number three he usually eats two soft tacos and a burrito whenever he goes to taco bell now um... how many are still perfect no mistakes whatsoever okay we'll knock almost all of you out right here everybody else just look at your creative writing to see how you do ok number four the four young children you're not supposed to say anything yet the four young children spent the whole afternoon playing on the swings and slides at the local park okay anybody still perfect we got uh... almost everybody out ok now number five let's see how how you do on this one ok after running four miles on the beach the young woman walked another mile in order to cool down and then went home uh... now i'm gonna ask you a couple of questions about this first of all when you are in a college class and you're trying to listen and take notes um... are you normally supposed to wait for the teacher to finish saying something and then start writing it no if you do that you're gonna fall so far behind you'll never catch up but here's the problem if the teachers talking like this and you can't write like this you're always behind which means that you're not writing what they just said you're writing what they said ten or fifteen seconds ago and you're trying to hold that in your brain long enough to write it and what else you doing at the same time trying to listen so you can write that next it's like juggling it is hard to do both okay the reason i wanted you to wait and then write was so that you would see what i think all of you see now and that is it's a lot harder than it seems to do that i've had people say i got that sentence totally right and then i read it and they had half of it wrong your mind kind of plays tricks on you also when you're taking notes in classes are you normally supposed to write word for word what the teacher says no every once in awhile they'll say write this down word for word but usually you write it your own way but accuracy is important and here's why here's my favorite little illustration one of these five sentences is very famous and it's gonna be famous for you now i have a lot of different lists of five sentences that are uh... kind of the same length as those but a few years ago i read this same exact sentences that i just did with you the same five and at the end of the class everybody left except one guy who came marching up to me with his notebook looking really angry steam coming out of his ear never fun to see somebody approaching you looking like that and he said something you don't really wanna ever say he walked up to me and i said yes he said you lied i said excuse me he said when we did that dictation exercise today one of those sentences you said it one way when we wrote it and then when we corrected it you changed it all around and i said no i'm really careful to be exact cuz that's the whole point and he said well you did he wanted to prove me wrong so he said can i see your sentences and i said before you look at mine can you tell me which sentence it is and show me what you wrote he said i'd be happy to because it's what you said and so i said which one and he said number three now i want you to look back at sentence number three whether you got it right or not i don't want you looking at me while i say this i want you to look at the sentence cuz it'll help you appreciate it more when when he wrote down number three this is what he wrote i swear to you he usually eats a big mac and fries whenever he goes to mcdonald's that's what he wrote and he said that's what you said and i said no i didn't say that and he said yes and for the rest of the semester he sat there everytime we had class like you and i like he wouldn't let it go ok i didn't say that i said the same thing i did to you why did he write that yes because he just came from mcdonalds he was going to mcdonald's after class he had mcdonalds on the brain so he heard this and then by the time it came out he wasn't even close now one of the biggest frustrations you can have as a student is to sit there trying desperately to keep up with the teacher and you write down what they just said or what you thought they did then you take that home and you make a flash card out of it and you memorize it and you've got it you go to the test there's the question mark it wrong because what you wrote was the wrong thing tests are hard enough as it is without writing the wrong information down so the more you can hold words in your head long enough to write them down accurately the better your notes are when you study them later and so one last little part of this and then we're going to get to our final one is that i've actually had students do something that i never asked them to do before but it's a great testimony to this and that is they did really badly they were out by number two or three by number five they weren't even close so they went home i didn't ask them to do this and they grabbed a magazine or a newspaper or a novel anything with writing on it even a textbook and they went up to someone they live with and said could you do me a favor could you find three sentences in this one short one medium and one long not even five just three and could you read em to me and then wait while i write it em down so same thing we just did accept just a shorter version takes like two minutes well person said okay and they read em they they tried to copy em exactly they checked just as bad as they were in the classroom and then then they tried it again and then a few days later they tried a few more times it's almost like exercising every couple days and after several weeks they notice these are all easy i'm able to do long sentences like number five with no problem at all so they actually notice that that part of their brain is getting stronger and it's a weird idea that you can actually improve your ability to concentrate but this is one of the best ways to do it so not a specific suggestion but if you didn't do so well on this it helps to try that okay and then the last one that we're going to talk about just for a couple minutes and i see the did anybody miss the sign in sheets in this okay so go ahead and take this i wanna take a quick look i don't know why i'm looking trik-a-trik-a i will uh...email later i wanna have you write down one more and i'm gonna sort of demonstrate this to you then we'll be all set this is an odd idea but it definitely works and that is pretend to be fascinated if you have to pretend to be fascinated if you have to um... what does that mean well i'm going to demonstrate something here what is fake listening called again yes pseudo listening and we said that's a problem people say well wait is it a problem or is it a solution kinda sounds like the same thing it's not the same thing at all member psuedo listening is for everything on the outside looks good uh... and you're not listening to one word okay pretend to be fascinated i want to have you look up here for a second ok i wanna demonstrate something if you're sitting in a classroom and you are listening to the teacher and you are like this ok what message is your body sending to your brain yeah this is pathetic when is this going to be over this is the worst thing ever right when you are like this what message is your body sending to your brain yeah this is the greatest thing i've ever seen in my life this is so fantastic i can't believe it um... those are opposite right well if you ever find yourself in a class and you're in a ... position like that and you're thinkin well let's see we got an hour left uh... boy and you're lookin around you have two choices one is just to go to sleep and give up which doesn't do you any good and it's rude to the teacher but there's another thing you can do what is that yeah fake it sit up leaned forward get eye contact going with the teacher and act like what they're saying is the greatest thing you've ever heard in your life now one reason you do that is because it's respectful to the teacher ok teachers know that not everything they teach is going to be interesting to everybody i mean you know it's just realistic if i ever see a student in one of my classes who's starting to lose eye contact drool coming down whatever and they're just kinda losing it and i see them do this that's the most i could ever ask of anybody because it means they're trying right but also um... your body can fake-out or trick your brain when you're like this all signals are fall asleep right when you're like this all signals are this is great and the war begins you're like this and your body is sayin look at me this is the greatest thing ever your brain is saying no no i don't think so i think this is boring no look it's really fascinating and this battle goes on guess who wins sometimes the body and you can actually start getting more interested in paying more attention just by physically changing your posture leaning forward not like this but leaning forward and eye contact and facial expressions what happens to people's facial expressions when they get bored that's what happens right so get something going and even if you have to fake it ok and it's amazing what that can do and i'm gonna tell you one last thing that's a warning okay i never used to say this but somebody almost gave me a heart attack last semester by telling me something so i'm gonna tell you this this is what we'll leave with one of my students said i always get bored in one of my classes and so i tried what you said and i leaned forward and i did all the things you said and i said that's good and i did it help ah no i got in really big trouble and i said how do you get in trouble doing that that's a good thing well he went too far okay and this is what he said and don't ever do this ok i don't know where he got this idea instead of this to this which is what i said he did that far and then he also did this every time the teacher finished saying something he did this whew...all right...whew..ok teachers know when you're putting them on that's not a very respectful thing and i always tell people teachers know how to throw things okay they take a class in marker one oh one and they can hit you right in the head so don't make fun of em just make subtle changes okay don't slap anybody next to you if they're fallin asleep don't pinch yourself too hard but whatever you can do again you're just sayin i don't care if they're not interesting i need to know this and it's my responsibility to pay attention and again sometimes i know that's hard to do but that's the goal okay all right so we're all set now with this ok up thanks for coming today and uh... again i'll be here every wednesday for the rest of the semester you're always to welcome to come go out and listen well okay
A2 class listening people teacher write sit LBCC - IMPROVING LISTENING SKILLS 383 74 Hhart Budha posted on 2014/06/12 More Share Save Report Video vocabulary