How To Improve Your LISTENING SKILLS | LBCC Study Skills

[Music] okay you look good so we're gonna go ahead and start okay um one quick i guess word of introduction to the workshop today this is technically the first of two parts next week we're going to talk about taking better lecture notes it's really hard when a 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 this 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 listening skills so the idea is we 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 okay 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 going to teach us how to listen and i said well actually yes and people say well i already know how to do that i've 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 going to talk about that to start with but here's my little uh quick introduction to this whole thing and that is i talk to students really often and i don't know if

this is going to 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 wait what they say okay good you come to me with me to the workshop uh people's ability to concentrate is kind of scary and so what we're going to do is we're going to start with problems 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

going to 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 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 want to 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 because you're a human being you'll understand as i go through them okay 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 sudo 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 going

to make some of you nervous here in a minute but that's okay 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 them they're locked in on me and they're paying really good attention to me okay 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 you are ever like this because it's pretty disrespectful who sit in class and are just like this and all that and they're 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 a while and then there's the third group all of you are in this group every once in a while but some of you when i describe this you realize i almost live there and i've

got to 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 okay 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 know 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 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 him like this right in the middle of class and i lean over and say where are you take me with you wherever they are it's obviously a lot more interesting than what we're doing they're on a beach somewhere i don't know what they're doing if you're the type of person who lets 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 10 minutes at a time that's not good obviously you're missing a huge amount of the 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 okay and you know that and every once in a while i would 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 it just depends on you okay 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 selective listening okay 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 okay 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 going to give you this example and again this will either sound very familiar to you or you'd think no not so much i i had a student last

semester who came up to me after class one day and uh said something i haven't heard too often from students he said can i talk to you for a second and i said yeah sure 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 glasses i have 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 and i thought 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 have heard them but some people are so hyper sensitive 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 going to 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 than 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 want to make sure i've got this and that's critical listening okay 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 analyze 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 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 i said well i'll try and he said well it's my political science class and he said every time i go to that and then leave i have no memory of anything that went on in there and i said well you have to remember some things he said i remember nothing it's like a giant eraser on my brain i said that's really odd when was

the last time you were in the class he said i just got out about 20 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 then i said picture yourself in the classroom and tell me all that you can remember and seriously this guy sat there for probably 20 30 seconds it seemed like 20 or 30 minutes and he was like this and i was looking at him thinking oh my gosh and 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 i said 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 no 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 he said when he's talking i don't really remember what he's saying but i'm looking carefully and 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 looking right here and i'm thinking it's the same one it's the same exact one as last time well if you allow something that's really stupid or something really extra kind of bad to 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 okay 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 okay so we're going to talk about the six solutions there are more than that but these are the ones we're going 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 okay 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 doing that and then as soon as you recognize it what are you able to do yeah stop it okay um you're talking to somebody and you're looking at them and you're thinking uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh and then suddenly you think i'm pseudo-listening then you stop okay so being sensitive it's like i always described it like this way i don't know 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 i never would do this but i walk up to you and say uh you're uh biting your nails and you're just chewing away you know what you'd probably say you'd probably say yeah yeah and then you'd look i think how did that get in there but if you can get to the point where you do this and then you realize i'm about to bite my

nails it's over it kind of breaks the cycle okay so this is very simple but it can work really well okay now the second one that i'm going to give you is um something that kind of is a long thing to write i'm going to abbreviate it and 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 going to ask you a couple 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 do you need to do yeah eat not during the class but before okay everybody in here and this is probably a bad thing for me to say because it's 12 15. if there and if there's anybody in here who is really hungry right now good luck 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 because you hardly got any sleep the night before and most college classes are an hour and 15 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 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 hallucinations they were looking at the teacher and 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 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 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 because 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 going to 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 okay if you have no problems

whatsoever that you're dealing with that's nice okay i've had a few people say i don't have problems at all i said well 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 20 30 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 i'm 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 or however long this is the world this is all that exists is in here nothing else exists and i would sit there and i listen and then when all those problems start come in i'd say oh no no no that doesn't exist i try to push them 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 than letting that just sort of take over you okay

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 i find have the wrong approach here is to set a goal all right so i'm going to 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 carefully are you supposed to listen um 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 51 or 52 percent if they're good that day what's the answer supposed to be what percent yeah people are saying 90. like aren't you impressed with that no that's not it it's 100 are you ever going to be able to do that no okay but the idea is this and again think about 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 tv for example and you wait you turn to a program and 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 [Music] some people look at teachers like entertainers like they're coming to a comedy club or watching something on tv i hope he's good today i hope that she's interesting today and so they just sit back okay let's see entertain me and if

after 5 10 20 minutes you're thinking boy this is just not doing it for me then you can't do this okay um 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 going to 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 going to go in there and i don't care what i have to do i'm going to pay

attention perfectly 100 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 80 or 90 percent that's better than almost everybody else in the class if your whole thing is well it depends on them it's all up to the teacher then you're going to 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 okay i know that sounds hard sometimes and i know it

is okay i'm 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 okay 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 ahead and fill that out and pass it on to the next person okay the fourth uh one of these solutions is this um 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 often times i get somebody in the back of the room front front yeah front okay 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 the idea is to sit in

the front and center so i'm going to ask you a 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 it could be lazy but there's something else well yeah text yeah yeah that 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 all the way through the classroom right well you know what that's possible but you know who tends to get picked

on the most yeah people in the back and i want to 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 a hand or whatever but i see as i'm kind of 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're doing this little dance in their chair

if i see that who am i going for man i'm going to run up to them and pick on them so it's kind of a lame excuse to say i don't sit in the front because 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 okay i'm assuming some of you do if

you don't you will sometimes big theater seating if you're in the front usually you can hear better especially if the teacher is kind of quiet you can see better that's pretty obvious 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 okay do not forget that word and everybody's like what you can't even see it okay so uh that's important but also here's another thing

um people in the back let me ask this uh how nosy are you okay if some people say very much so thank you uh if you're nosy where should you sit here okay 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 are 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 this oh i wouldn't have worn that with i don't know what she was 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 could 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 adjust their glasses and they looked at them and they were just look over place this is where you should sit and also here's the last thing about sitting front and center then we're going to get to our kind of our our big solution that hopefully i'll have a little bit of fun with we're going to do an activity in a minute um how many of you've ever had a class before where participation was part of the grade okay i'm assuming quite a

few okay 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 speaking 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 people yeah people turning around and looking at them well i've had people in my class say okay first time they've ever raised their hand in like 12 weeks and i'm so excited and they say yes and they say um the answer is and then they look around and everybody's doing this and 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 teacher is really scary that doesn't help at all but if the teacher's okay and i know you hear everybody coughing and breathing behind you but if you can't see them 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 i've 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 and you feel kind of 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 um 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 okay 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 can practice ten hours a day you'll never get any better but if you learn the right way and you practice you're almost guaranteed to get better well this is the big one and that is practice i want you to practice listening and 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 you 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 going to 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 okay 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 100 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 okay 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 because it requires concentration so here we go and i'm going to only read it once i can't repeat anything because it's a listening exercise so listen first and then try to write it fairly quickly but exactly okay here's number one everyone at the game wore a red shirt okay now that should have been pretty easy this next one is a little bit longer requires a little 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 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 okay 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 added 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 okay 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 oh get oh and then everybody looks at them and everybody forgets okay so if

you blank out just sit there like this but just 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 okay 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's it 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 okay before we go back over these so you can see how you did i wanted to just tell you one thing i love watching you do this it 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 going to exaggerate a little sometimes by number five here's

what a student does they listen to me say it it's a long sentence and they start writing and then they do this and they just start creative writing they're writing this wonderful story it's not what i said but they're just kind of writing creative writing is good except not on this and i'm going to tell you why in a couple minutes so i'm going to 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 okay so if you made one

mistake if you put uh instead of the is wrong it's got to be exactly right okay 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 okay 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 see how you do okay number four the four young children you're

not supposed to say anything yet uh 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 okay now number five let's see how how you do on this one okay after running four miles on the beach the young woman walked another mile in order to cool down and then went home okay um now i'm going to 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 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 going to fall so far behind you'll never catch up but here's the problem if the teacher is 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 10 or 15 seconds ago and you're trying to hold that in your brain long enough to write it and what else are you doing at the same

time trying to listen so you can write that next it's like juggling it's 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 a while 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 going to be famous for you now i have a lot of different lists of five sentences that are kind of the same length as those but a few years ago i read the 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 ears never fun to see somebody approaching you looking like that and he said something you don't really want to ever say he walked up to me and he said i said yes and he said you lied and i said excuse me and 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 because that's the hope he's well you did and he wanted to prove me wrong so he said can i see your sentences and i said wait a minute 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

um and i don't want you looking at me while i say this i want you to look at the sentence because 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 every time we had class like you and i like

he wouldn't let it go okay 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 mcdonald's he was going to mcdonald's after class he had mcdonald's on the brain so he heard this and then by the time it came out it wasn't even close now one of the biggest frustrations you could 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 got it you go to the test there's the question yes 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 and 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 lived 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 them to me and then wait while i write them down so same thing we just did except just a shorter version it takes like two minutes well person said okay and they read them they they tried to copy them exactly they checked just as bad as they were in the classroom and then they tried it again and then a few days later they tried it 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 and i want to take a quick look i don't know why i'm looking trick and trick or trigger okay so i will uh email later i want to have you write down one more and i'm going to sort of demonstrate this to you and 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 uh what is fake listening called again yeah pseudo listening and we said that's a problem people say well wait is it a problem or is it a solution it kind of sounds like the same thing it's not the same thing at all remember pseudo listening is where everything on the outside looks good and you're not listening to one word okay pretend to be fascinated all right i want to have you look up here for a second let me get all the way okay i want to demonstrate something if you're sitting in a classroom and

you are listening to the teacher and you are like this okay 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 and 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 the position like that and you're thinking well let's

see we got an hour left oh boy and you're looking 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 okay sit up lean 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 okay 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 kind of 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 saying 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 yeah that's what happens right so get something going and even

if you have to fake it okay and it's amazing what that can do and i'm going to 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 going to 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 well that's good and

i did it help oh no i got in really big trouble and i said how can 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 okay 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 all right okay and 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 101 and they can hit you right in the head so don't make fun of them just make subtle changes okay don't slap anybody next to you if they're falling asleep don't pinch yourself too hard but whatever you can do again you're just saying 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 okay thanks for coming today and uh again i'll be here uh every wednesday for the rest of the semester you're always welcome to come go out and listen well okay [Music]