when things go bad, make someone else the victim

So today we had a rough start in class again. There were a bunch of weird bugs in the software tool, and none of the exercises were working very well. People were getting frustrated. One of the students finally 'confessed that they knew next to nothing about the tool and that they didn't understand things that I assumed they knew.

There's one student in particular, I'll call him P, who kept asking the same question like a million billion times. So, I decided to put him center stage, thinking that might help turn things around.

I stopped the exercises we were working on and decided to go to ground zero. I said to the class "do you know what today is? today is P's lucky day". P, unsuspecting, smiled. Suddenly, everyone was interested. "Why don't you come up to the front of the class and see how lucky you are?" I said. P came to the front of the class and I told him to sit at my laptop.

Now, suspecting shenanigans, P said "Uh, I have swine flu. Are you sure you want me to touch your laptop?" Hopefully he was joking. I walked him through doing some basic stuff with the software tool. Then I started asking him "How would I do (some function)?" If P couldn't figure it out the class helped him. Then I had P walk the class through the exercises they were struggling with. By the end of the day everyone seemed to be doing much better. And I promised P that tomorrow he can select the next person who's going to sit up at my laptop and get picked on.

We also started talking about the practical uses of enterprise architecture. When I presented the class with some business questions and asked how they would answer them given the diagrams we created I could see about 90% of the class was finally getting it. That's always exciting. Two of the guys went back to their offices right after class (impressive considering we worked from 6 am to 330 with only an hour break) to generate some reports to show their customer.

And, it didn't matter that I got back to my hotel later than usual, because Bones is still ensconced with the cheerleaders. I got him a kong so he will hopefully not chew up any more of their bedspreads (they said, anyway, that Bones did it). They are brushing his hair and teeth as promised. He looked happy, though I worry about the music he's been listening to. And god knows what he sees on their TV at night. I hope they aren't exposing him to sit coms.