 instructor I think it's also important that I have the courage to experiment with how I run the class and allow myself to fail when appropriate. So you know not everything is going to work but if I'm afraid of trying new things because they might not work then then I'm gonna put myself in a pretty static teaching environment. So for example a few years ago you know I was teaching a marketing research class and I'm really struggling with how to get the students to understand experimental design and I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine who teaches in the geology department and he was talking to me about how he uses Mentos and Coke to teach how volcanoes work and it occurred to me that one could use that same process for teaching experimental design in a fun and engaging way. So we developed a whole process around designing an experiment that would determine the optimal combination of soft drinks and Mentos in order to make the biggest explosion. So you know that means that we have to operationalize what we mean by biggest explosion. It means that we have to set up experimental groups and stick in appropriate controls and as we think about all of that and we get the students to start thinking about all of that they'll understand design in a way that that they can apply to Mentos and Coke but they can also apply to you know market testing a new advertising campaign so how are they gonna get the biggest impact from their campaign. But we start off by experimenting with a new approach to thinking about what experimental design might be and so it takes a certain amount of courage to approach a class and say okay today we're gonna go outside and we're going to drop Mentos in Coke and at the end of it you're going to understand how to run an experiment. That one happened to work very well. It's possible though that that I can do something and I have done things in classes where you know I've tried to approach a topic in a certain way it hasn't really worked out and I've had to back away from it and try a different way. So you know I think last quarter I tried to teach the impact of cannibalization. If you introduce a new product that cannibalizes an old product I approach this in a bunch of different ways and it just wasn't sticking and so I had to come up with another example that was I think a lot more accessible to the students and it but it took me a few tries to get there. So instead of talking about golf balls or flanker brands or anything else I talked to them about waffles and pancakes. What happens to your waffle business when you start selling pancakes and how you decide whether the selling the pancakes is going to help your business or hurt your business and so just making a really simple idea like that the students like waffles so they like thinking about waffles. We were able to get everyone through and everyone to understand it and that was very very satisfying. There's also an old question that that's been going around and I think I first heard it on MBR. A question that a social question about whether would prefer to have the superpower of flight or the superpower of invisibility and it's kind of a fun question it's kind of an interesting question it's a question that engages students but in my marketing research class I would start off the quarter with a survey that the students have to take and I ask them a bunch of questions about things related to their knowledge of marketing research or their knowledge of marketing and I and I use those questions to slip in examples of different question forms that will then come back to later in the quarter but I also asked them this question of would you prefer flight or invisibility if you had to choose between a superpower and and then when I reintroduce that later in the class they always remember it but they start to think about and hypothesize about why one would prefer the power of flight over invisibility or vice versa and so they come up with different ideas about why one might be true or the other might be true and and then we can turn around and just take the data from the class or take the data from prior periods and start testing it and so this gets them to thinking about okay what is a what is a hypothesis how would I might might I test that hypothesis in a very basic way so as they start to think about what is a good or a bad hypothesis we can we can talk about that in a context that doesn't really seem so incredibly complex to them and actually seems kind of fun and whimsical