Thursday, January 25, 2007

How to Make Friends and Influence People?


Answer: Feed them.

Last night, I began teaching conversation class (two of them). Sometimes it's hard to get everyone started, especially at the beginning. So, I passed around a plate of M&Ms and told everyone to take two. One was to eat and one should be saved.

Although they didn't know it yet, each color corresponded with a topic (yellow-hobbies, orange-family, brown-school or work, red-New Years, green-something funny or happy). To my relief, it was a great icebreaker and I didn't even have to invent more topics for the rest of the class. I sat back and the conversation steered itself as everyone took turns sharing and asking each other questions.

I noticed last semester that food began to play an increasingly important role in my classroom. Perhaps because I like to eat. I started making tea sometimes, for my students, and then it led to occasional cooking spurts, and somehow spiraled into a grand project in one class where the discussion topic was "food" and I made everyone bring something to eat.

Having become more of a food junkie since living near San Francisco, and reading more about business as I try to decide what to do next in life, I was delighted to find a NY Times article the other week noting that cooking is increasingly being used as a team-building activity outside of work. So if you don't just want to drive the golf cart around and heckle people, which is what I usually do when I'm trying to "golf", you can set up your very own "Iron Chef" style competition/gathering at a local restaurant. Check it out.

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10B13F938540C708DDDA80894DF404482&oref=login

1 Comments:

Blogger Heather said...

That is great! Nothing influences people more then chocolate! No matter the country ;)

10:15 AM  

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