Jon, I think you’re very correct that class size has a lot to do with how much people raise their hand in class. One thing about larger classes is that more of your hand-raising time is going to answering rather than asking. In general, the vast majority of times that people speak in class it is to answer a question, but I’ve found that this gets more and more true the larger and larger the class gets. Freshman year of undergrad I had a bunch of 500+ person classes and no-one ever raised their hand then. It’s scarier to answer than to question, although personally I’ve probably been embarrassed more by asking stupid questions then being wrong. The semi-painful silences in classes come when people aren’t answering, not when there’s no questions.

Somewhat related to this, I really like Keith’s phrase “fears of continued abstract exploration weigh down a desire to speak” and feel that it is very relevant to this class in particular. I’m a good deal more intimidated of Prof. Moglen than the other professors I’ve had so far. You can characterize this as my embarrassment cost being high or whatnot. I don’t want to answer when I kinda feel like I know what’s going on because I don’t want to go down some road where my lack of understanding is exposed. I definitely don’t want to ask a question that is quickly and definitively deemed useless for reasons I don’t get.

Lotta “I” in that last paragraph. Anyways, I don’t believe that completely understanding why you’re afraid to talk in class is necessarily all that useful if your goal is to try to talk more. I can spend a long time figuring out that I hate spiders cause my sister dropped one in my crib but this doesn’t make me less afraid of them (not the best analogy maybe).

Possible things to try if you just really want to speak and to get comfortable with it:

• If you have a question, write it down and force yourself to ask it in the beginning during question time.
• Get to know people in the class better so you’re less afraid they’ll think you’re an idiot/douchebag when you talk.
• Piggy-back on someone else’s answer/question.
• Read one part really really well and raise your hand when we get to that part.
• Post on here about how you’re definitely going to say SOMETHING next time and hope that fear of shame will force your hand to go up.
• Imagine everyone in their underwear.

Dunno if that’s what you’re looking for, and it definitely wasn’t what you asked for, but it was helpful to me to try and think stuff up 

-- JustinChung - 02 Feb 2009

-- JustinChung - 03 Feb 2009

That weird symbol at the end was supposed to be a smiley face, btw.

-- JustinChung? - 03 Feb 2009

-- JustinChung - 03 Feb 2009