First Day of Class

So now we’ve looked at three basic techniques that you need to pay careful attention to the situation you’re in or find what you have in common.

Then you need to ask interesting insightful questions or make interesting insightful comments so that the other person wants to speak with you.

And you also need to pay careful attention to body language.

Now let’s actually look at some examples.

First the first day of class.

Let’s say let’s imagine if I say let’s say it means for example.

OK so let’s say your first day of class you’re a university student you’re a freshman freshman by the way.

The other three years of university if you don’t know freshman and then year two is sophomore then Junior and Senior sure many of you already already know that.

Let’s say there’s another student sitting beside me I feel nervous.

So my first lecture in college in university what’s the shared situation here.

Well everybody in this lecture hall we’re all students right.

We’re all students and this is probably all of our first lecture probably.

So we have a lot in common.

We share a lot.

Right.

So that’s great.

We have many things that we could talk about.

Here are a couple a couple of examples.

And these are by no means the only things that you could say but I turned to the student sitting next to me.

I don’t know this person.

OK I’m going to try to begin a conversation.

How much homework do you think we’re going to get on the first day.

How much homework do you think we’re gonna get on the first day.

I could say going to get but I’ll probably say Can I get going to get going.

Now they might just say I don’t know body language.

That means probably they don’t want to talk to me and maybe they say I don’t think that he’s going to give us any homework on the first on the first lecture because what could there be homework on.

We’re probably just going to go over the course the course syllabus syllabus the overview for the whole course.

Yeah I hope so.

OK.

So we’ve started something.

Right.

OK.

That’s one way we could say are you a chemistry major too.

So if we’re in maybe a basic biology class maybe a basic chemistry class whatever but there are a lot of chemistry students here chemistry majors may right be right that again that’s really messy.

C h e m i s t r y.

OK so are you a chemistry major too.

I’m a chemistry major.

That’s what that means.

OK.

And it doesn’t matter if I’m right or wrong if he says I know that I can say oh what Major are you on a biology major.

OK.

Now we’ve started something.

So why have you decided to take this professors biology class instead of Professor Jones.

Because I heard that this professor is actually really good and kind of relaxed about exams.

Yeah I heard the same thing.

We’ve started a conversation.

OK.

Are you a chemistry major.

Yes I am.

Cool.

Me too.

All right.

Now we really have something in common.

Why are you studying chemistry.

I’m studying chemistry because someday I’d like to be a pharmacist.

Whatever conversation.

OK.

The beginning part.

All we have to do is get that beginning question if it’s interesting enough that person shows that they’re willing to talk with us.

They would like to talk with us by saying a little bit more that we can then grab on to an ad to or if they say yeah I don’t know then we can see hey they don’t want to talk to me and that’s just fine right.

OK.

I heard this professor speaks really fast maybe it’s before the professor even came into the lecture hall.

I heard this professor speaks really fast.

I hope that I’ll be able to take enough notes because I don’t want to fail my exams.

You could just say this I heard this professor speaks really fast then the other student says Actually Actually he does speak really fast but if you look back there they’re recording all of the lectures so you can actually download the lectures after class.

Wow.

That’s great.

So if I need to I can download it and listen again.

If I missed something.

Yeah that’s awesome.

All right.

Once again we’ve started a conversation that has to be an OK question.

It doesn’t have to be an amazing question.

But if you turn to that person and say How about this weather.

That sounds very silly right.

It sounds stupid.

It’s not related to the situation.

We say Do you like movies awkward strange connected to the situation.

Let’s look at another.