yahoo answers

My boyfriend got me hooked on Yahoo Answers. You get points for answering questions about anything you can possibly think of, and you can get lost for hours just answering questions.

I think it would be awesome if colleges were structured like that. You go to class, the professor asks you a question, whoever answers it the best gets 10 points. But if you're one of those annoying people who has to ask for clarification on something 25 times in the 5 minutes before class gets out, you get one point taken away for each question. Can you imagine? People would be jumping over each other to get the most eloquent answer in the shortest amount of times.

Some people would just post a link somewhere (or quote the textbook) and get a mediocre response, maybe a thumbs up or two. But those who thoroughly researched their answers (or at least had enough charisma to pull off looking like they knew what they were talking about) would get the best rewards.

Classes would branch off like wikipedia articles, everyone would talk about what interested them, and everything would somehow, some way relate back to the class at hand. No one would be bored, everyone would be engaged, because these points would be their entire grade, at least for one class period.

I think when I become a teacher, I'll hold classes like that with my students as a sort of review session. God knows it couldn't be any worse than those old, boring study guides we got in high school. I think if I had those growing up, review sessions would have been a lot more productive.