I dont know if i have said this before; I will say this again nevertheless – Don’t compare your inside with someone else’s outside. One will need to remember this maxim during class participation.

There are people who speak and then there are people who do. People who speak can intimidate, particularly during the early stages of ISB life. And once one feels intimidated, one could do two things – either stop participating in class discussion (?) or just do it without giving much thought to it.

Class Participation allows people to speak. And speak will those people that tend to speak without the realization that class participation is a good way to share knowledge, but a bad way to think that one could display knowledge.

I say this because, many of the points students make are usually already thought by many of the other students. There are only a few points that are made in the class that the other students would not have thought about. These points as everyone can guess are not found in the facts of the cases that are assigned for reading, but are found in the books that one has read in past or in the experience that one has gone through or even observations that one has made.

If there is one thing that ISB students need to improve on, that would be class participation. I only said improve.

But so long as class participation will be graded, such tendencies to speak what has already been spoken or speak that everyone has already thought out in the dreams or just repeat the facts of the case will continue.

A simple rule is what is said in an old saying – don’t look where you fell, look where you slipped. Look not for obvious facts, but for the causes that underlie the facts. One will then speak what makes a class discussion enriching. One will do good in class participation.

PS: CP = Class Participation