Excellent!

I laughed out at this point. Heh, heh.

This is exactly how I feel with those classes… and those crappy courses.

Can’t they teach something real?

Why do they always assume people will be looking for the library when you go on holiday or something?

Or any other boring place you wouldn’t get caught dead going to in your own home town.

Don’t get me wrong, I use the library…

But not when I’m in another country… sheeesh!

Rezbi

Anyway, I must tell you that, this time, you grabbed me by the balls: I am both a university professor with that M.A. diploma hanging on the wall AND a professional copywriter. I can testify every word you said here. No matter if I have five, or thirty, or four hundred students attending one of my lectures, I always notice I am talking to only a handful of them, while the rest just stay there, wasting their time listening, bored to death, to what sounds to them as a meaningless speech.

Sometimes I ask one of those guys - “hey, what would you rather be doing right now instead of attending this class”? When I get the answer, and I tell him, “Just get out and go do it right now. Bring me back a paper next class about that experience”.

None of them, ever, took this offer. It seems rather difficult for most people to do what they really want, even if they are told to!

On the other hand, if I am talking to marketers and salespeople at big companies, I have the majority of my audience standing on the edge of their seats.

I made this test, once. I spoke in class exactly the same words I had used the day before in a very succesful conference to salespeople… People yawned and some left the classroom.

A few years later, one of those students came back to tell me he used the concepts of that “failure” class in his career and - guess what? - he had his working on competition for a Clio!

I know you don’t really think advertising prizes are important at all, but some guys out there do think it is valuable enough to pay loads of money for a single design of this former student who stayed in classe while everyone else was sleeping…

By the way, two students who left earlier that lecture are now very successful and respectable marketers… People are different, and learn differently, as you said.

Best wishes,