One of the challenges that I face is how to engage the class. I try very hard to get down to their level and pull them into whatever activity that I’m doing. There are some common rules that I follow that I would like to share. Bring the activity into the real world. One of my pet peeves as a student was busy work. If I’m doing an assignment that I know (or think) it was only given to fill time, I’m not a happy camper. Bring the assignment into the real world by playing the role of the boss and giving the new “worker” an assignment related to the job. Example: “Today we are going to learn how to do pivot tables. Just to give you an idea of why this will help you down the road; it will take a massive amount of data and analysis it 100 different ways in seconds. If you work for a car dealership and your boss asks you to dig up a large amount of marketing data for a new sales approach, you can! Take all the buying data in the database pop it in a pivot table and it can start to tell you some interesting things.” This goes a long way to an adult student when you introduce the idea of a real world application to the project at hand.