Some more on my two factors... after group discussion

Talking about these two ideas (mine were emotion and authentic activity) really made me examine my thoughts, specifically how complex they get when you move into how to implement them into specific methods.

The most troublesome was the idea of emotion as a tool. Did I mean to say it was tool when I first brought it up? I'm not sure, but it gets pretty scary when you say it that way. I thought of some of my best emotional experiences in class, and they were always centered around good discussion or interaction, not usually engineered by a teacher. When a teacher engineers something to be emotional with the specific intent of using that emotion somehow, it's usually pretty transparent, and nothing is less emotionally effective (or more counterproductive) than transparent emotional manipulation. We came up with some pretty good examples of good use of emotion and bad uses of emotion. For example: a really engaging discussion can sometimes happen when a controversial topic is brought up. Students who might not have cared about a topic before are now personally involved. But what if it becomes contentious? (And I don't mean to say that anything critical or any sort of disagreement is contentious - I mean specifically the presence of malice) Then you've turned a really good emotional opportunity into a really negative experience, and probably just deepened participants into their trenches.

There's also the danger of sentimentality and cheap shots - playing on emotion in an artificially manipulative way.

But I still think that in spite of the dangers of excess, instructors need to be aware of and work with the emotional factors in the material. It's going to be there no matter what approach you take, and it will be worlds better if the emotional current in your classroom can be something somewhat more effective than "This is soooooo boring."