Follow the instructions as close as you can

I've been teaching cgi for a while it's a tough job, but many times you get your rewards from your students. If I'll have to give an advice I'll give this "Follow the instructions as close as you can". Why? well First, if you chose to take class with someone you should trust this guy, if you don't trust this guy there is no point in take class with him.
Second, teachers don't have magic bullets, we only have methods and this methods are developed to make you a bit easier the path too follow. Some of the intructions could look meaningless but could make the differece between exit or failure. So is up to you.
One of the better things to be a teacher is that you have a wider perspective. Because a teacher is a student too.
I know is not and easy advice to follow, I forget it sometimes so is a selfremainder for me aswell.

I like rigs

A rig it's the system that make posible to animate a 3d charater ( you can screw the character aswell). The rigs are like the wires in a Stop motion Character, and I really like rigs ( I hate it sometimes too). When I watch a "making of" I really like to see the controls and gui to manipulate a famose character like Scratch (Ice Age). I don't know but maybe is because I feel that the character are only liveless puppet and that only the magic provided by a great animator make the character looks alive and empathyze with you.
To me have the oportunity to manipulate the same controls that top notch animator used to make some of the greatest moments in some movies or shorts is like have the oportunity to be in the copckit of a plane. I'm sure that this probably sounds weird but I think I'm a bit weird :P.
Anyway one of the famous rigs and character in animation is Hogan. This character was created for the AAU students and you can watch great animations from students, most of then working right now in the industry, created with this rig. If you want to know a bit more about this Rig and his history take a look at the great article by P.J. Leffelman in his blog link to the article