come to live/ come alive, fingernails on the blackboard

 Mr. Chagnon's theory of the formation of society, his major contribution to the discipline, was like fingernails on the blackboard to these new anthropologists. They feared that his depiction of violence as central to social identity in groups like the Yanomamö would be used to cast indigenous peoples as savages, who could be forced into reservations "for their own good."


TEACHING MATH AS NARRATIVE DRAMA
When Edward B. Burger presents a math challenge to his class at Baylor University, he paces the aisles and pairs students together. "I want to hear chattering," he says. Before long, students are laughing and shouting out answers. He dashes to the chalkboard to scribble them down, creating long rows of numbers topped with running stick figures. Mr. Burger, 46, who is visiting from Williams College, keeps up a rapid-fire banter with his students, whom he calls by name. He began teaching night classes at Austin Community College at age 22, while he was working on his doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin. "What I was trying to do was to take really complex, intricate, abstract ideas of mathematics and make them come to life for these students," he says. He began encouraging students to be creative and take risks, and even bases a portion of their grades on "the quality of their failure." The article is in The Chronicle of Higher Education


Scraping a chalkboard with the fingernails produces a sound which most people find extremely irritating. The basis of this innate reaction has been studied in the field of psychoacoustics.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalkboard

come to live/ come alive
Meaning #1: stop sleeping
Synonyms: wake up, awake, arouse, awaken, wake, waken