We started classes this week, and it was exhausting and exciting in equal measure. When I was in school I almost always looked forward to the start of the school year. I loved the supplies we got (sometimes it was even the BIG crayon box, the one with the sharpener on the back), the Big Chief tablets, and #2 pencils (if you were lucky you got ones that were different from those of everyone else). I don't remember what mine looked like, but I do remember that this was an important aspect of the hunt for school supplies. Glue came in bottles and you would put coloured tissue paper in the bottle to colour the glue. I can remember the smell of a new classroom even today.
While this is my career, a college teacher's life sadly is not quite the new discovery each year that is part of the 2nd or 3rd grader's experience. But I still like it. And because of the way that most US universities structure their schedule, you have a completely new beginning for almost all your classes almost every semester. Each class has a different atmosphere, and there are always new people and new issues ever January as well as every August. It is nice to feel renewed, but it isn't something completely unknown, usually.
Come with me through the orange filigree door for some thoughts on how the new beginning has gone this semester and the concern/goal I have for one of my larger classes. If you have suggestions on engaging students in a large, largely lecture, class I would love to hear them.
I am like most professors, in that the majority of content on the first day of my classes is going over the syllabus. I do not expect students to read the syllabus as closely as I really would like them to, so I use it as a contract, but go through and highlight the most important things for them. These include things like "While I don't count attendance I expect that you will attend class every day" and "Yes, I take plagiarism very seriously, and the chances are pretty good I will catch you if you do it" and "Computers should be put away and phones turned off when you are in class." Essentially I go through the rules and the deadlines, and assume that they will be able to figure out the points and set their priorities themselves.
However, the first day of class, just going through "rules" would make for a very boring time. I do a few other things for me, and a few for the students. For me I call the roll so I can figure out how names are pronounced and start to put names to faces (or more accurately put names in their seats, and hope eventually to match faces to names). And I hand out information sheets for the students to fill out so I know something about them. I ask such questions as what are your major(s) and minor(s), what museums have you visited recently (if any, and sometimes students say they don't visit museums), and why they are taking the class. Often the answers are rather generic, but I do get some information that helps me pick out some of the students from the beginning, and I have caught people who thought they were majoring in some Art instantiation, but are not in the right classes for what they want to do. That can help to offset bad advice from incoming student advisors (which, although they are very good, happens at times, in part because students don't really know what they want).
For the students I try to give them a sense of what we are going to be doing this semester. For my introductory Art History class, I show them some images, and introduce the concept of iconography -- sometimes by drawing a stick figure of a man, and putting a crown on the drawing, which they will instantly identify as being a king. And having them look at a photograph of a church and get them to figure out how they will know a building is of one particular type (e.g. why is this a church and not a palace?). In my interdisciplinary studies class, I had each of them briefly introduce themselves and identify what their interdisciplinary major will be (at my university the self-designed major is one that focuses on interdisciplinarity). and for the last 45 minutes I put them together to talk about their majors with people interested in the same sorts of things (Film Studies and New Media Studies together, Environmental Studies and Environmental Science and Sustainability together in another part of the room. The loveliest thing about these classes is when the students are talking and the volume starts to rise, and there is laughter and discussion among students who did not know each other just ten minutes before. It doesn't even really matter (at least today) if they are talking about their majors, the syllabus, or the upcoming NCAA basketball season (to be fair, as far as I could tell no one was talking about NCAA basketball). They are building an academic and social community based on shared interests and desires (the environmental, women's and gender studies, and development majors all have a desire to make the world better; the communication and creative students are interested in cultural issues and communication strategies for entertainment and persuasion), and they will help each other through the class experience. They may even make friends for life (my closest friends other than those I work with are those I went through college with); although I am a teacher of content and process, a university experience should be life-changing in other ways as well, and it is not a bad thing to promote that within my classes.
A successful first day is one in which students ask questions, develop a sense of the level of discourse and commitment will be demanded by the class, and figure out whether this is something they want to devote the effort to get a good grade or other beneficial outcome from or not. It is also one after which I have several students dropping the class. While each one is disappointing to me, when I go through the sheets they filled out for me, I am often not surprised by what they have said. The students who say, in answer to the question why are you taking this class, say "it fit my schedule" may or may not choose to drop, but someone who wrote "I loved visiting this museum and I wanted to know more about what I saw" is highly unlikely to drop the class after the first day (there is an exception for graduating seniors, however, who have to have other priorities, and might find the requirements too much for a last semester in which they are doing a capstone course).
So far my three large classes seem to be going okay (the fourth is a team taught senior thesis class which is very predictable and is doing fine). In one of them, you can't stop students from talking, which is a great thing, and in another, students are really enthusiastic about the upcoming assignments and stayed after to talk with the visiting specialist, and I finally had time to talk to her for a few minutes after the students were gone, a full half hour after the regularly-scheduled end tie. In the third class, a large-for-us lecture class with 45 students, there were a few questions the second day, and the third. But not much engagement beyond the dedicated taking of notes. They were too quiet, engaged but not in a way that encouraged involvement in the material. It is hard to see students spending the whole semester engaged like that. I do lecture in my largest classes, at least most of the time, but the way I lecture is by telling stories, and I try to be as entertaining and engaging as I can be without downplaying content. And I want them to engage by laughing when I say something funny. They are slightly uncomfortable the first few days, and I am sorry that they need to take the time to relax enough to smile, or even laugh. But the ice eventually does get broken, and at the end of the third class period, on Friday, when I was snarky, they did laugh (to the credit of Mel Brooks, it was a joke about Nazis). It was a nice way to end the week (not with Nazis, but ... you know).
I have four very different classes this semester, two of them in my home department, and two in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department. One of the classes in the latter is a very project-oriented one with significant service learning and community engagement components. It takes a lot of time to set it up, but once the semester starts it needs management, but much less leading, from me. The others are more guided, but only one is completely taught. I need to work on that, breaking away from the very old-fashioned teacher imparting knowledge model. It is hard to do, though, in a class that focuses on content, according to the university's curricular framework. I am still working on it, both conceptually and practically. So although everything has started out well, and I think the entertaining aspect of the lectures seems to be going okay, I will be looking for windows into a different process for delivering content, or achieving student-generated content that would produce the same result.
We have other issues this year in my department, including planning for the future after multiple retirements, not all of whom will be returned to us as faculty lines. We are preparing for our five-year review (I am on the three-person team doing the self-study). We are developing a minor in Museum Studies, and I am leading that initiative. There are other things I am involved with off-campus, most particularly the Council on Undergraduate Research, and then there is the research that I am wanting to focus on, a site report that is perhaps 20 years overdue.
But right now, I am enjoying a relatively successful first week of classes, and hoping that positive trajectory will continue for the next several months. How is your semester starting?