Thread by @studentactivism

Seems like a good time for another of my classroom teaching practice threads. Today's topic: How I use the first class(es) of the semester to set up what follows.

My introductory work has gradually expanded over the years, to the point where in a twice-weekly class we'll now spend the whole first week on it, starting actual course content at the top of week two. Here's why:

I've never been a "here's the syllabus, go go read it" type of prof, and I move further away from that approach all the time. My syllabus lays out how my class works—the first class of the semester is my opportunity to explain how those policies fit together and why I chose them.

If you look at the threads in this thread-of-threads, most of them describe stuff I discuss with students on the first day of class: "Here's what this course is gonna be like. Here's why I do it that way. Here's what it means for our working relationship."

Too many profs assume that their policies and practices represent a universal norm or ideal. Each of us is idiosyncratic, and if we don't let students know what our idiosyncracies are, we wind up rewarding the ones who are good at guessing and punishing those who aren't.

(Which means, of course, rewarding students who have already been socialized to conform to higher ed expectations—or into expectations that happen to resemble ours—and punishing those who haven't. Which is an ugly and cruel thing to do.)

So in a twice-weekly class, the entire first session will be on how I understand the project of the class, how I understand the project of learning and teaching history, and what the syllabus says—point by point, page by page—and why.

A big chunk of this, BTW, is devoted to the grading process—making it clear what my expectations are, how grading works, and (crucially!) what their options are for bringing grades up and challenging me if they think I've gotten something wrong.

If you, as a professor, think students shouldn't care about grades, give everyone an A. Problem solved. If you're gonna give grades, the grading process is a contract between you and the students, and you're obligated to make the contract a fair, decent, and transparent one.

As I see it, the list of things I owe my students is long (longer by far than the list of things they owe me), and I make my understanding of those obligations clear on the first day of class.

So that's the first day. Here's the second:

At the start of the second day of class, I give each student three blank 3X5 cards. These cards serve two purposes. The first purpose is to give them an opportunity to tell me their names.

Lots of students go by a name that isn't the one on the roster: Trans students, students who go by nicknames, students whose middle name is the name they've always used, whatever. If you're going to be talking to them for four months, you should know their actual names.

But in my experience, students often won't correct me when I encourage them to do so while I'm taking roll, or after class. (I often didn't when I was a student, despite the fact that the name on the roster was one I'd never been called in my life.)

So by giving them the cards, and inviting them to write down whichever name they want, I make the choice as close to frictionless as I can. They have to write SOMETHING, and writing down what they prefer is (not always, but usually) as easy as writing down what's on the roster.

Why three cards, though? This is where it gets interesting, and why I don't give out the cards on the first day of class.

I teach history. Specifically, I teach introductory history courses. Specifically specifically, I teach introductory survey history courses at a community college that serves students from an extremely wide variety of backgrounds and experiences.

I've always encouraged students to ask me tangential questions in class—questions of the "that reminds me: I've always wondered what the deal was with blah blah blah"—type. I can't always answer them immediately, but they're pretty much always worthwhile.

A few years ago, it occurred to me to be a bit more proactive—to ask students to give me those kinds of questions at the beginning of the semester.

If I'm teaching world history to 1500, or even US history since 1865, I'm going to leave out far more than I include. Soliciting questions at the beginning of the semester gives students a chance to help shape the direction of the course.

A lot of the questions they ask wind up being stuff I was already going to cover. A bunch more wind up being ones that are easy to incorporate as I go. And for the rest I set aside a bit of time every week or two at the beginning or end of a class, and just go through some cards.

The problem is, though, that it's hard for them to come up with questions—particularly questions they're really interested in knowing the answers to—from a cold start. And I don't want them to just put down anything, or pander.

So I give them a heads-up on the first day of class that the cards are coming, so they can start thinking about it, and then on the second class session we preview the whole semester, week by week.

I hand out the cards at the beginning of the second class, and then I just do a few minutes, week by week, on every topic we're gonna cover. What are the big questions? What are the big issues? Why do I care enough about this to put it on the syllabus?

This nudges some students' memories, sparks other students' curiosity, encourages some to ask questions they might have thought were too basic or too niche. And at the end of the class I collect a stack of cards, many of them really interesting.

And of course along the way I've given the students a roadmap to the semester, a sense of my priorities and interests, and a set of hooks that they can start to hang things on as we go.

One postscript on the question cards: I explicitly invite them to ask questions about conspiracy theories, if they want to. If they're wondering whether aliens built the pyramids, or whether we really went to the moon, or what the Illuminati is, they're welcome to ask that.

As a historian, I LOVE talking about conspiracy theories. Both because some of them are actually true, and because of what the false ones reveal about how we understand the past.

So that's my first two class sessions, every course, every semester, now. And I have to admit that I feel a little nervous saying so in public, even after all these years.

There's still a voice in my head that says "You're taking time away from the meat of the course." "You're cheating your students." "You're slacking." The work that I do—that we do—in these two sessions still feels vaguely scandalous, vaguely decadent, to me.

The vast majority of professors receive virtually no instruction in teaching before we enter the classroom, and only minimal and desultory feedback or guidance from colleagues as we go. So of course our work can feel isolated, furtive, clandestine.

That's a big part of why I do these threads—and why they still feel a bit like a tightrope walk.

Good question. I should have clarified.

I have the students write out one question per card. That way I can easily sort and arrange them, and set aside duplicates and redundancies. That gives me a single stack per class, ordered chronologically, so I can read questions from the top of the stack as I go.

(There will always be some questions that don't fit the chronological order—maybe they're methodological, maybe they're meta-questions about teaching, maybe about current events. Those I put at the bottom of the stack and check in on occasionally as the semester progresses.)

When I've answered a question, it gets set aside, so the stack dwindles over the course of the semester. I keep one stack per course, and generally just wrap a rubber band around each one and leave them all floating in my teaching bag.