I have been working at UW since 1988, and had prior teaching experience elsewhere. But I still get nervous before the first lecture of an offering. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's because it's a time to make first impressions and to set the tenor of the course, and there are so many ways it can go wrong. Yet common sense tells me while the first lecture is important, it's only slightly more important than the other twenty-five lecture meetings.
When I was asked to teach first year, I knew that much of what I said in the first lecture would be instantly forgotten, washed away in the overwhelming flood of information and sensation experienced by a new student. I took to dressing all in black, carrying a large boombox in, and blasting some raucous music at them. I would pick something I liked but which would set them a bit on edge, one piece at the beginning of the class of recent vintage, and one at the end from the year they were born (lest they think I was trying to be young and cool, not that I could ever fool anyone if I wanted to). The idea was to give the impression that this was not business as usual. I don't know if it had that effect, but I liked doing it. I still play the music, because it's easy to do with the A/V setup in the classroom, though I've moved it to the pre-lecture transition, and it's no longer as raucous or as symbolic.
As I gained some experience in teaching, and realized how different than mine the views of many students were regarding what a lecture was for, what assignments and tests were for, and how they should approach each of these components of a course, I took to speaking about these in the first lecture, and where appropriate during the term. This evolved into a set of three thought experiments, which I set out in an open discussion.
The first asked students to imagine a scenario where we gave them back the three hours of lecture time each week, providing them with all auxiliary materials such as instructor lecture notes. We would still have office hours, set and grade assignments, and run exams. Few opted for this, because they felt that lectures did assist them in learning the material. (Of course, some of those who expressed this view proceeded to skip the majority of the lectures.)
The second set out a scenario in which, as students walked into the midterm, they were met with the announcement, "The answers are on the back table, take them if you want." Who would take them? Again, a few people said they would; most said that it would render the exercise meaningless, that they wanted the information about themselves that the midterm provided. I suspect once the few actually went back and took the answers, everyone would, so as not to "fall behind", even if that meant undercutting their learning. But this was a thought experiment, so I couldn't confirm it.
The third postulated a contact of mine in the Registrar's office, who could replace a student's mark in my course with a mark that would show up on the transcript as exactly the average of their marks in other courses (i.e., it would be average-neutral). I then offered the students the choice: if they immediately signed a paper saying they would go away, I would give them this special mark. Who would take it? Typically at most one student would put up their hand, though I suspect that if they could answer anonymously, or think about it overnight, more would take up the offer.
I was under no illusions that this discussion would magically convince students to see lectures as opportunities instead of chores, midterms as diagnostics instead of obstacles to be overcome by cramming, and a course credit as a symbol of a successful learning experience instead of an end in itself. But at least they had been given the opportunity to think about these issues.
Unusual though a discussion like this is in most courses, it still suffers from being moderated by a professor, and students may give the answers they think the professor expects, instead of what they really think. To gain some distance, and to spice things up a little, one time I taught 251 I wrapped this in a bit of theatre. I came in holding a telephone receiver (it should have been a cellphone, but I don't own one) saying, "Suppose your instructor couldn't make it this morning. Suppose he phoned me and asked me to take the first class. The dialogue might have gone something like this." I then proceeded to act out a conversation, from the point of view of an alumnus working in industry, a former classmate of the instructor, being asked to take the first class and just read out stuff from the Web page on the marking scheme and other logistical details. Instead, the industry guy proceeds to question the whole system of education through the three thought experiments. Part of the effect depends on students being confused by the use of the conditional tense in those first three sentences, and not being really sure who was talking to them. Once I got through the experiments, I called a break ("Your instructor was supposed to be here by now... I'm sure he'll show up any minute") and then put my name up on the board and continued with the regular lecture.
That was fun, also. But sometimes things happen that change our perspective, and make everything that we are doing seem self-indulgent, trivial, and ineffective. The last time I tried the performance described above, I delivered the first lecture on the morning of September 11, 2001. --PR
(Adapted from a blog posting made September 8, 2003.)