First Class Reflections

Wednesday saw my sections of 1301 meet for the first time. Though first days are, obviously, the first and last chance to make a first impression on students, I find that it's also their first and last chance to make a first impression on me, their instructor. This is obvious but worth noting, along with its qualifiers, for a few reasons:

1. In any given class meeting, instructors are essentially teaching, in the case of 1301, 35 different classes. Because impressions and opinions are digested differently by each student, I like to reflect on Wallace Stevens' opening stanza to "Metaphors of a Magnifico" to ground myself before starting. He writes, "Twenty men crossing a bridge, / Into a village, / Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges, / Into twenty villages". So, 35 students are 35 students seeing 35 instructors and hearing 35 different messages.


2. My name is in the right hand column of the roster. Dr. Mark Smith, former composition director at Northern Michigan University, told incoming TA's this factoid in order to quell any concerns about our fitness or ability to command respect, convey important information, and provide students with a positive learning experience. Because graduate school asks us to learn and to teach, it can cause some stress fractures in our psyche. However, in even the worst case scenario, I will not do my students any harm with my relative inexperience teaching composition. Though certain teaching techniques may be roughly hewn, I am capable of overcoming these lack-of-experience issues by being a decent human being who knows and cares about the material I've been charged to help them learn.


3. I do not remember the first day of my undergraduate career. Though it is true that impressions are likely cemented on the first day, I don't think that a rough start is that big of a deal. Students, especially first semester freshman, are often overwhelmed, rattled, and eager to overcome their real or preceived shortcomings. In short, I wonder if sometimes they're not more concerned with how they're seen than they are with how they see their instructors. And, for better or worse, those impressions grow fuzzy and indistinct as the semester moves on. We can either reinforce their positive impressions or begin to dismantle their negative ones.

Those are my main thoughts as I start a new semester. For this term, I was more concerned about the technology aspects of the class than I was about presenting material, making a positive impression, or getting flustered or rattled. Though, and this is funny, I could not unlock the cabinet in my second section. I knelt behind the podium, jimmying the key, swearing to myself, and, after class, realized that that's an apt image for teaching composition with or without technology. Sure, there are all sorts of great things to be gained by teaching or taking composition courses, but if the cabinet or the packaging of the material is junked, broken, or flat out stinks, all the goals locked away and theorized about--those goals that will best provide students with the skills and techniques to succeed in their college and professional lives--are meaningless.

All in all, a successful first day. 14 more, and we'll call it a term. Zippy.