Two Cultures on the First Day of Class
And also the last day
Over at Inside Higher Ed they have a piece headlined “Starting Off Right With the Syllabus” about ways to use the first day of class to get students to “engage” with the document in question. As a 51-year-old professional academic reading this, my immediate reaction is that I would seriously consider jumping out a third-floor window to get away from some of these activities. (I’d be thwarted mostly by the fact that modern climate control means that none of the classroom windows actually open any more…)
This does remind me, though, that the approach to “the syllabus” is one of those areas where there are particularly stark disciplinary divisions, and that these largely carry over to the first day of class. This leads to a pattern that I was sorta-kinda aware of as a student but never gave much thought to, that makes total sense on reflection given the way courses in different fields operate.
As an undergrad, the first day of class in courses about literature and history and politics tended to be kind of useless. They consisted of either a brief rundown of the course policies and what books you needed to get followed by an initial assignment and an early dismissal, or “Let’s go around the room and everybody introduce themselves with your name, class year, major, and an embarrassing story from junior high…” Science and math courses, on the other hand, opened with a more or less normal lecture (albeit slightly shortened by the need for a brief review of the course policies).
As a student, I didn’t give this much thought— I was aware of it, and would tentatively plan what I would do with the half-a-class-block if I got lucky and was let out early, but mostly just wrote it down to the English and History faculty being a little more touchy-feely as people than the Physics and Math faculty. With a bit more perspective, though, it makes a lot of sense given the nature of the material. Math and science classes tended to be direct lecture courses, where the faculty present material and then assign homework, where the not-STEM courses were more about discussing texts, and thus required students to have read stuff before class, which obviously wasn’t something you could count on for the first day. This also carried over to the last day of class for the term: STEM courses tended to use the final class meeting just for exam review and Q&A (or maybe student presentations in classes that involved final projects), where not-STEM courses would be a more or less normal discussion, maybe with a more summative “here are the grand themes you should recall from the semester” character. And again, that makes total sense given the disciplinary difference— there’s no point to introducing new material on the last day of a lecture course, but it’s a perfectly useful class day if you’re discussion pre-class reading.
This distinction has softened a bit with the rise of active learning methods and things like “flipped classes” in STEM courses, which have more of a read-the-book-and-then-we’ll-talk nature than the sit-down-shut-up-take-out-your-notebooks lectures of my youth. Still and all, I’m in the middle of prepping a new-to-me course for the Fall term that will start in a couple of weeks (well, technically, right now I’m procrastinating from prepping said course…), and I could not be less interested in devoting the entire first day of class to “engaging” with the syllabus. I’m planning to use it as a more-or-less-normal class, doing a fast recap of fairly basic background material that the students ought to have encountered in some past courses.
(The course in question is an intermediate quantum mechanics course, using Griffiths’s book for those in the business, and the first-day material is a rundown of basic probability concepts that will be used over and over in the course.)
Another contributing factor here is the single-topic, single-text nature of the courses. I’ve taught and taken a couple of physics courses that were half from one book and half from another, but for the vast majority of the physics curriculum, you can describe the contents by naming the book. I’m getting a bunch of emails these days asking about course equivalencies for students transferring in from other institutions, and pretty much the only information I need to match a course at Directional State to one of our courses is what book they used. “Halliday and Resnick” or “Serway” identify a course in the intro engineering sequence, while “Giancoli” is a course in the pre-med sequence. I did it in the parenthetical above— “QM out of Griffiths” tells every physics prof in the country what that course is— and it carries all the way into grad school, where “Jackson” is enough to trigger bad flashbacks to a very particular course.
As a result, there’s not a great deal to engage with in the syllabus— there’s a textbook, you can get it at the bookstore or from some shady online site, we’ll be working through it more or less in order. There are various class and grading policies, and if I’m trying out some unusual grading scheme or a different class structure, I’ll spend a bit of time going over those, but none of that really demands a significant fraction of the first class.
If you’re teaching about a broad genre of literature, though, you need a bunch of different texts, and there’s probably value to talking through why you picked them or how your organized them. Likewise if you’re teaching about a large swathe of history in some particular region: you’ll necessarily have to be choosing what to put in and what to leave out, and there’s some meat there that can lead to a useful first-day discussion. Those choices just aren’t really present in the sciences in the same way, meaning that the syllabus really is mostly just a list of policies and procedures and the legalistic bafflegab that the college requires because the attorney says it will reduce the chance of a lawsuit.
And that, in turn, goes a long way toward explaining my instant reaction to the Inside Higher Ed piece. Put that together with my desire to delay the writing of lecture notes about the Born Rule, and you’ve got this post pretty well explained, as well.
I sorta-kinda suspect that I’ve written essentially this same post before, at some point in my 20-year history of blogging, but I can’t be bothered to look. I’ll probably do it again at some point in the future; if you’d like to know as soon as I do, here’s a button:
If you want to enable my procrastination by complaining about my characterization of syllabi or chocie of textbook, the comments will be open:
A few years ago - during an ill-advised jaunt through law school in my mid-30's - I had one class in particular that used an organizational style that I thought was incredibly effective. Possibly it just clicked with me personally, or it may just be that it was a law school class (patent law, which was the entire reason I went back to school) and those, for some reason, lead themselves to creating a "great outline" of all the material covered in the class.
(Perhaps I should have been outlining my classes all along, STEM and non-STEM, in undergrad, and I was just too young and dumb to do it that way.)
In any case, we spent the entire first week or two going through the entire semester's worth of material at a very high level. Here's what a patent is, the overall requirements for getting on are that it is original, functional, and you created it first (or something - this was 15 years ago and I don't do that anymore), it lasts for this long, it can be invalidated by x, y, or z, whatever. In any case, for an outline, just covering the major headings.
Then we spent the rest of the semester working through that outline, hitting each topic in full detail. I thought it was great because the entire semester I had a sense of what we had covered, what we were covering now, and what we still had to cover for the rest of the semester, within a framework that had been previously laid out.
Again, perhaps it's just me, but in other classes I never had a sense of what was coming next, and I didn't have a framework of what we were covering mattered within the overall structure of what I was supposed to learn over the course of that class. I found that exceptionally helpful because normally at the end of the class I would have this mass of material that I learned and I'd be trying to figure out how to organize it as a whole, and not just a collection of disparate topics that had been thrown at me willy-nilly. (In fact, I'm sure it made sense within the context of the syllabus, but since I didn't know what any of the things in the syllabus meant until we got to them, it meant nothing to me until we were already in the weeds of it.)
TL;DR - the most effective use of the syllabus I've seen was when we spent several class periods going over it with a general explanation of what each topic was, so we could see how it fit into the whole. Then we went back and filled in the details on each topic so we had a sense of the entire structure from the very beginning.
Just some thoughts from the other side of the lectern. :)
Not so much a question as a comment, ha ha. Like you, I probably wouldn't do any of these for an upper level course, though I might do one or two of the shorter ones on the second day with a class consisting mostly or entirely of first-year students, just to emphasize that it's an important document they should pay attention to. I'd make the syllabus part of the reading homework for the second day -- maybe requiring students to mark it up in Perusall or Google Docs, or giving a short syllabus quiz on the second day. These days I rarely spend the first day of class on the syllabus itself; instead, I jump right in with an activity that exemplifies what we'll be doing in class. More interesting for everyone.