A good "first" (well, okay, second) day of teaching

I had a wonderful "first" day of teaching yesterday.  (Let's call it the first day since the actual first day, Wednesday, was nothing more than a syllabus and a writing prompt.)  And in the spirit of trying to more regularly and actively reflect on my teaching this quarter, I'd like to write about it.

So, a few contingencies are on my side this quarter.  I now have three quarters of experience under by belt, which both makes me feel more comfortable in the classroom and has allowed me to build a toolbox of skills and ideas that I can more naturally access as I talk in front of a class.  It feels easier to talk about writing (or just talk in general, in front of the class!).  But just as importantly, I understand this discipline so much more strongly.

I've had a summer of reading and thinking about rhet comp literature.  I still process some of the ideas we read about in last winter's Teaching College Writing, and a spring course on Ancient Rhetoric has finally clarified a lot of the fog that surrounded Aristotle, in my head.  Almost a year of engaging with material, reading professional listservs, and mulling over ideas has me thinking in a new way.

It's funny how learning to teach is, in many ways, just like learning to write.  There are certain skills that are simply impossible to execute perfectly on the first "draft"—they must be slowly incorporated as you revise and rewrite, revise and reteach.  Yesterday, I found myself better using the kinds of tools that Joyce emphasizes in Practicum—I'm simply more able to use them, now that I've gained some metacognitive distance.  (Which, in case you didn't know, is pretty much my favorite technical teaching term.)

For instance, I began class by acknowledging and praised what the students were doing in their first-day writing prompts—a simple, "So I read your first-day writing prompts, and I really enjoyed them.  You had some very interesting and insightful things to say."  From there I talked about what they had written about, some really interesting and insightful examples from specific students, and some trends I saw developing across the class.  Last year I had simply made a list of what I saw and what they had in common with each other and thrown it up on the projector, and it wasn't nearly as effective.  The seemingly small change of adding a short phrase that acknowledged what they did (and the fact that they did something well) was, I think, what made for the new classroom dynamic this year.  They were just so excited.

I turned to a discussion of what writing can be, and what it will look like in our class this quarter.  It's not about grammar—our focus is being aware of an audience, and writing to that audience.  Presenting ideas logically (in terms of development and organization).  Embracing writing as a process, and getting things down on paper the first time through—accepting that our writing won't look perfect after a first draft.  I know it's because they're fall quarter freshmen, and they're excited to be in college—but their faces looked so damn excited.

I owe some of the inspiration for Friday's success to the discussions I overheard in the Teaching Practicum on Friday morning, as well.  (This year I'm the graduate assistant to the directors of our writing program, so I'm attending weekly Teaching Practicum courses along with the first-year cohort of instructors.)   Great stuff was said that connected the anxieties students were coming in with (fear of rules, fear that writing has to be "perfect," difficulty in getting things down on paper perfectly, fear that their creativity and personal views will be repressed) to the way that we will actually be encouraging our students to write.

A discussion of reading practices built on the energy of the beginning of class.  Knowing this to have worked well in the past, I tried asking a reflective question to open discussion—I asked them to tell me what they found interesting or surprising about the A&B's discussion of "expert reading strategies," and they were surprisingly energetic.  One told me, "I'm really mad no one ever told me about this before I took AP English.  It would have made it SO much easier!"

All in all, a very satisfying class.  Great way to end the week since Wednesday, the true first day of the semester, had felt a bit awkward for me.  I remember finding last year that my awful days of teaching, or days that ended somewhat unsatisfactorally for me, were usually followed by great ones.  Maybe the tradition continues.