This article first appeared in The Teaching Professor on August 8, 2022 © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. Try The Teaching Professor FREE for three weeks!

I probably shouldn’t admit it, but when I started my teaching career, I had one clear goal on the first day of class: to scare the crap out of my students.

I’m exaggerating, but only a little. And while I’m tempted to say, “I’m not even sure where that came from!”, that’s not quite true: It came from my sense that, as a graduate student and young professor not much older than my students, I needed to assert my authority. It came from the fear that I might not be as smart as I thought, and that I needed to hide that behind a veil of superiority. It came from the intimidation I myself had felt, semester after semester, year after year, sitting in class across from professors I assumed were infinitely wise and infinitely powerful.

It seems odd to even be talking about this in the “post” COVID era: Among the many lessons the pandemic has taught us about effective teaching, “be kind to your students” ranks right at the top. But to be honest, even after the last few years, “being kind” isn’t really my main goal when I first enter the classroom. Rather, on that first day, I want to make my students curious.

Take Bryan Kelvey, for example, a meteorology professor at Carroll Community College. He begins class by handing out weather maps, dividing students into groups, and asking them to predict the weather.

Or consider the late Thomas Knorr, a physics professor at Wheeling Jesuit: He began his introductory lectures by giving students a long, narrow piece of wood and asking them to devise a unit of measurement that they would then have to use throughout the semester (Hanstedt, 2018).

In my own introductory humanities courses, I like to project a painting by JMW Turner—one of his more abstract ones—onto the screen and ask students whether it is a celebration of technology or a reaction to it—and how they know. Sometimes I also give them a short poem and ask them to identify the most important word in it—the word around which the whole poem revolves—and explain their reasoning.

I do this even before I tell them my name. I don’t want them to be distracted by who I am, by my title, by power dynamics that are unavoidable. I want them to love what I love: the way perspective can change depending on what we emphasize, the formal elements that attract us or turn us away from, the way words have both an intellectual and an emotional logic, the way the images we have in our minds as a result of those words can influence our perception of the people and the world around us.

I also want students to be confused – and to enjoy that confusion. I want them to understand that confusion is a necessary step, not so much toward an absolute answer, but toward the next wonderful, compelling, beautiful confusion that is incredibly exciting.

Years ago, I gave a talk at Montgomery College in Maryland, emphasizing that when we teach general education, we need to do a better job of connecting our courses to life outside the academy. Afterward, a mathematics professor came up to me. “I understand what you’re saying,” she said. “But I love my subject not because it’s connected to life, but because it has these big, beautiful problems. They don’t really have a purpose, but I Love them.”

Kathy Takayama (2014) puts it this way: As scientists, we know that our best work comes from moments of confusion, where something doesn’t make sense, in spaces of paradox or contradiction. These spaces contain questions that we want to answer – no, actually we feel forced Takayama goes on to note that our students are also, by and large, in a state of transition, whether from high school to the workforce or from one career stage to the next. She encourages us to allow our students to dwell in this transitional state, to embrace it and learn, to explore the robust and playful opportunity it provides to ask questions and engage in problem-solving.

All this, it seems to me, offers an answer to an eternal question – a question that has been asked even more frequently since the pandemic: How do we motivate our students?

We engage them by making the first day, the first hour, the first minute of class to introduce them to beautiful problems – the kind of problems that fascinate us. The kind of paradoxes that led us into our fields of expertise. The kind of questions that almost make us run into the street on the way to work in the morning, so distracted are we. The kind of confusions and challenges that we discuss over coffee with colleagues at conferences and laugh about in the taxi ride back to the hotel after giving a not particularly interesting keynote speech. We start not with the syllabus, not with the table of contents, not with the attendance policy, not with lame jokes, but with the real questions that bring us joy in our own work.

I know, I know, we can raise a number of objections to this approach:

1. I can’t do that in a large lecture.
2. Maybe you can in your area, but in my area these questions are so advanced that we can’t answer them on the first day.
3. However, we are legally obliged to cover the curriculum.

I’m happy to discuss the details in more detail – just email me! However, my short answer to these concerns is this:

1. Yes, you can: that’s what Clicker and Poll Everywhere are for.
2. Yes, many of us research and write about questions that are so advanced or abstract that they cannot be covered on the first day. If that is the case for you, think back to the first time you fell in love with your field: What big questions did you think about early on? Bring them into play, perhaps in a simplified form. And if even this are too advanced, focus less on the complexity of the question and more on conveying to students the intellectual and emotional fascination you feel when working in your field. What kind of puzzle, riddle, or challenge could accomplish this?
3. Cover the curriculum later. And if you’re looking for some good ideas on how to move beyond the legal obligations to a meaningful understanding of the curriculum, check out the tips offered here.

Maybe I slipped up earlier when I said that being kind wasn’t necessarily my main goal on the first day of class. Because in a culture that increasingly views learning and knowledge – and a college degree – as transactional; in a nation where curiosity is under threat and too many are willing to take the ramblings of idiots on social media at face value; in such a world, making our students curious may be the kindest gift we can give them.

Paul Hanstedt, PhD, is founding director of the Harte Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington and Lee University and author of General Education Essentials: A Guide for College Faculty (soon to be published in its second edition) and Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World.

References

Hanstedt, Paul. 2018. Creating evil students. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

Takayama, Kathy. 2014. “Fostering Learning Cultures.” AAEEBL Conference. Boston, MA: 2014.