What's History: Cultures of Kindness in the Classroom

I've gone down a bit of a rabbit hole in thinking about kindness this week: between individuals, within groups, and in the classroom. Although teaching kindness isn't exactly teaching history, fostering a considerate atmosphere can greatly improve the ways in which we learn it.

Quite a bit of informal reflection has been done on academic kindness and unkindness. In these pieces, much has been made of the meanness of the academic world, expressed through, as Kelly J. Baker writes, "hostile questions and comments in seminars and at conferences, microaggressions, petty rivalries, sabotage and backbiting, racism, misogyny, ableism, ad hominem attacks, general rudeness, cruel footnotes and endnotes, harsh criticism of graduate students as a method to malign their advisers, remarkably long emails listing years of complaints, insidious gossip in the hallways, hate and disdain directed toward students, harassment, and even assault." The unkindness seems widely troubling enough to call forth a desire to counteract it-- there exists a Tumblr dedicated to small acts of Academic Kindness.  Baker suggests that the scarcity of consideration can be traced to a lingering division between the intellectual and the emotional which persists in academic circles: "Thought is what's important. And emotion? Less so."

I think many of us expect more from those who have spent their careers lifting up histories of the marginalized, or forming intellectual communities in ways that have inspired us. It is because of this that unkindness can dismay us so much-- not just an unpleasant moment, but a moment that makes us rethink our place in the world. This is doubly true in cases of imbalance of power-- when the unkindness comes from someone in a higher position on the academic hierarchy than their target. We have hope in those who have higher positions than us that they will behave in ways that, if not completely aware of our situation, are reflective of a certain element of awareness and sympathy. Instead, sometimes it is as though they revel in their ability to make others unsure of themselves-- they use their power to spread unhappiness and deter people from learning.

It is an awareness of these imbalances that I strive to bring into my teaching, despite the complications that arise when one teaches while being in graduate school. Many of us who are teaching assistants or graduate instructors do not often reflect on the complex balance of power that  in the classroom between us and our students. We often feel powerless to control what, when, and how we teach; we feel that we are at the mercy of student evaluations; most critically in the current time, we wonder if our students will target us because of our identities, beliefs, or scholarship for far-right harassment. The potential for injury comes from both "above" and "below" in the academic hierarchy. 

However, our students have similar worries about us, particularly students who do not fully understand the distinctions between lecturers, graduate instructors, and full professors; particularly marginalized or first-generation college students. Very little of this is explained to you when you enter an undergraduate degree program, and as a result I remember feeling mingled fear and awe at anyone who stood in front of a classroom. I was afraid to talk to any of them, and I worried about their opinions of me for minor actions. In this tense atmosphere, a little sympathy goes a long way. 

Students are not just uncertain about their instructors, of course; they also walk into the first day of class with some trepidation about their classmates. In my (very fortunate) experience, undergraduate classrooms tend towards superficial politeness already. There may be days of tension here and there, or conflicts between viewpoints about race, gender, ability, or sexuality that negatively impact students or instructors. However, for most times in most classrooms, the majority of students tend to be overly polite with one another, based out of their disinterest in starting a pointless conflict (likely about a topic they don’t feel they have a personal stake in) and the fear of being wrong or appearing unintelligent. I'm not talking about the oft (too oft)-repeated fear of "offending someone" in a "PC culture"  but rather the crickets and vague nods we've all received in response to a question like, "So, does everyone agree with Oliver's statement that the author of this document was trying to foment a Marxist revolution?" 

Education can help us more if we gain practice in disagreement about issues of interpretation, and teaching Reacting to the Past convinced me that aspiring to create an atmosphere where this could happen was desirable. Mark Carnes argues in his book Minds on Fire that Reacting to the Past creates a space in which students can comfortably disagree. In Reacting, students have a need to engage in conflict and take a stance which will necessarily put them in conflict with others-- the kind of temporary conflict that is excellent practice for the more permanent real conflicts that await. The Greenwich Village game is ideal for this because its two conflicting sides actually agree on many core principles-- supporting the rights of women, critiquing the horrors that befall working women in the 1910s, and the need for positive change in a world which seems far afield of the vibrant place they wish to inhabit. Yet they disagree on a few very critical points, largely revolving around tactics-- how best to get to the world they want.

How does all of this relate to kindness? I think fostering a culture of kindness in the classrooms in which we teach helps to ensure that students feel safe enough to disagree even without the excuse of embodying a historical character.  

It is interesting how many of the materials you can easily find on emphasizing kindness in the classroom deal with young children, as if kindness must only be suitable for children and irrelevant to the "real world." Yet I'd wager that many people learned a great deal about empathy and respect in college-- practicing concrete ways to help other people, joining groups dedicated to improving their communities and their world, or learning in their classes about the context of other groups and people which they had previously not appreciated.

Ideas about kindness don't have to be blatantly stated-- I don't have any plans to walk into my next class reminding everyone about treating one another with "loving kindness" (a reminder I got a lot in first grade) or handing out gold stars for sharing. In fact, the most effective thing I have done to promote consideration in my classroom was completely by accident. 

Public speaking can seem like the most daunting task to many students about to begin a Reacting game, and Lily Lamboy has put together an excellent set of videos which have been widely used among instructors who use RTTP. I used one of these, the eye contact exercise, in the first week of one semester of my Reacting to the Past course. Students pair up and practice talking to one another with eye contact. In part, this was simply to get students used to talking in front of a classmate and practice one of the important aspects of effective public speaking, so that they would have the tools to feel confident in their performance when it came time to argue for or against Anne Hutchinson's banishment, or appeal to the Boston Church to let them become members. The timing was convenient because it broke up the tedium of "Syllabus Week" and gave us all something to do while we waited for everyone's books to arrive (thanks, bookstore!). 

However, my choice to begin with this exercise had an added benefit I had not realized. The intimacy fostered by this exercise had lasting effects on the way in which students saw one another.  Unlike an earlier course, in which students had seemed uncomfortable with the amount of conflict that arose so suddenly with a group of veritable strangers, the group who participated in the eye-contact exercise seemed to feel more security in their roles almost immediately. I can only base these observations on my own vantage point-- perhaps the difference in the air between the two classes was entirely because of their individual personalities, or in the way I'd explained the ground rules of the games, or perhaps my observations don't adequately reflect their opinions of their time in the course. Yet the change in atmosphere as well as student comments suggested it had an effect. One pair even told me at the end of the course that they had become good friends who socialized outside of class because of their pairing for the exercise. (This Modern Love column suggests that sustained eye contact can lead to love! No reports back from my class on that front.)

The icebreaker is obviously not a novel idea. There are a lot of activities that get students to do a sort of meet-and-greet to learn names, build rapport, etc. Yet I rarely remember these being wildly successful from my own undergraduate career. I think the eye contact exercise works for several reasons:

• It's straightforward. Nothing terribly complex about looking at someone else and talking to them, though it may be difficult in other ways.
• It gives a task to focus on other than memorizing a name. Similarly--
• There's not a lot to fail at. I hate the "name game" because I have a terrible memory and I don't care what anyone says-- it's embarrassing to begin your first day failing to remember "Prickly Pete" or whoever.
• It lets you focus on one person and one thing at a time, meaning that you're more likely to remember what you learned. I'm reminded of the polar opposite of this exercise-- those bingo cards asking you to find "someone wearing green" or "someone who plays a sport" or "someone whose name begins with m." Has there ever been an activity more reluctantly begun than any round of this game ever played? 
• It practices a skill that will be important to students' success later in the game. So, to pull off the eye contact exercise specifically, I think a class probably needs to have a public speaking component. 
• And, most importantly for my purposes in fostering kindness, it creates a personal connection, which leads to an appreciation for the opinions and feelings of others in the room. 

Got some good ideas for cultivating collegiate kindness? Let me know!

Related Links: 

Academic Kindness on Twitter. 

Mark Higbee's article on Reacting Pedagogy which highlights, among other benefits, the social connections wrought by the games. 

Reacting to Reacting: Bellingham and the Granary Burying Ground

Granary Burying Ground, from the innermost side looking out. 

When I've talked previously about the Trial of Anne Hutchinson game, I've talked a lot about John Winthrop. If the goal of this blog is to find connections between teaching history and everyday life, John Winthrop makes for a rich source because he has been so aggressively memorialized through place, as I noted in my discussion of Boston Common and Winthrop Lane; through the wide availability of his writings, such as his conversion narrative; and through the continual recycling of the myth that the United States is the "citty upon a hill" of which Winthrop wrote.

However, I was delighted to find a slightly less-discussed figure from the Anti-Anne faction on my trip to Boston's Granary Burying Ground, the third-oldest cemetery in the city (citty?) Most of the attention at the Burying Ground is lavished on the who's-who of the American Revolutionary set-- Paul Revere, John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and Benjamin Franklin...'s parents are all resting comfortably here, as well as the victims of the Boston Massacre and the grave of Increase Mather. The slide show below has a few of my photos of these Revolution-era graves.

However, a (truly filthy) sign along the pathway revealed that none other than your old friend and mine, Richard Bellingham, also lay within the gates of the burying ground.

Sign mentioning Bellingham's burial site along with another Massachusetts governor in Tomb 146. 

There are several interesting reasons to recall Bellingham; when he is remembered it is most frequently not as a historical figure but as a character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. The historical Bellingham ran against Winthrop for the governorship in 1641 and served as the Massachusetts Bay Colony's eighth, sixteenth, and eighteenth governor. He was also influential in persecuting Quakers, including some of the pro-Anne faction, and Bellingham, Massachusetts is named after him.

All of this, however, apparently pales in comparison to the delights of historical gossip. The sign recalls another tidbit that I've mentioned in postmortem chats after the Anne Hutchinson trial-- his scandalous self-performed marriage to a much younger woman. Such drama! The 1919 History of the Town of Bellingham, 1719-1919 quotes Winthrop (again with Winthrop! The man had an opinion on everyone and everything, I tell you):

The young woman was ready to be contracted to a friend of his, who had lodged in his house and by his consent had proceeded so far with her, when on a sudden the Governor treated with her and obtained her for himself. He excused it by the strength of his affection, and that she was not absolutely promised to the other gentleman. Two errors more he committed on it. First that he would not have his marriage contract published where he dwelt, contrary to an order of court, and second that he married himself, contrary to the constant practice of the country (7).

Sadly, it is impossible to get close to Bellingham's resting place, as the pathways do not go near it and are pretty strictly cordoned off from the graves. However, the shot below gives a fairly good view of the top of the tomb, which details the two inhabitants and tells us that Bellingham died in 1672 at the age of 81.

This photo, from Find a Grave, is far better than any of the ones I was able to take. 

Related Links:

This video is a fun intro to the Granary Burying Ground and its inhabitants.
Enough About Me: I once played Pearl Prynne in an adaptation of The Scarlet Letter. Freddie Tate portrayed Bellingham. 
You may notice another familiar name in this character list for The Scarlet Letter-- John Wilson, minister of the First Church of Boston, also makes an appearance.

Enough About Me: Improv in the Classroom and Giving Yourself Gifts

Here's a fun fact about me: I, like many other impressionable souls, did a stint of improv in college, and by a stint, I mean "became enmeshed in improv for five years, including spinoff groups, off-campus shows, and several 24-hour indoor-outdoor marathons during which I rapped outdoors in the chill of the early April air." I spent my 21st birthday presenting at an academic conference and then being elected President of the campus improv group. (For you Bojack Horseman fans: Yes, Todd's experience in the second season seemed a little familiar to me.) For those unfamiliar with the form, improvisational acting encompasses a variety of styles, from games of music, dialogue, and movement (think Whose Line is it Anyway?) to more cohesive long-form scenes which can be comedic or serious.

My toothy grin at receiving the "Greatest Hit" superlative in 2013. Photo from Spiked Punch Lines Improv. 

I learned a ton (and made a lot of friends!) from improv, and I'm not alone. The form has been touted for its applicability in the classroom both as an activity for students and as good practice for instructors. In both cases, key parts of its appeal are its encouragement to work together with others instead of competing with or ignoring them; to listen to another person and build off of what they have said instead of negating it (also known as "Yes, And"); and to accept and try out new ideas without fear of failure. These benefits are similar to those that Reacting to the Past games intend to encourage. Mark Carnes titled a chapter of his book on Reacting to the Past "Learning by Failing." Indeed, the in-game portions of RTTP have much in common with improv-- Mark Higbee describes being in a Reacting game by encouraging us to "Imagine being in a play with no director, no script, and no set conclusion" (48).

However, I admit I don't love the idea of actually doing straight-up improv in most classes, because it is so often used with little investment or warning. Whereas it often seems like it will be a fresh, exciting energizer to instructors, the experience of being a student in a class where you are confronted with Surprise Improv is often characterized by anxiety and/or annoyance (even among those who are outgoing or already do improv). Several articles linked above note that improv exercises trust, and the annoying thing about trust is that it has to be a) slowly built and b) consensually developed. I do think that courses can incorporate improvisation and performance effectively-- if the building of trust between participants occurs regularly and if students are warned about this aspect of the course early on, so that they can decide whether they wish to opt out. 

It's much easier to use a little improv to facilitate better teaching. I won't rehash some of the popular concepts that others have addressed about this connection, some of which can be found here-- these are good connections and for the most part true ones, but they're not the ones I draw from the most. Without a doubt my most evoked improv-related technique is "Give yourself gifts."  I don't know how common this concept is among improv communities; I learned it in a workshop given by Oklahoma City improv duo Twinprov.  One of the titular twins offered this simple suggestion about the very beginning of a scene. "Give yourself gifts," he said, "even before the scene starts." He raised his arm in the air as though he were holding something above his head and explained that unlike the scene that starts with two people slouching neutrally at one another, the scene in which you have a raised arm has an immediate point of interest. It raises a question: what is he holding in the air? You don't have to know the answer to that question immediately, but if you give yourself the gift of having something to hold, you have the opportunity to answer that question in your scene. 

I approach research and teaching with this concept in mind. When I see something of interest to me, even if I'm not sure why it's of interest or what I could use it for, I take a photo, write it down, save the link, etcetera. This is the reason I have photos of research documents that would be great to use in classes that I have no current plans to teach. By making note of primary sources, pieces of information, potential places to take a class or activities to do, I give the instructor I will be in the future, struggling to make some sort of cohesive course, an opportunity to develop a lesson around something that caught my interest even without context. I've also regretted my failing to give myself gifts, such as when I was writing my Greenwich Village post last week and discovered that I had failed to give myself the gift of writing down exactly which of my photos corresponded to which of the tour's listings (thanks, Google Street View!).

The nature of the gift I'm giving myself is also significant. In the improv workshop, the gift could vary but was always physical: holding something in the air, or performing a repetitive motion with your foot, or simply pointing. It is so easy in both improv and teaching to fall back on the strength of your words, simply cracking jokes or stating information without actually evoking a scene or a place. But this is boring, as is obvious when you are sitting in the back of the room but somehow forgettable when you yourself are delivering your fifth witticism of the afternoon. The gift concept reminds me to incorporate not only pictures and words but also movement and three-dimensionality into class activities. If I'm lecturing, I try to move around (sometimes to a fault-- I've been accused of pacing), gesture with my hands, and incorporate at least one thing that requires a little bit of spatial explanation (if colonial Boston is here where I'm standing, Rhode Island is way over there at the other end of the room). In a discussion session, making groups and then combining or redividing them does more than change the people involved;  it changes one's physical context and thus, just slightly, one's mental context. I took several classes from a professor who would make everyone move every once in a while, suggesting that seeing the room from a different vantage point just might help you see the material differently too.

What gifts do you give yourself? Does improv have a place in your classroom or approach to work? 

Reacting to Reacting: Taking the Greenwich Village Walking Tour

While in New York City last fall, I remembered that when I began teaching Mary Jane Treacy's Greenwich Village game, I had seen a self-guided walking tour somewhere among the extra materials. Rebecca Stanton created this great resource as an add-on to the game.  I saved the map onto my phone and set out to hit a few key stops in the world of the bohemians.

My itsy-bitsy phone map of the tour. Larger Word doc version here.

The descriptions of the places on the tour. I did a lot of reverse pinching/pinching out/stretching!

If you've played the game, you may remember that most game action took place as the characters hung out in Polly's restaurant (14). You may also remember well this image of Polly's, which I show at every opportunity! 

 Jessie Tarbox Beals' photo of Polly's.

When I visited, I couldn't quite see address numbers and get my bearings enough to figure out where the restaurant formerly was-- at the time, I thought it was this building:

Wilf Hall, formerly...not what I thought.

However, when I sat down to write this post, I discovered that Polly's was actually more likely to be down the street where this building now sits. From Polly's to pizzeria? Perhaps the smallest shift in function that I found from 1913 to today overall. A blog post on Polly Holladay from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation suggests that the majority of the block was demolished to make way for NYU law buildings, Wilf Hall being one. Wilf Hall, incidentally, turned out to be more relevant than I thought it would be when it turned out not to be Polly's. As this 2010 NYU Law Magazine piece about the then-new building assures us, the Provincetown Playhouse is the lone survivor of the block, still utilized as a "working theatre." As players of the game may remember, a number of figures from the game were pioneers in the Provincetown Players, including John Reed, Hutchins Hapgood, Neith Boyce, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell. A History of the Provincetown Playhouse gives not only background details on the formation of the Players but also some fun insight into the Players' messy personal entanglements (sound familiar to any former bohemians?)

Besides Polly's, the bohemians had other neighborhood haunts, one being the Golden Swan Cafe (1). The dive bar was affectionately dubbed "The Hell Hole" and drew many of the Greenwich Village bohemians of the 1910s through its doors. Artist John Sloan, who plays a significant role in Greenwich Village, 1913, even did an etching of its raucous interior.

John Sloan's Hell Hole, 1917. Playwright Eugene O'Neill at upper right.

At present, the area is much more peaceful. As Stanton notes, since 2000 the site has been occupied by a small garden.

Sign for Golden Swan Garden, with outline of leaf.

Trees in the Golden Swan Garden.

Another angle on the Golden Swan Garden, showing some trees, a light post, and an empty pedestal planter.

I also visited the sites of two of John Reed's former apartments. The one he inhabited during the events of the Greenwich Village game once sat at 42 Washington Square (4), and inspired him to author a poem so delightful that I will reproduce it here even though Stanton has already included it in the tour:

In winter the water is frigid,                                                   
In summer the water is hot;                                                    
And we're forming a club for controlling the tub                   
For there's only one bath to the lot.
You shave in unlathering Croton,
If there's water at all, which is rare,--
But the life isn't bad for a talented lad
At Forty-Two Washington Square!

The dust it flies in at the window,
The smells they come in at the door,
Our trousers lie meek where we threw 'em last week
Bestrewing the maculate floor.
The gas isn't all that it should be,
It flickers,-- and yet I declare
There's pleasure or near it for young men of spirit
At Forty-Two Washington Square!

But nobody questions your morals,
And nobody asks for the rent,--
There's no one to pry if we're tight, you and I,
Or demand how our evenings are spent.
The furniture's ancient but plenty,
The linen is spotless and fair,
O life is a joy to a broth of a boy
At Forty-Two Washington Square!

As far as I could tell, the site of this joyous address now sits somewhere in the midst of this NYU building.

Forty-Two Washington Square!(?)

The second apartment Reed occupied in 1918, as he worked on his famous Ten Days that Shook the World (2).

147 W. 4th St. 

As Stanton notes, Polly's occupied this building as well, from 1915-17. How convenient for Reed! No need to leave the building to socialize or get the latest scuttlebutt from his fellow bohemians.

Visiting the former site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory is perhaps the oddest part of this excursion (7). The infamous fire, which killed over 140 workers on the upper floors of the Asch building (most of them young immigrant women), occurred in 1911. It launched investigations into workplace safety and inspired interest in labor movements among many locals. Yet it also followed memorable wins for women's labor movements, such as the 1909 Uprising of the 20,000, suggesting that existing efforts had not made as much change as they had hoped. The tragedy is momentous for a variety of historical and emotional reasons, and most students I've discussed it with have responded strongly to the personal narratives, the newspaper articles, and the images related to it found at Cornell's excellent online resource about the fire. The semi-recent centennial of the tragedy (has it been seven years since 2011 already?) inspired many commemorative actions and ceremonies. 

I had known that the building was in use by NYU and had been for some time, but I had expected that the site would be obvious, perhaps something of a tourist attraction with a statue or the like.  But the building (which suffered very little damage in the fire) appears in fact unremarkable. A bit of hunting reveals two plaques, one from the Department of the Interior in the 1990s and another one from 2003 by the New York Landmarks Preservation Foundation.

The National Park Service plaque.

The New York Landmarks Preservation Foundation plaque.

These plaques are easy to miss, and people flow around them without cease. I seemed to be the only one there that day specifically to see the building which survived a fire that dozens of workers inside it did not. 

There is a current effort to place a memorial at the site. The Remember the Triangle Fire coalition has a plan for the design which will cleverly incorporate steel panels into the exterior of the building, stretching up to the eighth floor and around the base, with names and details of the fire etched upon them.  Until then, the view is a simple one. I found it a half-troubling reminder of the ways in which physical places can seem to move on from events that societies never quite do (as Stanton notes, sweated labor and unsafe working conditions are still alive and well in the modern US).

View of the Asch/Brown building from the sidewalk.

Related Links:

The Tenement Museum gives an idea of the living conditions of immigrant workers who worked in factories like Triangle, organized within labor unions like the IWW and ILGWU.

For teaching or just browsing around, Cornell's expansive resource on the Triangle Factory Fire is a must-visit, featuring primary sources, secondary descriptions, timelines, legacies, and more.

Take My Advice: Promoting Communication

Happy New Year! In the general holiday spirit of making things better, I've created a guide to my post labels. I was inspired by writing this post to do so, as I realized that I think about the topic of student advice so frequently that I will probably want to write about it again.

Advice is a different category than the ostensible goals of many courses. It's not historical facts, which seems obvious; it's not really even just skills like writing or reading strategies, although it can encompass these things. Rather, I think of advice as information about how to approach things which students might not be tested on, but which may help them in both the course and their academic, professional, or personal lives. There are many informal online resources giving a wide variety of tips to college students, often written by professors or instructors, so I am clearly not alone in this impulse (and I should note here that these links are purely examples of the impulse, not support for all of the advice or language contained within). I think a lot about how to pass along things I've learned to students, probably because there are so many things I wish I had known earlier in my journey. I find myself wanting to give my students the advice that I never got, or was given but did not fully understand, when I was in their position.

There are many reasons to resist the impulse to advise. Most of those students will never be in my particular position-- the vast majority will not go on to pursue a graduate degree in history. And no one wants to be inundated with a barrage of helpful hints about life while in their 9 AM history class, regardless of their applicability to their own experiences.  So, what advice is important enough to emphasize? And how do we incorporate advice into our classes, whether it be advice about history, academia, or life in general?  I'll address questions of this sort under the "Take My Advice" label.

The first strategy I always want to impress upon students is the critical skill of communicating with one's instructors. This may sound very simple and very obvious and is indeed repeated by basically every instructor I've met, in varying forms but most often in the phrase "Come to office hours" and its followup, "No one ever comes to office hours." Both professors and graduate instructors encourage folks to come to their office hours frequently, but in most courses nonattendance by ninety-eight percent of the class is the norm. (My Reacting classes have been an exception to this rule, though the percentage is still less favorable than I would like.)

This is pretty easy to understand when I think back to my own undergraduate experience-- I did attend a few office hours and got a lot out of them, but for the most part I considered them a last resort for the desperately behind because it seemed so serious to seek out a professor in their private domain and discuss something one-on-one. It's very similar to how I feel about phone calls-- one must have Something To Say that is both specific and important to communicate. This is not to say that I want my students to show up and have nothing in particular to say ("Hi Teach! I plan to stare at you uncomfortably for fifteen minutes or so") but rather that office hours are a great time to develop understanding even without a particular "deliverable" on the table.

For example, taking fifteen minutes to ask questions about the reading or discussion that weren't fully clear during class is a worthwhile use of office hours, even if these questions don't apply directly to a current assignment. This isn't just because of "face time" or some similar nonsense-- it's because it both helps a student think through the material and help me figure out how they think. Like many instructors, I tend to base lectures and assignments in part on information I have gotten from the students. The first time I taught The Trial of Anne Hutchinson, I added a brief section on the Reformation to the lecture after it became clear on the first day of class that people wanted more context for the particular religious positionality of the Puritans. If I know what students are grappling with, I can tailor class time to addressing those questions. I can also base quiz and exam questions on topics they find particularly interesting or relevant. 

The idea of communication with an instructor extends beyond the idea of filling office hours, however. I also want to encourage students to approach me with accommodations or schedule modifications they need-- that is, to encourage communication more broadly. This is a critical part of treating college students as the adults they are and acknowledging that all people, by virtue of being human, occasionally need to adjust or negotiate the ways their time is allotted. Frequently, the complaint is voiced on the other side- that students do not respect instructors' time-- which can certainly also be true. I try to model respect for student time in the hopes that it will also encourage greater reflection on the value of others' time. 

In a teaching-focused reading group I attended last year, I and the other participants debated the idea of taking off points for late assignments. This is a fairly electric issue-- although in my memory, we appreciated the text's point that punctuality has little to do with mastery of the material, per se, we also expressed an interest in protecting our own time, as grading assignments piecemeal tends to take much longer than doing them all together. Ultimately this conflict is often resolved with a communication compromise: If a student requests an extension in advance of the deadline, the delay does not affect their grade. This resolution promotes respect for the time of both parties, benefiting both. Encouraging students to approach me and, by extension, other instructors when they know they will be absent from an important meeting, need an extension, or have to reschedule an exam could result in a more convenient schedule if one isn't trying to complete two projects at the same time when they could have received an extension for one. It could also result in an improved grade, if it frees a student from trying to plow through the project without careful thought simply to get it in on time. And even if discussion with an instructor does not lead to an extension, it will at least lead to greater clarity on what the instructor's expectations are. And if I know that late work is coming to me, I will be able to allot time to grade and respond to it with far greater ease than if it suddenly appears in my inbox. 

My favorite way to open the door to sustaining practical communication is handing out "first day sheets,"  an idea I borrowed from one of my favorite former professors at the University of Tulsa. I change it up a bit depending on the course (the "history" question is most often tailored to the specific themes of the course), but below is my basic format.

First day sheet. You can also access this as a Word document.

When I was a student filling out a similar sheet, I thought it seemed like a pleasant way for my professor to get to know a bit about her students. As an instructor, however, I've realized the multiple ways in which the sheet both makes my life easier and communicates messages to students about my approach to the course. First, the practical-- I often use these as a tool to learn names, as they give me a bit of information to attach to each person when I am taking roll or reviewing during the first few weeks. I get some information on what topics or issues the people in that particular semester might be interested in, so that I can emphasize those things. The dietary question and the calendar portion help me to ensure that everyone in the course can be involved in all activities if they so desire: if I bring snacks, I can make sure to provide at least one thing acceptable to each person, and if I schedule extra office hours, I can be sure that at least the majority of students will have the option to attend them. 

The sheet also communicates to students that I am willing to learn more about them so as to more effectively help them learn. I tell them they are free to leave anything blank if they wish, so that it is clear that I am not trying to drag information out of them that they do not wish to give. I also provide a space where students can tell me whatever they think I might need to know. Many use this to give little tidbits about their extracurriculars, but I also receive disclosures about minor accommodations they might need, or disclosures about things they find particularly difficult. By opening this line of communication, I try to convey that I am willing to put some effort into making the course accessible and expect the same effort in  

One downside of my emphasis on communication with instructors is that, quite simply, all instructors do not encourage this sort of communication and thus it is not a helpful skill for all situations. It is clear from my own interactions with students that some of the ways I would like them to approach me are discouraged by their other instructors. For example: A student approached me wondering if I would excuse her from one class period to attend an interview for a graduate program, offering to provide documentation to prove that her absence was legitimate. When I told her she was free to attend the interview and not worry about the proof, she expressed relief, saying that the professor she had approached first had denied her request, and my class was during the last interview slot available to her. How do I encourage students to communicate honestly with me as adults to solve problems when they are confronted with other instructors who refuse to provide any flexibility? I go back and forth as to the responsibilities I might have to prepare them for reactions different than my own, especially in the case of first-year students. 

Students, do you have any memorable experiences about communicating with instructors? Instructors, do you have particular approaches to encouraging communication with students?

Related Links:
A few suggestions for instructors on communicating with students, from USC TA Wiki and Inside Higher Ed.
A brief, thoughtful post on how instructors' writing can convey particular meanings to students. 

Coming Soon: A new Reacting to Reacting post! Get amped to spend some time with the Greenwich Village Bohemians.