Mornings

This week I received my evaluations back for the fall.

Most of them were pretty good. Generally, they're pretty good. But the evaluations revealed something really interesting. Last semester, I taught two sections of English 1110, a basic composition course.

The scores for the two sections were pretty different. At first, I couldn't figure out why. I do basically the same things in every comp class.

What was different?

Nothing except the time. The first class was at 8 in the morning. The second class was at 11:30. The first class also had a rather large number of high school students. The second class also had some high school students, but not as many.

The 11:30 results were much higher than the 8:00 scores.

I realized that I had had the same split the previous semester: the early class scores were yucky, and the later class scores were pretty good.

This discrepancy made me think about the fact that most college students and most high school students are not morning people.

I've always been kind of an anomaly. Currently, I get up at about 4:00 am every day. Even when I was a teenager, I usually went to bed before 11:00 pm and was up by 6:30. But I've read literature that says that most teenagers have huge amounts of trouble getting up in the morning, not because they're lazy but because their body clocks are set differently.

This semester, I'm going to really focus on my 8:00 am courses. I have two of them: both American Lit I Surveys. These are the classes that are going to be interesting. The last time I taught this survey was at the University of Minnesota. The students were mostly juniors and seniors. And I taught from about 6 pm to 9 pm.

So, my goal this semester is to figure out how to make an 8:00 am course that covers some rather difficult material interesting and a destination.

I'm going to focus on the following:

1. a lot of in-class activities.
2. lighting: I am going to make it as bright in the room as I can.
3. a lot of group work.
4. High energy.

Let's see how this turns out.