(Essay 342) Tomorrow is the first day of my spring semester. I always want to focus on how to get my students off to a great start. William James once stated the obvious, "It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.” The problem is: How do you help your students start out with a healthy attitude toward your course? They’ve been in school for so long that they often walk in expecting to have trouble staying awake.
I am teaching Intermediate Accounting II this spring, which has always been known as a very challenging course. Plus, even accounting majors tend to believe that accounting can be a boring slog. Therefore, helping my students start the semester with a good attitude is never easy.
Some teachers, I expect, simply direct the students to have a good attitude without really explaining what that means. Kind of sounds like the old song, "Be Happy. Don't Worry." Saying it is different from doing it.
I decided to
try a different tactic this semester. I
sent my 63 students the following email today to help get them ready for our first
class tomorrow.
Will it help get them into a positive mindset? Will their attitudes be universally positive? Honestly, I don’t know, but I think (if I were 19 years old again), this story would have caught my attention. It’s in a form that I think they can relate to. Any story of an athlete willing to step up and hit the winning shot should resonate with a lot of people, especially students. At least I hope so.
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To: Accounting 302 Students
From: JH
I've taught so long that I have a story for everything.
Years ago I was reading an autobiography of a famous basketball star. He told this story. He was playing in the final game of the pro (NBA) basketball championships. There were only a few seconds left in the game and his team was behind by a point or two. The coach called time out to set up a final play. All five of the players on the floor immediately rushed over to the coach to demand that they be given the ball so they could take the winning shot. They were sure they could do it and they wanted to do it. The player writing the book said that, at that moment, he knew they were going to win and they did.
Everyone knows
that I call on students in class. For 50 minutes, I'll call on people and
we'll chat. Any moment in any class when you are not praying to be called
on is the moment when you are not an A student. At that moment, you are
just one of the fans observing the game and not one of the players in the
middle of the action.
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Will it help -- I think it will, at least a little. Try something similar and see if it works for you.
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In case you are interested in watching my 12 minute TEDxYouth@RVA talk about transformative education, here is the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G20tup61ZxI&t=1s
And, my book, Transformative
Education, is available as a free download at:
https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/375/
If all of that is
not enough, you can also go to the following link and where a video where I
tell four stories about teaching in college.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT428yjJ0Ls
