Attending the first week of Classes

1. What are some important things to do during the first week of the semester?

2.  Look at the course information sheet for one of your classes and answer the following questions:

• How can you contact the course’s instructor?
• What materials are required for the course? When will you have them?
• Which course learning outcome do you think will be easiest to learn? Which one do you think will be most challenging? Why?

Applying The Learning process

• Review the learning process as described in this chapter.
• Identify a class you are currently taking that requires studying.
• Identify the stage of the learning process which you feel describes your current knowledge level in that class.

Chapter One Case Study: An MCC Tale

Augie – Augustine to her immigrant parents from Quebec – was nervous starting out at MCC. Why wouldn’t she be?

For one thing, she was the first in her family ever to go to college. She, her parents, and her older brother knew nothing about the experiences that awaited her. For another, she had grown up on a farm deep in Livingston County and had graduated from a small, rural high school. Moving to MCC was like parachuting into a foreign country. The campus seemed like an immense puzzle packed with a dizzying diversity of people – people of every age, hue, culture and personality, people she assumed all knew more and were smarter than she was. “So you’re from the sticks,” as one of her new dorm mates, from Syracuse, put it.

But Augie managed to survive those first couple of weeks. She grew quickly to like her roommates – even that Syracuse girl. After a few missteps, she learned her way around campus, and she got used to the waits in line at the bookstore and for food. And starting classes wasn’t nearly as traumatic as she had feared. Soon enough, classes seemed not much different from high school. The other students, she learned, weren’t really all smarter than she was, and the teachers were pleasant enough and didn’t bury her in homework, or at least homework she had to turn in.

Trouble was, here it was midway through her first semester, and things weren’t turning out well. As a farm girl, she had risen early her whole life, so she had signed up for early-in-the-morning classes. But the temptations of dorm life – the late-night talk fests, video games and food runs, among them – had caused her to sleep clear through two of her Bio classes. She arrived a few minutes late three other times, missing the teacher’s introductory instruction and feeling lost for half the class, like she had stepped into the middle of a conversation.

She also thought that, just like high school, she could skim through assigned readings or skip them altogether. She figured the teacher would go over everything in class, so why bother? But after a few weeks, she realized that her prof assumed she was familiar with the material he had assigned for homework, so she was too unsure of herself to participate much in group work or to answer any of the questions the teacher asked in discussions. She felt lost and disconnected and found herself daydreaming during class rather than listening carefully.

The story in her Spanish class was no better. As the child of immigrants, she could get by pretty well in French, her parents’ native tongue. Since Spanish was a Romance language, like French, she was confident that the vocabulary and grammar the teacher covered in class would just sort of stick to her. She again spent little to no time with the textbook drilling and memorizing before each class.

That was a poor plan. She was getting Cs and Ds, and not just in Spanish, but in all her classes. Worse, an important writing assignment was due in her history class. She was struggling with her paper and needed help. But she had lost her Course Information Sheet and forgotten her professor’s name, so she couldn’t email her or rush to her office.

Time was running out. It was 2 p.m., and Augie needed to upload the paper onto Blackboard by midnight, which presented another problem. She had no idea how to do that.

She could just hear her mother scolding her: “Quel cauchemar!” What a nightmare!

Augie knew she had to do better – in all her classes. But how?

Activities:

1. Using the resources in this chapter, create a bulleted action plan for Augie. What steps should she take to improve her performance in school? In each step, describe both what she should do, and why.
2. Create the same sort of action plan for yourself.

Activity Options: Interacting with Your Instructors

1. The word instructor comes from the Latin word, struere, meaning build, construct. Make a list of ten ways in which you could take advantage of communicating with your instructor to help build and construct a powerful learning experience.
2. Look through your course information sheets and identify an office hour that is convenient for you to attend because it doesn’t conflict with your other classes. Formulate a specific question to ask your instructor on your visit to his or her office. When you visit your professor, note the positives of your experience and be prepared to share with your peers.
3. Pair up with one of your classmates and role-play a visit to one of your professor’s offices. Make sure you each have a turn as student and as professor. Consider performing your skit for the class or sharing any insights you gained from this experience.

Brief Case Studies

1. Myeisha is a first-generation college student who just registered for courses at MCC yesterday. Her classes start tomorrow, and she’s not sure what to do or where to go first. What advice would you give to Myeisha to help her start smart?
2. Kyle was excited to take a beginning Spanish class to prepare for a semester abroad in Spain. Before his first vocabulary quiz, he reviewed his notes many times. Kyle took the quiz, but when he got the results, he was surprised to see that he had earned a B-, despite having studied so much. What specific advice would you give to Kyle to help him increase his grade in Spanish class?