It doesn’t matter how many times you teach a particular course or how many years of experience you have – everyone gets nervous on the first day of a new semester. You’ll wonder, will my students like me? Will I sound like I know what I’m talking about? And inevitably, no matter how computer savvy you are, you will end up looking like an idiot within the first ten minutes while you try to get the computer working (I practically live on my computer and this still happens to me). The attention spans of your students might be less than a minute, since many of them are still in vacation mode. All of this could add up to a potential disaster.
But it absolutely doesn’t have to be this way! As the veteran of many first days of classes, I’ve developed some effective strategies to make the day go as smoothly as possible. So in this blog post, I’m going to give you some tips and tricks to make your next first day of class an awesome day of class (was that too corny?)