First day of calculus class
Last night I had dinner with a friend who is a post-doc in math, and she was mentioning that her students, especially in the lower-level calculus classes, generally don’t refer to her as “professor.” This would be fine since she’s not yet a professor, but she also mentioned they do refer to graduate student men in the same department as professor. She’s a young looking woman, and my guess is they simply don’t know better. Here’s what my advice to her was (and as usual, I’d give this advice to both men and women).
On the first day of class, introduce yourself and put your name on the board, explain when and where you got a Ph.D., what your field of research is, what your current job is, as well as office hours and homework policies. In addition, wear a button-down shirt that first day of class. It’s kind of ridiculous but it works, in the sense that the students will be more impressed with you, which translates into them behaving more respectfully.
Moreover, it’s totally appropriate and not manipulative to explain your credentials. It’s probably most important for calculus, because generally those students don’t really want to be there, at least not all of them. Upper level classes contain students who are more psyched about math and eager to like their professors. I say this partly from experience, partly from talking to other people about their experiences, and partly via information I glean from the student evaluations I’ve read.
Speaking of evaluations, at some point I want to write about the noise that come from calculus evaluations, because that may as well be an entire subfield of statistics in itself. For example, I think there may be more variation depending on semester than depending on professor, due to the way kids take calculus in high school. In general it’s really hard to infer how good a job you did teaching based on calculus evaluations.
However, there is some signal. I remember reading about a study that said when some guy who was teaching two sections was introduced the first day in one of the sections by a distinguished-looking professor who went on about the instructor’s credentials, that class had much better end-of-semester evaluations, even though the content of the two sections was identical. Even more evidence that you should formally introduce yourself, if not bring in a friend for the job.
mathbabe 
Just a comment on the last paragraph… I don’t think it’s a good assumption that the two classes were otherwise identical. I am, for the first time ever, teaching two sections of the same course this semester. They are not at all identical. The one that I teach second *consistently* goes better than the one that I teach first. In the first section, I figure out what is confusing, how to say things better, how to transition between ideas more smoothly. It may not seem like a big deal, but the scores on the first exam in my 2nd class are a bit higher.
Anyone who takes even a moment to reflect on a class before teaching it again will do better the 2nd time around. (Except that a year or two later, you may not remember what your insights were… but a few hours or a day later, you do.)
The better evaluations could be an artifact of the inflated esteem the students feel for the instructor based on that first day. But it could be that one of the sections genuinely had a better class experience than the other.
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I concur with Michelle. During two semesters I had to teach three algebra or trigonometry sections to undergraduates. Typically, there was a section early in the morning, late in the morning, and then late in the afternoon. The second section in late morning always went a little more smoothly than the early morning one because the early morning section functioned as a rehearsal for the second one. In addition, the kids were probably more awake for the late morning section. By late afternoon, the kids were getting tired (I could tell by their body language) and I was getting a tad bored with the material. It was a long time ago, but I believe the second section always did better on exams.
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I’m also teaching two identical classes for the first time this term, back-to-back in the same room no less. The second lecture is definitely more polished, though I am sometimes a little tired.
On the first midterm, though, the the first section did 3.5 points better (out of 100 total) than the second section. The class sizes add up to 500, so probably this isn’t just a small-sample thing. The local folk wisdom is consistent with this — the students willing to sign up for the 8am section are supposed to be the best…
I will interesting to see if this patter holds up over the rest of the term.
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True, I hadn’t thought of that. I should find the paper and see how they handled that.
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I like the open honest approach of telling students who you are at the beginning of the semester. No need to make a big deal of it, but it lets your students know who you are. Evaluations are tough but I agree that there is a hefty signal extraction problem.
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I completely understand the reasoning behind what you are suggesting. But frankly, if I had a teacher who explained his or her credentials on the first day of class, I’d think that person was a serious blowhard. I suppose that this may be a worthy tradeoff in certain circumstances.
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Reply to Dan L: I think the point here is the distinction between the way young male
teachers are perceived and the way young female teachers are perceived. Given
this [and I think it does have validity] having a young female teacher make unusual
steps to make the students recognize her abilities is a good idea. The “serious blowhard”
is a danger, but it doesn’t have to be if it is handled well.
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True! I say start out a blowhard and then slowly reveal that you’re actually cool. Of course this is only true for calculus. For other classes you can tell them the first day how cool you are.
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I think it is appropriate if you are giving a course, to introduce yourself to your students at the beginning. What is blowhard about it?
Furthermore I have never taught a calculus class (and I last took one for thirty years or more ago). So Cathy’s restriction to calculus class may invalidate my comments.
That said, I always hate being referred to by title. Furthermore I would rather that students try and argue against me than have them accept what I say out of respect for me personally.
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Roger, if you hate being referred to by title, I wonder what you prefer?
I do have the same problem described by Cathy… I get “Ms.” or “Mrs.” in emails and in person, never “Prof.” or “Dr.” even though that’s how I introduce myself and how I sign the emails. I’ve even had students apologize for calling me “Ms.” and not “Mrs.” when they find out I’m married, but never apologize for not using the correct title.
I find “Mrs.” particularly grating, since I don’t in fact have my husband’s last name. And it does bother me that this seems to happen to the female faculty much more than the male faculty. Maybe if there were a catchall “Mr”-like title for us, I wouldn’t mind so much…
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FWIW, my experience as a male tenure-track faculty member has been that the overwhelming majority of student emails in calculus classes address me as Mr. Lastname. There are a few people who call me Professor Lastname, but at least among calculus students at my large state university they are definitely the exception and not the rule (no more than 20%, probably less).
A few years ago I assumed this had to do with people assuming me to be a grad student, but as the beginnings of the aging process have made this explanation less plausible and as I’ve gone to greater efforts to make my credentials clear (e.g. in email signatures) with no discernible effect I’ve settled on the conclusion that they just think that Mr./Ms./Mrs. Lastname is the appropriate thing to call your professor.
Which isn’t so unreasonable, really–after all, for the last 12 years they’ve been addressing their teachers in that way, and they’ve been doing so precisely because they were told that that’s the respectful thing to do. I suppose that if one believes that this sort of thing matters one could give a little public service announcement at the start of any freshman-heavy class about how you are supposed to address people people now that you’re in college. But I’ve come around to believing that any impulse that I might have to say to myself, “How dare those students address me as they would a mere high school teacher!” is probably not a healthy one.
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At Girls’ Angle, some adult visitors have commented to me that they sometimes can’t tell the difference between some of our mentors and some of our members.
But I do seriously wonder about the matter of titles. At the club, we suppress titles and everyone uses everyone’s first name. We do this because we want the girls to become friends with the mentors and we don’t want any of the girls to feel intimidated by the fact that someone may have a Ph.D. in math. This ties in to what Roger said about wanting his students not to accept what he has to say only out of respect. We want the members to feel free to speak their mind and not have a potential added layer of distance that might make them even more afraid to make an open mistake. In fact, it’s a major challenge to convince the members to feel fine about making mistakes in the open.
And in our magazine, the Bulletin, I also suppress titles for the same reasons. At another level, this policy may have a negative affect because there are probably people who are dismissive of the Bulletin when they don’t see “Prof.” and “Dr.” in front of people’s names.
I’m not certain the policy is a good one. The policy we want to use is whatever best helps the members and readers learn math.
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