kkuter

On Monday, 12 February, classes at HIT started. The class that I picked up just the week before (Statistical Methods for Finance) meets at 10:15am on Mondays and 8:00am on Fridays. The class is required for the Financial Engineering degree program and is taken by first-year students.

I won’t lie, I was pretty nervous for my first day. I really didn’t know what to expect other than there would be 48 students in the class. I did not have a chance to see the classroom the Friday before since it was locked and I couldn’t find anyone with a key. I wasn’t too worried on Friday though, because I usually I arrive at campus by 9:30am. So I figured I would have plenty of time to view the classroom before class started.

Unfortunately, there was a miscommunication between the HIT drivers and I didn’t end up getting picked up until 10am. Thankfully, it only takes 10-15 minutes to get from my apartment to campus. So I made it to the building (pictured above) by 10:15am and stopped by the Chair’s office as he had instructed me to do on Friday. The Chair was going to introduce me to the class that first day. However, when I stopped by his office, the Chair was not in, but his secretary was. She went and found another faculty member to assist. At this point, it was after 10:15am.

This new faculty member, whose name I did not catch, told me to wait in the secretary’s office while he went and “prepared the class”. I am not sure what that meant, but I waited with secretary as instructed (she had a lovely name, Mercy, which at first thought was merci – like the French word, they way she pronounced it, and we had a laugh over that). Finally, I was escorted to my classroom.

I could tell the students were excited and curious about having me as their instructor. There was a definite buzz about the room when I walked in! However, I had to set up my computer in order to project my slides and of course it didn’t work. So my entrance was a bit awkward and slightly anticlimactic!

Thankfully, every class has a student assigned as a class rep. The class rep helps with communication between the lecturer and the students. My class rep, Anotida, helped me notify the students about the Google Classroom I had created on Friday before classes started. (BTW Google Classroom is essentially a website for me to share course materials with the class.) She also jumped into action to assist me with setting up my computer. So while she did that I introduced myself to the class. I wrote my name on the board and did my typical spiel of “It’s cuter with a k!” to help them with the pronunciation. I then told them Josh’s joke that it took me marrying him to become c(k)uter… haha. Well to my great surprise, this was met with uproarious laughter! I think the students were predisposed to receive me well given my novelty. I also think they may have been nervous as well. For example, when I asked if anyone had every heard of Indiana, one student said yes, which surprised me. When I asked him how he knew of Indiana that elicited much laughter from the rest of the class for some reason.

At this point, we got my computer connected to the projector and my slides were up. So I moved on to my planned “icebreaker” activity (slide below), which I realized in the moment that the term “icebreaker” would be completely foreign to my students. So I had fun explaining that. There are so many little things I take for granted in my typical teaching approach!

After I explained the icebreaker activity, the students jumped right into it! I walked around and saw a lot of typical approaches to it, where students were labeling the axes with height, weight, age, etc. But one group had the labels: alcoholics and ice cream. I had them explain and then asked if one of them would be willing to come to the board and explain it to the whole class. After a bit of coaxing, a student named Courage came to the board. What an apt name!

I then launched into the lesson of the day, which was basic intro to statistics content. Not very exciting stuff, lots of terminology, but the students were listening with rapt attention! Then at the end of class, they clapped! It was such a wonderful ending to a very chaotic and stressful beginning.