Ideas for freshman comp class: First night

First night:
have them write info about themselves on 3×5 cards, including phone numbers where I can get ahold of them

have them group themselves according to several categories…
I’ll start off with majors, since they’ll have talked about those in the introduction to themselves. Have them talk among themselves, talk about classes they’ve taken, how long they’ve been going to college. That may give them resource people in their majors to talk to.

Then I’ll group them by with kids, married without kids, straight out of high school (hopefully those won’t overlap), and single but not straight out of high school. Hopefully that will get them in touch with people in a similar life station to them.

Have them write the first night. Give a couple of topics and have them write a paragraph on one of those. Kind of like freewriting, only not. For that matter, I could do freewriting. I could do that every class period. It would be interesting to see what the students write down. They could have a slim notebook for that. It’s what I did for my high school English class. They didn’t like it, but I still think it is a good thing. Maybe every once in a while, I could have them count the number of words they wrote. Did their writing increase over time?

If I want to do this, I should buy up a trunk load of notebooks at WalMart, you know the 90 page spirals they sell for a dime right before school starts. I should buy extra for the spring class, too. Then the kids could just pay me a dime and have them. They wouldn’t have to go get them or pay more for them by that time. I need to be looking for those.