{"id":5758,"date":"2011-07-26T09:41:24","date_gmt":"2011-07-26T09:41:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2011\/07\/26\/revenge-of-the-morning-people\/"},"modified":"2011-07-26T09:41:24","modified_gmt":"2011-07-26T09:41:24","slug":"revenge-of-the-morning-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2011\/07\/26\/revenge-of-the-morning-people\/","title":{"rendered":"Revenge of the Morning People: What to Do with 8am Classes?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Dean Dad asks a question on the minds of lots of faculty: how do you handle early-morning classes<\/a>?<\/p>\n

\n

Wise and worldly readers, have you had good experiences with 8 a.m. classes? Does anybody know of any useful empirical studies done at the college level of the effects of 8 a.m. classes? Is this basically solvable with caffeine and nagging, or are we shooting ourselves in the collective foot here?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As I am emphatically not a morning person myself, I’m no fan of 8am classes either, but as Dean Dad notes, they’re a necessary evil given the constraints of limited classroom space. I don’t know any good ways to deal with this– fortunately for me, one of my colleagues likes<\/em> teaching at 8am, and usually jumps on those sections of the big courses– but I’ve always been fond of the suggestion made by a colleague in another department, which is basically a Jedi mind trick: open a 7am class slot.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The thinking here is that most of the problem students have with the 8am class stems from it being the first class of the morning. They’re just fine with 9am, mostly because they know it could be worse– they could have an 8am class. If you got rid of 8am classes, they’d piss and moan about 9am classes.<\/p>\n

So, if you put a 7am class block on the books, then 8am would no longer be the earliest class block. You wouldn’t even need to schedule much of anything into it, save for the occasional elective class by one of those older professors who gets into the office at 6am anyway. Knowing that they could’ve been stuck with a 7am class will make 8am seem much more palatable, and improve student attitudes in the early hours.<\/p>\n

As a plan, it seems to rely too heavily on the gullibility of college students, but then, insert your own favorite paraphrase of Barnum and\/or Mencken here. It’s at least as good as any of the other options, as far as I can tell. But anyone with better suggestions should feel free to leave them in the comments.<\/p>\n

(One side note: as the Dean Dad notes, one problem of the 8am section is that it’s the last choice of a lot of students who are too disorganized to register early enough to get one of the other sections. This is countered somewhat by the fact that it’s the first<\/em> choice for another group of students, namely those who have a need for early classes. Locally, this means the handful of ROTC students we have (who have afternoon ROTC things over in Albany, so can’t take afternoon classes), and athletes (particularly baseball players, who regularly have doubleheaders starting at 1pm), both groups who tend to have enough discipline to make it to 8am classes and do well in them.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Dean Dad asks a question on the minds of lots of faculty: how do you handle early-morning classes? Wise and worldly readers, have you had good experiences with 8 a.m. classes? Does anybody know of any useful empirical studies done at the college level of the effects of 8 a.m. classes? Is this basically… Continue reading Revenge of the Morning People: What to Do with 8am Classes?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-education","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5758\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}