The Cold Open

Last night we met for the first time—and as I always do before a first class meeting, I thought about how to generate an active classroom from the beginning, even before we really know one another. In my undergraduate classes, I always jump right in to work on the first day, whether that means having students turn their desks to the wall and asking them to copy the university’s plagiarism policy longhand before asking them to read “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” or digging in to the language of the Fugitive Slave Act before sending them off to begin Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

These classes are a little bit like the “cold open” sketches that jump-start Saturday Night Live, throwing us right into the show before the credits, before the band starts playing, before we meet the evening’s host.   I’m not sure what the SNL writers want that cold open to do, except perhaps to keep us watching in the hopes that there will be another sketch worth staying up for as the late night progresses. And certainly I hope that a strong opening will engage students enough so that they’ll be willing first to open their assigned reading—and that when they do, they’ll begin to make the kinds of connections between our opening activity and the reading that will help them engage with the unfamiliar prose styles they will confront in these texts (or at least, have enough patience with Melville’s or Stowe’s particular nineteenth-century styles that they begin to feel familiar instead of alienating).

I imagine that for the cold open writers, some weeks are easier than others simply because the content is better—and this is certainly true when I think about the opening day in a literature classroom. It’s fun to find an angle on the material that will maximize engagement within the time constraints of the opener—5 minutes or so on SNL, maybe 50 minutes for me. They need to keep the viewers watching; we need to get them thinking. But in either case, losing the preliminaries and jumping into the material, especially experientially, can help foster the engagement we want to build.

So how did our cold open work? Initially I had planned to have you freewrite about a really memorable teacher, and we still may do that exercise at some point. But I wanted to begin with the work of the class, and that meant digging into a literary text right away. So it was time for a new plan. As class approached. I decided to test out a series of class activities outlined in The Literature Workshop by Sheridan D. Blau (my hero!).  These activities—silent reading, jump-in reading, pointing, free-writing, and discussing—had always struck me as aimed at a younger, less sophisticated audience than those I have in a graduate seminar, and as inappropriate for anything longer than a poem, and as best suited for an initial encounter with a text.  I had assigned a short story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” that I knew would be familiar (maybe too familiar) to many of you. But we jumped in anyway.

I was thrilled at how immediately you engaged with the activities we tried—a very good sign, I think, for your ability as teachers to experiment and go with a new idea instead of fighting it right away. And I loved your responses to the activities. Though some of you found it uncomfortable to share your writing with your peers, and others felt constrained to write in a way that sounded like a seminar paper, others of you noted that the activity allowed you to participate actively in a new group setting surprisingly quickly. It can be hard to be sure that all students are engaged, even in a small seminar—I felt that this sequence was almost magical in the way in which it got everyone talking with almost zero effort from me.  

But were we engaging with the text? I would say yes. You mentioned how hearing lines read expressively pointed you to new interpretations. Slowing down to listen to and talk through a (very) familiar text revealed new opportunities for close reading. Seeing different approaches to the same lines of text showed that our first approaches to writing about literature does not need to be polished or written from a distance. These initial responses can be personal, idiosyncratic, associative—they can even (quite usefully!) invoke the special pain of a sunny morning hangover. And it seemed to me last night that they can allow us to feel like a class already—even after just one night.