NUTSHELL NOTES "Teaching tips in a nutshell" - The University of Colorado at Denver's One-page Newsletter for Teaching Excellence

Tim Doffing of the University of WI at Platteville Mathematics Department provided me with a useful practice for increasing students' vocabularies that can make these first awkward couple of minutes useful to students who are present without placing latecomers at a serious disadvantage. I watched Tim teach "word of the day" in his calculus classes and later heard enough good comments from students in my courses to know that they appreciated his mini-lessons in vocabulary. If many of us did this at UCD, our undergraduates would have more powerful vocabularies by the time they were seniors. In addition to the general boost it provides to literacy, it can be very helpful to those students who must take some type of exam, such as the Graduate Record Examination, that tests on vocabulary.

The idea is simple. Pick any word which you feel a college graduate should be familiar with. It doesn't even have to be in your field. If you are at a loss for words, the appendix to E. D. Hirsch Jr.'s Cultural Literacy - What Every American Needs to Know has 63 pages of double-columned gems that have been officially sanctioned by that author as worth knowing. Write the word on the board as soon as you enter class. Ask students to turn to their neighbor and see if each can explain the meaning to the other. Then poll the class for a meaning. Supply the meaning yourself if answers aren't forthcoming. The entire exercise should take less than 90 seconds.

One can use variations of this to introduce discipline-specific content. For instance "Geography Across the Curriculum" (place of the day) or "History Across the Curriculum" (historical character of the day) are fun themes that can broaden students' general education. The accumulated knowledge that result from a tiny investment of time at the start of each class can be impressive over a semester. I have employed variations of this practice in my geology classes as "mineral of the day" or "time period of the day" to enable students to arrive at learning both the common minerals and the geologic time scale without going through a more painful memorization session.

If the word is carefully chosen, it can be the start of an entire discussion about the concept or topic that you intend to teach that day. In addition to teaching vocabulary, this exercise gets students' minds actively involved and provides a kind of jump-start to the class that is a better use of time than having students sitting and waiting for you to begin the active work.