Getting Ready for the First Day
"Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?" he asked.
"Begin at the beginning," the king said gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."
Lewis Carroll
We're going to start at the very beginning of getting ready for the first day--at the instant you find out you're going to teach the course. To keep the discussion focused, I'm going to make some assumptions. Let's say you are on a semester system (most common), it is the Fall semester (to give you a little time to work over the Summer, and because it is both more fun and more challenging to work with entering students), and you have about 250 students (about average for a large class). Further, you don't have labs or recitation sections (too complicated for right now), you have mostly first year students, and you have some teaching experience, but not with a large class. If your course is a three credit general introductory one, that means you will have to fill up about 39 hours worth of class time (actually 37, because you will probably have two, hour-long examinations). Although there are activities other than lecture that can profitably fill that time, for the worst case situation, we'll figure that you'll have to prepare 37 or so lectures. Ill further assume that you will not have "released time" for preparation, and during the summer before the first class, you will be teaching summer school, doing scholarly work, or wrapping up your post-doc and moving (if you are a new hire). Several secondary assumptions fall out of the first ones. You will in all probability have other college obligations during that Fall semester, for example another small course (perhaps a grad seminar), more scholarly activity, and certainly a plenitude of committees. It will therefore become increasingly difficult for you to "keep a lecture ahead" of your big class as the semester wears on. So, how much time is it going to take to set up this baby over the summer? That, unfortunately, is like the question, "How much does it cost to feed a dog?"
Depends on the size of the dog---.
