Baruch English faculty share how they break the ice and begin building community on the first day of the semester.
I teach multilingual sections, and I’ve sometimes done an icebreaker where I put students in groups and ask them to translate and explain their favorite proverb in a non-English language. That gets us started talking about the impossibility of translation and the beauty and power of languages!
—Brooke Schreiber
I have students pair up with one another and simply introduce the person they’re paired up with. I ask them to make their introduction somehow memorable and distinctive — enough so that we can recall the student’s name and something about them. I also invite them to include one lie.
—Frank Cioffi
I ask students to share three things about them: (1) fun fact, (2) where they’re from, (3) their major or subject of interest.
‘Home’ Essay
For a first-day writing sample, we brainstorm the different meanings of “home.”
We discuss lines from Robert Frost’s poem “Death of the Hired Man”—Home is the place that when you have to go there / They have to take you in.
I may ask, What does “have to” mean in this context? And who is “you”?
We may watch the last 3 minutes of “The Wizard of Oz”—Oh, Auntie Em, there’s no place like home.
Other angles:
the homeless
refugees
Homeland Security
baseball: the batter runs to 1st base, 2nd, 3rd but his/her goal is to go Home.
“How many homes do you have?”
Since there are so many doors into this topic, my writing prompt asks students to focus on only one aspect.
—Gregory Galassini
Rice Icebreaker: How do you make rice?
Who doesn’t like breaking the ice? Let’s break it with rice. It is only one letter off from the word “‘ice,” so that’s something.
On a separate piece of paper, answer the following questions:
1. Do you like rice? (if no, skip to question 9)
2. How many days per week do you have rice? If not weekly, how often per month (or in a longer timeframe)?
3. What is your favorite type of rice to eat? (Arborio, Basmati, Jasmine, White, another kind of rice)
4. Why is that your favorite type of rice to have?
5. Do you, friends, and/or family ever cook rice at home? If no, what takeout or sit-down restaurants do you order rice-based meals from?
6. For which meal is rice typically prepared (or ordered)?
7. Please describe each step of preparing rice in your household (or ordering it!).
8. In minutes, how long does it take to typically prepare rice in your household (or have it delivered/picked up/served)? Be as exact as you can.
9. Ignore this question if you answered “yes” to question 1. If you answered “no” to question 1, choose either another food to prepare (e.g., pasta, fruit, soup) or a tradition you have with family, friends, or just yourself (e.g., events at a place of worship, working out, getting your hair cut and styled). If you choose a food, answer questions 2 through 8 and substitute “rice” with your chosen food. If you choose a tradition, be creative in answering versions of questions 2-8 by trying to capture when the tradition occurs, how often, if it is a type of a larger group of traditions, how the tradition is organized and prepared for participation (to include its steps), how long it takes, etc.
Groups
Let’s take some time to share how you responded in small groups, especially how you (or your family, or a wider cultural background you have) typically prepares rice (or another food or a non-food tradition).
Be sure to compare commonalities and differences! And anything else interesting that comes up in conversation.
Make sure a group member is taking notes on discussion and you have a group member who will present to the class since each group will share to the larger class.
Class Discussion
This is a variation of an activity by Dr. Amber Spry, assistant professor of Politics & African + African American Studies at Brandeis University. The idea is that nearly the whole world eats rice (caveat, of course: some people don’t like it, some people might have an allergy or intolerance…still, pretty much all cultures do something with rice even if individuals might not like it or can’t eat it).
Seems simple enough. But we prepare, use, and enjoy rice in A LOT of different ways. Dr. Spry is relating this to how our backgrounds and identities shape how we see the world. Cooking and eating rice is not as simple as cooking and eating rice. When we encounter rice, we encounter it in a very specific way and context – our backgrounds shape this seemingly “universal” food.
What did you all find out about each other and the rice you eat, make, and/or know about?
Another question we can talk about now or think about the remainder of the semester is the following:
How do we all prepare our writing? Do we do it in the same way? Does the writing we eventually produce always come out exactly the same?
Even if there are different processes and products, are there still notable commonalities? What are they?
Finally, like Dr. Spry mentions how despite commonalities in rice and rice preparation, “answers to some questions will be different depending on the background we have when we enter the conversation.”
So another interesting question for writing is how our own backgrounds shape the kinds of language we use and writing we produce. What is the relationship of our identities to the language we use and the writing we create?
Writing can mean very different things to different people. It can look very different depending on the people involved and the context. How do we engage with those differences as readers and writers?
[the above questions can be taken as questions for discussion or just sort of larger questions to pose but not directly engage on first day]
—Daniel Libertz