For some reason, my syllabi collated fine, but my first day’s reading (a PDF) didn’t. Probably something I did wrong in settings — oh well. There’s something nostalgic about hand-collating the materials for the first day of class…
This is chapter 1 of Le Guin’s _Steering the Craft_ — they’re buying the book, but I usually also hand out the first few weeks of readings, to give them a little more time to get books if they don’t have them yet. The exercise for today is “Being Gorgeous,” which is a really fun one, and a great icebreaker for the start of a creative writing course.
Okay, ready, I think! Today is all about duplication of information — I’ve printed out the syllabus and first day readings, I’ve e-mailed them to the students through Blackboard, and I’ve uploaded them onto Slack. (I’d just use Blackboard, but Slack is so much better, it just works a lot more smoothly for me and my classes, so we do the bulk of our online work through that system.)
I don’t know if it’s a pandemic effect, or the overwhelming proliferation of communications media grabbing for our attention, or both together, but the last few years, my students seem to really struggle with keeping track of things. So I’ve taken to just being really repetitive with important elements of the course. Maybe it annoys some of them to get the same information in three different ways / places, but some of my students really seem to need it.
At least I’m not texting them! 
Now I just need to figure out what to wear…