SIVACRACY.NET

By SAM KEAN

In some ways, Kristél P. Kemmerer's first day of college teaching five years ago was great. Thinking she was still on summer vacation, she didn't bother to show up for class.

"I had just switched universities," she laughs, "and I missed the e-mails" about the semester's beginning. "I started teaching a week after everyone else." She did, however, notice something amiss. "I thought a lot of students were floating around campus for that time of year."

Ms. Kemmerer, now acting dean of students and undergraduate studies at Albright College, spent her off day preparing lesson plans, but she was the one who learned a lesson: No amount of preparation prevents a bad first day.

The opening of a semester can be hard enough — three years ago, after dressing in the dark, Ms. Kemmerer spent the day with her dress inside-out, tags and inseams visible. But truly memorable gaffes require the combination of nerves and overeagerness that only the first day at a job can bring about. On Day 1 of her teaching career, at a high school, Ms. Kemmerer glued her mouth shut.

"I was so excited to prove myself a wonderful teacher that I jumped to help this student. And you know how you put the Super Glue cap in your teeth?" she asks. "My lips were stuck. I was melded into one big blob." She spent the rest of the day in a dentist's chair having her teeth scraped clean.

Other bad first days aren't the result of clumsiness, but of careful plotting. After a sweaty day of teachers' meetings that preceded his first job 23 years ago, Gregg Lee Carter, now chairman of the department of history and social sciences at Bryant University, carried his dress shirt on a hanger to class and changed in a men's room. Wanting to make a nice first impression, he had also done the wash the night before. But in a laundry mishap worthy of a freshman, he discovered his shirt had shrunk.

"From a size 17 neck to about a size 14," the 6-foot-2-inch, 205-pound Mr. Carter recalls. Not wanting to cancel his sociology class or wear his wet, ragged undershirt, he decided to wrench the buttons shut and fess up.

"I promptly told the whole nightmarish story to my students — who got a real hoot out of it," he writes in an e-mail message. "We ended up having an immediate personal connection. It wouldn't take several class sessions to begin seeing me as a fellow flawed human being rather than big-shot professor."

Not that students have trouble seeing professors as flawed. In his "first executive decision" as dean of the business school at Saint Joseph's University, in Pennsylvania, Joseph A. DiAngelo shifted 25 undergraduates in an overcrowded accounting class to a different section with a less popular professor. That morning, after a pleasant hello in the hallway with a few students who had been moved, he turned a corner, only to hear one say: "That's the new dean. He's a real S.O.B."

At least Mr. DiAngelo knew what he had done to make himself unpopular. Some teachers find themselves judged before they open their mouths. On her first day in front of a class in 1969, Martha Sloan, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan Technological University, had a student walk in, do a double-take, walk back out, check the room number, and mutter, "I didn't know Tech had hired any females."

"I was teaching a course [on magnetic circuits] that I'd never taken," she says, "So that already put me off on not the best foot." But instead of shrinking, she immediately asked for the student's name. The class cracked up, and he slunk to the back row and shut up.