I was 21 years old when I first stepped into a college classroom as an instructor. My master’s program had assigned me to teach a composition course and gave me a brief orientation to teaching the week before the semester began. I was so close in age to my students, so nervous about how they would perceive me, and so uncertain about what I was doing that I had precisely one goal for the first day of the semester: Get through it.

I managed to achieve that modest goal. But over the course of the next couple of decades of full-time teaching, I have become much more aware of the extent to which the first day of class sets the tone for everything that follows. In her book, The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom With the Science of Emotion, the psychologist Sarah Rose Cavanagh explores how humans quickly make initial judgments of people, on the basis of thin slices of evidence. “On the first few days of class,” she explains, “students will be forming their impressions of you, and this impression may be more important than much of what you do later.”

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