Goals and Standards of the FYS Seminar and its Teachers

First-Year Seminar is the essential Mercer course, teaching the skills of analysis, interpretation, discussion, and writing that are crucial to all the other courses of a university education. First-Year Seminar also invites and encourages students to value the life of the mind, to appreciate the power and precision of language, to see past surfaces into the depths, to seek their true vocations rather than the mere satisfaction of appetite, and to act responsibly and ethically instead of seeking advantage over others. Mercer and its First-Year Seminars seek to produce men and women who are spiritually and intellectually wealthy, who are able to assess and choose wisely among events and ideas, and who thus create for themselves thoughtful, fulfilling, and productive lives.

The First-Year Seminar is a two-semester sequence. Each semester, all sections of the Seminar focus on a single topic, using texts and events chosen by the individual instructors of the sections. In the fall, students and teachers chosen from faculty of the various colleges and schools in the university, explore in small discussion groups the topic of “Composing the Self.” Building upon that work, they turn outward in the spring to examine the theme “Engaging the World.”

The FYS teacher's responsibilities are:

To encourage critical writing, reading, discussion, and analytic thinking skills, helping students to see texts as halves of conversations, incomplete without their readers' participation.
To help students grapple with significant classical and contemporary works drawn from the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
To make writing assignments which help students to identify their own voices as well as their individual strengths and deficiencies as writers. Through paper comments, individual conferences, and small-group work, to provide personalized instruction that allows them to grow as writers.
(There should be a minimum of five essays assigned in the Fall Semester, at least one of which involves research, and four in Spring Semester, one of which is a substantial research paper.)
To include in students' considerations the broader worlds of Mercer and Macon.
To use Preceptors in all of this work.
To be as human as we can be, to “know as we are known”; to be generous of spirit and to expect good work from the students and from ourselves.

You can lead the horse to the water and although you can't make the horse drink you can make the horse thirsty. There actually are horses that must be made thirsty, for example, by being exercised, because they will die if they don't drink. Students too will die if they are not thirsty, in the sense that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” We must try to make them thirsty.