I met my students for the first time on Tuesday, for the first session of my seminar in the History of American Foreign Policy. What an amazing group of students! I am very excited to teach this group. I am also confronted immediately with the differences between American and Italian styles of teaching at the university level. The setting for our intimate seminar is a room with capacity for 50 people, with a raised dais for the professor to sit. I obviously did not sit there. I also learned that Italian students are not accustomed to peer review or sharing their written work with each other. We started out talking about our associations with the phrases “American foreign policy,” “diplomatic history,” and “foreign relations.” Think about it: each phrase has important signifiers about who, and what, matters most in the U.S.’s relationship with the world. We talked about agency – it was fun to try to explain what that means both linguistically and theoretically to historians. We negotiated how long our paper would be. I told them I was happy they are here! (This is something I’ve been doing since last term and I like being so overt in expressing my excitement and care for their experience as learners.) What do you do (or want to do as a student or as a teacher) on the first day of class to set the tone?