Week 1: Starting a Conversation
The opening lecture — what you've actually enrolled in, and the protocol for walking up to someone you have never met
27 July 2026
Half and half, like every lecture: George Curious on what you’ve actually enrolled in, Haskell Byte on how to walk up to someone you’ve never met.
George’s half — what you’ve signed up for#
The idea first, because the rest only makes sense downstream of it. Campus behaves like an economy: attention, trust and serendipity are finite, unevenly held, and worth nothing at all if you never spend any. Twelve weeks of spending them deliberately, on people you don’t know, is the course.
Then the practical frame — how a Crossing works across its two weeks, who teaches which one, what each piece is worth, and the two rules that catch people out. All of it is on this site already; the lecture is where you find out it exists.
Haskell’s half — how to actually do it#
It opens on the finding this course is more or less built on. Epley and Schroeder put commuters into three groups — talk to a stranger, sit in solitude, ride as normal — and asked them to predict which would make for the better journey. They picked solitude, and they were wrong: the group told to talk to a stranger reported the best commute of the three, across nine experiments. The gap between what people expect a conversation with a stranger to cost and what it actually returns is what the whole semester spends against.
From there it’s practical. Haskell treats “I don’t know how to start a conversation” as a solvable problem rather than a personality: a reason to be standing there, an opener that survives contact, and an exit that doesn’t slam the door. Three parts, all learnable, none of them natural to anyone the first time.
Then the part most people underestimate — the telling. Crossing 1 isn’t finished when the conversation ends. The week after, you stand up and account for it at How It Landed, and that’s where most of the Crossing’s mark is actually made. A conversation nobody hears about is half a Crossing.
What you should leave knowing#
- what a Crossing is, and why it takes two weeks
- who to ask when you’re stuck, and who to ask when that doesn’t work
- that nothing here is submitted, so nothing here can be late
- an opener you’d actually use this week
Teaching team
- George Curious — convenor
- Haskell Byte — tutor