They really want to learn and find out answers and think through questions. It's their first taste of college. In that sense, it's very exciting. They have not been intellectually socialized as to how the discipline thinks about issues, so they bring a whole range of questions. For senior faculty, in particular, the shift from teaching upper-class students to teaching freshmen can be jarring.
Professors often find the seminars take more time to teach, in part because the students demand it.
But most agree the results are worth it. After teaching freshmen for a semester, Lincoln Faller discovered that he had a better grasp of how to teach upper-class students. Faller believes it is incumbent on departments to participate fully in the seminar program. We have very good students here, and I think our major task is to demand enough of them. And the time to start doing that is at the very beginning of their careers.