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| Jorge Cham at phdcomics.com |
I never saw a syllabus in high school. On the first day of any grading period, I had no idea where we’d be on the last. Some of the better teachers wrote the day’s topic on the board. But in general, our knowledge of any future beyond that was limited to the next assignment (printed in a corner of the board under the words “Do Not Erase”). If the class were governed by policies unique to the teacher, they were conveyed by word of mouth. These usually had to do with the proper use of unwieldy bathroom passes or returning scissors to a shoebox covered in contact paper.
Then came college and the syllabus – an unfamiliar Latin scripture in which each teacher declared himself god. Office hours defined the time/space boundaries of his universe. A grading scale enumerated sins and their respective punishments. A calendar prophesied the future.
Clearly the professor hoped we would mimic his own reverence for the document. It was the sole subject of our first gathering. Some paragraphs even merited a public reading, verbatim (though, literate, we each held paper copies before us). Often the readings were followed by a litany begun by the philosopher/king with the words “Does anyone have any questions?” and responded to thusly by a representative supplicant: “Are the exams cumulative?” A moment of [respectful? overwhelmed? bored?] silence followed. We were dismissed early to the bookstore, instructed to purchase other sacred texts and relics of the order.
Because the internet hadn’t yet been invented, I punched holes in the syllabi and prominently filed them in a ring-bound notebook. Then I did what most of my colleagues did as undergraduates. I did what my undergraduate students do. I never gave those syllabi a second look.
Okay, maybe that’s not entirely true. I can remember consulting Madame Maxwell’s French II syllabus toward the end of one lackluster term. I’d been eking by with Ds. I told my parents it was because irregular verbs were kicking my ass. But I wasn’t really kicking back. Only as April turned into May did I begin to worry that the [many] classes I had skipped might just cost me a diploma. So I scoured the syllabus – not for information, not for instruction, but for loopholes, escape clauses. When was the last day to drop a class? What was the highest grade I could transfer? What was the overall G.P.A. required by students in my major? When was the last day to submit make-up work?
Honest recollections are important. Many of us have re-written our own histories to erase from them the very behaviors we decry in our students. Perhaps – in the second before we roll our eyes and begrudge them the precious class time it takes to address a question we’ve struggled to anticipate and answer in the syllabus – we should ask whether we are now authoring such compelling and useful course policies that our 19-year-old selves would read them.
Might our memories change the content and design of our own syllabi? If the drop date was most important to you as a panicked student, might your syllabus seem more relevant if it featured that date well before a section on course objectives?
Next: Syllabus Policies
