Have you heard? It’s “syllabus week.” Or was, last week. Urban Dictionary helps: “the first week of class, when syllabi are passed out . . . a basic waste of time.”
As you might guess from the definition, the term is one that college students (not faculty) use. I’m newly aware of it, I admit. Syllabus week seems to be an idea born of both wishful thinking (“No work!”) and diminished expectations (“No work!”). “Going over the syllabus,” as we say in pedagogy-speak, which means highlighting important matters and reading a few bits aloud, might take twenty minutes or so. It might even take a class meeting. But it doesn’t take a week.
A widespread belief that the first week of a college semester is “a basic waste of time” could have three unfortunate consequences. Younger, less confident faculty who believe that students expect (and are thus entitled to) a week of nothing might delay in getting down to the work of the course: they won’t want to alienate their charges early on. Faculty who plunge right in might begin to look like outliers. And students who aren’t yet showing up because they believe the first week to be a waste of time won’t be able to tell the difference.
A much smarter strategy for starting out: treat the first weeks of a semester as if they were the last ones. Work as if your grade depended upon it. (It does.)
A related post
New year’s resolutions (And academic life)
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Syllabus week
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comments: 7
The very worst class I ever had was second-semester Latin (which can be a fun class with motivated, mature students), and I started right off the bat reviewing all of the noun declensions, which none of them knew (my chairman, who had taught the first-semester course, told me that they did not get as far as he planned). Well, I had not gotten through the third declension on the back blackboard (first and second, fourth and fifth were on the opposite wall), when a student just got up and left. I said that anyone who thought that he was above learning paradigms did not belong in Latin class. At the end of the semester this epsidode was cited by a student in a scathing evaluation as evidence of what a terrible, slave-driving elitist I am. Go to hell, I say. During my nine years at a certain institution I refused to teach "collidge". Though I was denied promotion, I left with tenure and my pride and honesty intact.
I had another colleague who handed out detailed three-page syllabi spelling out the pages in the book to be covered for each class day. Why not just photocopy all the lesson plans for the semester and hand those out? Saves the poor dears the trouble of showing up.
’Tis sad. Did the student return?
Last night's ABC national news featured a segment on someone's research showing students 'hardly learn anything' at their private colleges. The research claimed that very few students spent more than 4 hours a day studying, read less than 40 pages a week, and never wrote so much as 20 pages in a semester. I guess it can be done that way.. I'm still kind of wondering what colleges they are talking about...maybe I'll visit their website.
Here’s the ABC story Elaine mentioned.
No. Good riddance, said I then and say I now. My current colleague at the Bank, also a translator, told me in passing that she had had Latin in secondary school (she went to school in Oxford...yes, that Oxford), and said that her Latin teacher wrote crime novels, maybe you've heard of him, Colin Dexter...I nearly had a stroke: just think, three degrees of separation between me and the late John Thaw. Endeavour Morse is as close to me as Deng Xiaoping! (the Chinese ambassador to Denmark - Jiang Zemin - Deng Xiaoping)...
So you see, children, it pays to honor your paradigms.
BTW, this also means that that through me there are five degrees of separation between you and Mao Zedong, and thus six degrees of separation between you and Richard Nixon. Just sayin'...
Norman, that’s hilarious. I can claim though my own tenuous connection to Richard Nixon, in at least three ways: through the bassist Milt Hinton and trumpeter Clark Terry, who played at the Nixon White House for Duke Ellington’s seventieth birthday, and through William P. Rogers. I never met Rogers, but as a student I worked for a summer as a proofreader at Rogers & Wells. I see a fun party game here: Six Degrees of Richard Nixon.
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