Class
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I expect you to be involved in the course. What we do, for the most part, is discussion. If you are unprepared, unmotivated, or unaware, it will certainly reflect poorly on your grade.
Attendance
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An attendance policy is unnecessary. If you intend on passing the course your attendance will be regular and punctual. If your appearance in class is sporadic, I will advise you to drop the course.
Final Exam
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The final exam will cover all readings, all concepts, all assignments, and all discussions for the course. If you are an attentive and active member of the class, the final is a breeze.
Learning goals for Hamsters 1000
ReplyDelete- You will learn about Hamsters.
Fuck.
ReplyDeleteI found a few of my grad school syllabi, and they were... short, yes. But they also weren't written for my students...
ReplyDelete1989, you say? I look at my syllabus from 1999 and marvel at how short and yet, at the time, adequate it was. What's REALLY painful is comparing it to my syllabus now (22 pages and counting!), since at every new clause, I remember whichever peckerhead whose stupidity caused me to insert that clause.
ReplyDelete"Oh, here's the bit about having to write on just the front side of the Scantron, courtesy of the dickhead whose head really did look like a dick...Here's the bit from the one who couldn't understand Ockham's razor...Here's the one from the one who needed Ascension Day off...and of course, here's the 7-volume epic on STAPLES..." Jeez, it this PAINFUL!
This has been pretty much my experience as well. The amount of contingencies we have to spell out has become ridiculous. It's reduced the effectiveness of the syllabus completely as a tool. I know my students don't read it. I don't want to read it.
ReplyDeleteBut the one above is all that's necessary for those policies. Or it could just say: "College: you get what you put into it."
Does anyone else here have a school where your syllabus has to be approved every semester by someone above the Dept Chair?
ReplyDeleteNo, but for the love of God, don't give my dean any ideas!
DeleteOh, whenever one of my overlords wants to see my syllabus, I let them HAVE it, all 22 pages. That holds the little bastards.
DeleteNo. I think the program director checks syllabi written by new faculty pretty carefully, and of course is willing to consult with any of us any time, but mostly it's an archiving operation for accreditation purposes. We also hand in syllabi at the other end of the year, with our annual review materials.
DeleteWe do get semesterly emails from various assistant provosts and such, reminding of stuff we're supposed to include, usually sent well after most instructors have finalized their syllabi (and the few who still do so have sent them off for copying), but actually approving syllabi would be a complete logistical nightmare.
Which raises an important question: are faculty at your institution (especially contingent/adjunct/whatever you call per-term faculty) compensated for the time outside the regular term they spend preparing syllabi in time for them to be approved?. If not, I'd say that that sort of policy makes a nearly-universal problem all too concrete, perhaps concrete enough to constitute some sort of violation of labor laws (which might be a useful point to make while trying to get rid of it).
Also, methinks whoever is approving the syllabi could teach a(nother) section or 3 (or a dozen or three, since surely it can't all fall to one person), and save your institution some money.
the person who approves them is one of the under-Deans. they're very nice about it, and generally the only thing I have to change is to update the boilerplate, or maybe fix a date. But we all have to do it, even the full profs nearing retirement. And it's not every school at my university. In others schools only the chairs have to see them. And no, no one is paid extra. What we used to call "other duties as assigned"
DeleteI tried joking that my department should consider a section of policies and guidelines for parents--and my colleagues discussed the probable need for such a thing for nearly twenty minutes.
ReplyDeleteMy assignment sheets for essays now are usually longer than the essays. Is that true for any one else?
I just did a word count on my current essay assignment. It is indeed longer than the paper that is required. I'm officially part of the problem.
DeleteOh, yes. In fact, you could probably find at least one or two comments to that effect on my page over at TSTSNBN.
DeleteI've also had instructional designers suggest more bullet points (even though I'm trying to teach the little dears to write paragraphs, preferably ones that are longer than 2 sentences and shorter than 2 pages, to which extremes they tend) and various other ways to make my assignments shorter. I'm somewhat sympathetic to the point of view that we are, indeed, part of the problem, but my assignments, prompts, etc. tend to get longer because I incorporate answers to frequently-asked questions (though not in FAQ-list format), warnings against common errors, etc., etc. as I use and reuse the assignment, and I don't see any reason to go back to a version that requires me to answer a lot of avoidable emails and/or require a lot of avoidable revisions.
Cassandra,
DeleteI feel for you.
I've taken to writing my prompts for my (few!) writing assignments with sections and subsection. The very first section is "The Core Assignment" and it has no subsections explicitly so that it is easy to find and short.
Subsequent sections—each with a big, bold heading—detail timing, formatting, hints and suggestions, when and where to get help and so on.
The result is that what I'm writing looks like what I want from them: a terse, clear, carefully-organized technical document. I'd be rather miffed if someone told me to make it look like a powerpoint.
In my entire undergraduate degree I don't remember ONE class where a syllabus was handed out (there were no websites back then...). The 1st lecture involved the prof introducing the course, saying what material would be covered, what the final grade would be composed of, and... that was that. On with the course.
ReplyDeleteI always got them, but they were short, such as a page or two. I used to have a daily planner and I would immediately write down there the important dates, such as the tests and assignment due dates. I would update them during the semester if necessary. My work schedule (posted at work every week) and any appointments or other important activities (with the address or room number) also appeared on the corresponding pages. That way, if, for example, I was asked if I'm available for something one particular day at 3 PM, I could look at the page for that day. I would carry the planner in my purse no matter where I was going.
DeleteWhen I started teaching I prided myself on the one-page syllabus -- partly because syllabus meant "course schedule," and partly because I had to mimeograph them and there were just so many ways that could, and did, go wrong. Some of my undergraduate professors had handed course schedules out; others adjusted the assignment for the next class based on where we were at the end of a session, especially in modern language courses. We're now required to include about two pages of boilerplate, and when we're told we can't penalize any student for anything not specified in the syllabus, the list of policies and specific penalties does blossom into a rosa dolorosa. For my sins, and those of years of my students, my one page is now 7 pages.
ReplyDeleteI can run a mimeograph machine. I learned to do it in 8th grade, to create flyers for a birdseed sale.
DeleteAnd I last ran one c. 1987, at a girls' school in England where I was interning.
I've never produced a syllabus that way, however. (Hey, I get to feel like a youngun for once!)
Bless you for knowing what those were!
DeleteThe rhythm!
The smell?? I could never figure out if I hated it or loved it!
(I just Googled that for me. Apparently the smell was from "highly volatile methyl alcohol," if I believe what I read on the internet: http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2007/01/ditto_machines_.html)
I think I may have lost a few brain cells to that stuff, especially when I was trying to squeeze out a last few copies (which of course turned out fuzzy, and wet). And I'm pretty sure that a few of my more adventurous classmates lost a few more (it was either that or sniff the markers, which were still sniffable in those days).
DeleteActually, 1989 is the date on my first syllabus. I don't have it handy (though if I could find the floppy disk, and de-virus it -- not that 20th-century viruses are probably very dangerous anymore -- I think Word actually opens Wordstar files, after a fashion). It's probably a bit wordier than the ones I received in college (which were very minimal), because I was teaching for a writing program (teaching English 101 as my first class when I had other alternatives -- that was either my first mistake or a very wise choice; I'm still not sure), and there were undoubtedly, even then, Policies (especially since this was at a university with a long and hallowed honor-code history).
ReplyDeleteI do know what the type looked like, though -- Courier (or maybe Courier New?) -- produced by the same trusty daisy-wheel printer that produced my undergrad thesis. And of course it was printed out on paper with holes to go over the sprockets on either side, then the perforated strips were removed, and somebody (I, I think) ran off copies on a photocopier. I think it was at least a very fancy photocopier that sorted and maybe even stapled automatically, but it was very, very slow.
My first syllabus would date to 85. Thank god it is lost to time.
ReplyDeleteLyle
I got by with three-page syllabi all through grad school, which wasn't that long ago (2000-2007), although it should be noted that 1) I didn't include all the assignments on the syllabus, which I do now; and 2) we were only allowed 500 photocopies per semester, which is an excellent incentive for keeping things short. If you were teaching a comp AND a lit that semester, that was 150 copies gone before class even started. I remember cramming most of my handouts onto 1/3 of a page in 10-point type.
ReplyDeleteNowadays, I'm at a cash-strapped regional public university that has lurched from budget crisis to budget crisis for as long as I've been here, but at least we ARE allowed to be profligate of photocopies. I have no idea what my much better-funded grad school was even thinking.
I'm a kind of "pod captain" who is charged (by the overlords of curriculum) with reviewing syllabi for a major. I don't see my job as "approving" things for courses I've never taught, as if I know better. However, I am pretty good at pattern recognition -- when I start to see enough faculty with similar concepts in their syllabi, I go to the others and ask if they could use something like that, which they often do. Then I put those things in the handbook for the major (which I'm also responsible for) and take them out of the syllabi, and while I'm at it, I do some minor reformatting so that the syllabi all have a similar appearance (the accreditors eat that shit up). The faculty seem to appreciate this approach.
ReplyDeleteOur syllabi are 2 to 3 pages each, which includes the schedule and the standard disclaimer that students are responsible to read and understand all policies in the handbook.
That disclaimer should cover an immense amount of what does go into the syllabus, but it's just not enough: if faculty across the university could actually agree on some of the cultural standards it would help, but trying to get some of our colleagues to see beyond the minimal expectations of their own vocations is a challenge almost as great as getting our students actively thinking critically.
DeleteI was in undergrad in 89, but from what I remember, most syllabi were, at most, 4 pages, and we all survived. I find it disturbing that in these days of routinely 10+ pages and the customary assignment sheets longer than the assignment will be, at my school our lowest-scored eval. question is always related to the specificity of assignments. Always.
ReplyDeleteI didn't start teaching until the 90s, but then my syllabi were usually three or four pages. Now they're close to thirty. I've started including a table of contents. It's absolutely stupid. I had a grad class where the syllabus was a half a page, roughly something like this: "I determine grades based on your performance. If you're not willing to accept the grade I give you, drop the class now. We will read books in the order below. We'll spend as much time as we need on each. You'll write one publishable paper, and most of your grade will be based on that." That was it. No numbers, no specificity. Just essentially that and a short list of books. Try getting away with that now (I actually think he couldn't have possibly gotten away with it then, if anyone but his students had known he was doing that).
ReplyDelete