Back to School

I'm playing on facebook the day before classes start and two days before my first classes when it hits me, the little flutter of joy somewhere in my chest. I catch my breath. It's time. BACK TO SCHOOL.

I have no idea how spastic I was for the very first first day of school, but I know that I was crazy looking forward to it. I still think that the first day of school is just about the coolest day of the year. I've been watching my friends posting First Day pictures of their kids, and eagerly awaiting my own first day - one of the most glorious perks of life in academia is that you get a first day of school every year until you retire.

Buying school supplies is so fun that those of us without kids
 buy them for other people.  This photo from Back to School
shopping with my bestie for my church's school supply mission.

There are calendar years and fiscal years, and different new years in lots of cultures. The Jewish new year is Rosh Hashanah. The Chinese new year tends to be around the beginning of February. And for lots and lots of people, a year begins in January. I can adapt. If someone says ‘that was a tough year,’ I know she’s probably talking about a year that began in January, or perhaps a year bracketed by birthdays – the year she was 22, perhaps. If a friend says ‘Next year we’re going to keep the house cleaner,’ he probably means that as a resolution beginning 01-01. But for me, the year begins in August and ends in May. A year is catalogued not as 2002, but as 02-03. Summer is an extra time, a yearly bonus, a time to catch up with family and housework that the year didn't allow time for, time to research and read, time to sleep 9 glorious hours every night. But no matter how great the summer, no matter how bad the phase of my life, ever since I started first grade at age 5, August has always promised a renewal, a new year, new chances, new ideas, new people. The 3 years after college that I was out of school were good for their own reasons, but when August rolled around and I went to yet another day of work instead of to school, it was not only disappointing, it was disorienting.

I am about to have my 34th first day of school. It will be my 6th first day of school where I teach now. My 2nd first day as a tenured professor. I have had 8 first days since I finished graduate school. My first day of school as a teacher was 13 years ago. This is an auspicious year for me - 13 has always been my lucky number. I am, I have to say, incredibly and unspeakably grateful for every single one of those first days, for the fortune to have an excellent education, to have been able to spend year after year in a classroom, to have spent the better part of my life - and I do mean the better part of my life - learning.

 But I can't find words to express my gratitude for the 13 of those years that have been as a teacher, because I've learned the most in that time. I remember a professor in my Masters degree who just seemed to know everything, and I asked him "How, HOW, do you know all this? I will never know all this!" and he said "Oh, wait until you're a teacher. You don't really know something until you teach it." He was right. He was so, so very right. I really thought I knew Hamlet after I'd, you know, written about it in my dissertation. I freaking knew that play. Backwards and forwards. And then I was assigned my first Shakespeare classes, in my first tenure-track job. Re-reading the play to teach it taught me Hamlet. Preparing my discussion notes taught me Hamlet. My students' responses taught me Hamlet. It felt miraculous, recognizing that I'd be learning for the rest of my life, just by doing my job. 

Most of us start out each fall giddy with anticipation, ready to MOLD YOUNG MINDS and INSPIRE FUTURE LEADERS, hopped up from full nights of sleep all summer and perhaps in some cases a possible marathon of Dead Poets Society and Mona Lisa Smile. The weeks will pass. The joy will not last. The grumpiness will set in. A student will miss a required conference and have to be penalized. Cell phones will be confiscated in class. Unprepared students will be sent out, and they will complain that it's so very unfair and will possibly even go gripe about me on Ratemyprofessors.com, writing comments so foul as to deserve deletion by site administrators. (Should anyone choose to visit the site, observe the blank comments section on a few of the posts. There were once comments there. I have on this site a fairly good record of the dates I passed out graded papers in years gone by - it is the day before the date of the post, in many cases). Even in Dead Poets Society, there's the red-headed kid not standing on his desk at the end, bitter and angry and untouched by Mr. Keating's magic. There's always the one, at the very least.

See all the kids not standing? They don't care about Mr. Keating
and they didn't appreciate his life lessons. Not yet.
photo from http://www.whatascript.com/dead-poets-society.html

Ideals collapse, and yet they endure.

The summer of 1985, when I was about to start high school, I fell in love with an ideal of Back to School from which I may never fully recover, thanks to one of my teenage girl magazines, probably Young Miss or Seventeen. Whichever one it was ran an August issue photo spread that was all about Back to School, showing red-cheeked girls in sweaters and plaid skirts, in misty fall afternoon scenes of football games or chummily piled into someone's Jeep or Range Rover or something, all friends and laughing with their books tucked under their arms. I was completely in love with it. I paged through it breathlessly, soaking in that this was what school would feel like - it would feel like this felt - forgetting entirely that I was in south Georgia and it would be fully January before we had anything that could be considered sweater weather (I usually got a single sweater at Christmas, since it wasn't like you'd get much wear out of more than that). When those realities began to sink in, as the fall wore on and it was hot and I didn't have very many friends and certainly no Jeeps to hang around on, I had to come to terms with the fact that my Back to School ideal would not come true any time soon. But I had a wonderful year, nonetheless. I confess, though, that if you look at my senior portrait four years later, you'll see me in a sweater and plaid skirt, hanging on to that ideal in a faded form, insisting on carrying it with me into my academic future. 

The joy and the promise of Back to School is an ideal, and ideals fall apart when we get close to them, like meeting your favorite movie star and realizing he's not as brilliant or funny as the characters he plays, but is still a nice guy. The ideal of Back to School is a heady one for academics. And we do carry it with us, because for all that my first fall of high school did not turn out to be a teen magazine spread, I made some new friends and football games were fun, and over the years there were cars to pile into and girls to laugh with as we walked from class to class with our books tucked under our arms. Ideals are useful. They teach us what we want. They are an anchor for us when we're spinning, a home to which we can return when reality devolves into brown Christmases and grade complaints. 

With my two best friends from high school, goofing around as we got ready for
our next big Back to School - in college. Both of these friends just posted on fb
the Back to School photos of their daughters. Some realities are better than the ideal.

The first day of Back to School is so full of promise, and it won't live up to all the promises we force it to make to us. But it's a beginning, a return to an ideal. And in seeking our ideals, we grow and learn, a little more every year.

So when I see students posting pictures of the books they bought for my classes on facebook and twitter, when I see my friends post pictures of their kids in their First Day outfits posing on the front steps with their shiny new backpacks, when my dearest bestie from grad school melts my heart with her annual ode to sharpened pencils, and when my other friends are texting me that they're almost done with their syllabi and without a moment to lose, I get breathless with anticipation. The School Year is Here! 13-14, Babyyyyy!

Happy New Year, my friends.

Syllabus Agony

Syl.la.bus. Sillybus. Syllabus.

Forms:  Pl. syllabi /ˈsɪləbaɪ/ or syllabuses /ˈsɪləbəsɪz/ .
Etymology:  < modern Latin syllabus, usually referred to an alleged Greek σύλλαβος .
(Oxford English Dictionary)

The first recorded English usage, according to the OED, was in 1656, to mean a sort of summary of contents for non-printed dissemination of knowledge, sort-of like a table of contents for a series of lectures, as well as a brief statement of the contents of a treatise.

It's been in use since 1889 in its most common usage, to mean "a statement of the subjects covered by a course of instruction."

It is the bones of the course. The policies, the assignments, the reading schedule. It constitutes an agreement of responsibilities, proposed by the professor and implicitly agreed upon by students by their continuation in the course after having that agreement offered to them. It is a contract between professor and student, which even further underscores the deep and terrible shame that many students don't bother to do much more than glance at it once before it disappears, crumpled, into the vast recesses of a bookbag. Yes, there are students who on the first day, as I'm going over the syllabus and books and such, carefully get their portable hole-punch out of their backpacks and punch the holes so they can file it neatly into their already-labeled course ring-binder. They will then go back to their dorms and meticulously highlight the assignment descriptions and record the due dates in their daybooks. But those students are not the majority. Five weeks in to the semester, after something like 25 reading assignments and probably at least one writing assignment, a student will ask "Professor, when is the next writing assignment due?" Response: "It's on the syllabus." Student: "...um, syllabus," (said while absently unzipping the bookbag and idly ruffling through things) "...yeah, can I get another one of those?"

The bottom is where the syllabus goes.

Also: When are your office hours? What is your email address? Where is your office? How many absences do I get? What happens if I skip a test? Are we going to read just out of this one book or will there be other books I need to get? When is the last day of class?

It's on the syllabus. It's all on the syllabus.

Because before we can even get to the subjects covered by a course of instruction, we must include every policy of the school regarding student expectations and behavior in class, we must include the course objectives determined by our department, and we must include every detail that we ourselves want to have laid out and clear before that grade challenge at the end of the term. The syllabus is where we cover the bases, and where we cover our asses. It gets longer every semester because we have to go back in and clarify everything that students found loopholes in so as to (we hope, we hope each time) avoid any further awkward scenarios. Some things you don't put on there, because they would seem petty or you just hope they never happen again.*

Outcomes and Objectives - here is the information and here are the skills you are to have learned by the end of the term and I'm stating it clearly here so you don't imagine we're just sort of reading generally around in some literature and stuff with the purpose of making you well-rounded or whatever. Course Policies - you get 3 unexcused absences and here is what constitutes an excused absence and I really, really, really mean it when I say I'll penalize you for excessive absences so please don't push me on absences because holy crap I hate the arguments over this more than just about anything. Food and drink in the classroom - I swear to almighty God I actually have to specify which beverages are permitted ("food is not permitted but water, juice, and soda are fine") because I don't want to have to specify "non-alcoholic" on the syllabus after the time years ago that a student took "beverages are permitted but food is not" to include a Coors Lite. Cell phones - strictly prohibited because no you don't need it to know what time it is since you don't wear a watch, and I will count you absent if I see you texting, and no you don't need to answer the call from your mother while sitting in the middle of the third row of class just as we're covering the rhetorical triangle because she's your mother and we can only hope that she'll understand that you were in class and couldn't answer. Assignments - due at the beginning of class and not 25 minutes into class after you finally got the printer to work in the lab full of students that you got to six minutes before class started, and yes 4-5 pages means a minimum of 4 full pages and a maximum of 5, and you have to address the specific assignment and not just write whatever you felt like because you thought my expository essay assignment was boring and you wanted to do something you found more challenging so you wrote a short story about yourself.

Then we put in the disabilities statement, and the teacher licensure objectives, and whatever else comes down from administrative sources as things that must go on every syllabus. And then, only then, do we get to the subjects covered by the course of instruction. The policies take time, but after the first creation of a first syllabus, they are mostly tweaking to adjust and adapt. It's pretty rare to totally rewrite from scratch. If a course is one you've taught a few times and you like it pretty much the way it is, if you're just changing out a few readings, there's not a whole lot to it beyond updating due dates based on that semester's calendar and adding any new personal policies you've picked up from conversations with teacher friends, like counting students absent for texting, or requiring the Turnitin.com receipt as the cover page for an essay.

The real work on a syllabus, the one that we dread sitting down to do but can kind of enjoy while in the middle of it, is the new or totally-revamped syllabus. I can update a syllabus I like in about a day, which includes due-date-changing, updated policies, even changing some readings or an assignment or two and posting on the online course management system (Moodle, Blackboard, whatever).  But a new or revamped course can take over 200 hours of work. This is almost impossible to do while teaching, so most of us do this over summer, when there might be time to read dozens of books before choosing which ones go on the reading assignments, pairing and repairing and re-repairing readings to see what goes well together and what themes emerge or what possibilities emerge for students to find cool open doors for their own work. Then there is the agony over the workload we're assigning. Is it too much? Is it challenging enough? Am I assigning tons of reading for periods in the semester when they'll be getting burned out or frustrated? Am I covering enough territory to give them a real sense of what else is out there? Am I going to kill them with all this reading?

I always say that the real divide between students and teacher when it comes to coursework is that they see 15 long weeks that need filling with stuff, and we see the entire world of literature that somehow has to get edited down and crammed into the miniscule 15 weeks we're given to cover everything. Why do we overdo it sometimes? Because we might be painfully aware that this general education literature course will be the last time some of our students read, so that last book for the last week of class may well be the last book that student ever reads in his life. No pressure. Or we might find it depressing that there are more major works of literary theory than there are class days in the graduate theory course, so we have to choose which ones to cover and which ones to leave off, hoping to God that we're not leaving off the one that would have made more sense to the students struggling to grasp the concepts.

Me, building a new syllabus from scratch.
Photo from: http://librarianinreallife.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/gandalf_201.jpg

Then we run around to our colleagues showing them the new syllabus reading schedule and asking if we're overdoing it. Then we re-do it a few times. Then we find the typos we didn't find in the last six revisions. Then we read it out loud to our pets to see if we missed any incomplete sentences or other casualties of cutting-and-pasting.

And at some point it is just done. We post it online. We print it and staple it and pass it out on the first day of class. If you're me, you read portions of it out loud to them so that later they can't say they didn't know that the professor doesn't answer work email over the weekend.

And the conscientious ones punch their holes and place it in the ring-binder, and the ones we'll sigh over later absent-mindedly stuff it into their bookbags where it will go to meet last year's syllabi and some food wrappers and someone's phone number, and we go over which editions of the books to get and what the first reading assignment will be for the next class period. And then we're done.

And three of them will drop the class for a variety of reasons. And the rest will come back.

Contract signed.

* Things that I have considered adding to my syllabus:

• No sunglasses to hid the shiner you got in a fight over the weekend.
• No asking athletes for autographs while in the middle of peer review.
• No dipping (when this kid pulled his spit bottle out out of his backpack and spit into it, the Kappa Delta across from him visibly threw up in her mouth).
• No transparent clothing in class.
• No changing shoes and socks in the middle of class.
• Backpacks must be stored safely under or up against desks and not sprawled out in the aisles where I will trip over them.
• A Facebook Policies section: You may friend me on facebook but I will put you in a restricted list so you can't see anything but a handful of pictures of me with my family and a few updates about school events, so please do the same since I do not need to see tagged photos of you doing kegstands. Also, I can put 2 and 2 together so if you post about your epic roadtrip over the weekend please do not then tell me you couldn't finish the reading because you had the flu. Also, it shows up in my newsfeed if you and another student who has friended me have a conversation about how much you hate my class and what a bitch I am.
• Grade-grubbing makes me crazy, so don't even think about it. Demanding that I explain to you how the grade was reached is only going to make me cut and paste into my response email the portions of this syllabus where I explain in detail how that assignment is evaluated, and to remind you to read my comments and the long paragraph at the end of the essay where I advise you on what you could have done better along with what you did well. 
• Recovery from tattoos is not an excused absence.
• Please consult the academic calendar before planning your wedding so that you do not book the venue for your ceremony for the exact time for which the university has scheduled your final exam.
• You may not substitute your own choices for class readings, even if you think that other book by the same author is better.