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.