There is something very rewarding about syllabus writing and while I don’t know as if it is my favorite thing to do each semester, it is certainly more interesting than many of the more mechanical aspects of academic life that the semester brings. At its best, writing a syllabus is a utopian exercise that seeks to align the requirements (and expectations) of a particular class with the students who are enrolled.
This semester I’m teaching a lot and have a new class — Roman History — that is occupying most of my syllabus time in the break between semesters. I’m building my syllabus for this class around three key expectations.
First, while my students are history majors, most of them have precious little experience with premodern texts and the premodern world more broadly. They are unlikely to want to go on to graduate school in ancient history (or Classics) and almost as unlikely to want to continue in history. As a result, this class is not situated in a sequence which develops period specific expertise or methods. Rather the class is part of a broad humanities education with less of an emphasis on particular periods and content and more of an emphasis on reading and writing skills as well as the ability to adapt these skills to a range of texts and situations.
Second, my institution has a 16-week semester and in the spring, this means that my students get tired. When they get tired, they really struggle to learn. I’ve blogged about this here. As a result, a syllabus that requires 16 weeks to cover content, methods, or material is not a syllabus grounded in real educational outcomes, but one that is grounded in some other set of professional dictates (most plausibly the alternate reality created by accreditation standards).
It also means that we have an obligation to find a way to mitigate the length of the semester by creating pockets of recovery time during the semester to mitigate student fatigue.
Third, my student generally take too many classes and work too many hours outside of school. This is not meant to be a criticism of student decision making, but a description of the current economic situation of most college students. They are pressured to get done as quickly and to avoid the potentially crippling burden of student loan debt as much as possible. As I’ve blogged about before, the maths simply don’t work in these situations. Students who attempt to work 20-30 hours per week outside of class time and who take 15-18 credits per semester would have to spend 50-60 per week just to keep their head above water. As a result, students are often drowning.
These three fundamental situations has encouraged me to approach syllabus building in two ways:
First, instead of producing a syllabus that has a lots of small assignments that requires constant engagement with the class, I’m creating a syllabus with fewer larger reading and writing assignments. This should allow students to negotiate the class at a less consistent rate and to take advantage of the irregular ebbs and flows of their own schedules and complicated daily lives.
Thus, my Roman history class will have five big readings scaffolded by five three-week modules. Students will have at very least three weeks to do the readings and each module comes with some kind of assignment the final draft of which will be due at the end of the semester.
Second, after a productive conversation with my colleague and friend David Pettegrew yesterday, I’ve decided to build “lab days” into classes where we shift from focusing on specific content and toward more technical aspects of writing about history. Each module then, will have a lab day and I’m tempted to make them optional to give the students a little breathing room during the semester.
I’ll post the syllabus when I’m done with it!