Calling Dr. Syllabus-Saver!

Right now academics everywhere are typing and clicking, copying and pasting, updating due dates and reading assignments to make sure their syllabi are flawless before classes begin, but deep in our hearts we long for the appearance of Dr. Syllabus-Saver, a caped crusader who swoops in to swat our hands when we're on the verge of accidentally assigning all our classes to submit drafts on the same date. Faster than a speeding cursor, he's able to make leaps of logic across courses and sections to see hidden conflicts, to synthesize details across space and time and stand boldly in the path of disastrous gaps that creep into policies.

I'm dreaming, of course. I've had decades of experience in enshrining foolish decisions on course syllabi, and no one is hovering overhead to prevent me from doing it again. I've finished two of my fall syllabi, but I've learned the hard way that I'd better not print them out until next week. One year a flood closed campus, delaying the start of classes for a week and washing out every date on every syllabus. If I print out these syllabi today, I'll just be tempting fate to strike us with a wildfire or tsunami or even a global pandemic.

So instead I'll keep pointing and clicking, copying and pasting, updating and revising until all three syllabi are done. Of course I did the two easier ones first. I've taught both of these classes many times before, but I've still needed to switch out a few readings and tweak some assignments and, of course, change all the due dates. I keep recalling the former colleague who used to hand her past syllabi to the department secretary and demand that she change all the dates manually with a typewriter, but nobody's getting away with that kind of noblesse oblige these days. We're all doing obeisance to our keyboards and course management systems, which means that the blame for any mistakes falls firmly on our own shoulders.

The next syllabus will take some work. I've taught the class twice before but I'm still not happy with the rhythm of the course or the assignment structure. Two of the papers are too similar, and I'd like to change the final project to eliminate some of the lazy shortcuts that students can't seem to resist. They do a ton of reading about what connects people to specific places, and they write some short papers about their own connections to specific places, but the final project asks them to argue that a certain group should take a specific action in regard to a specific place. Despite seeing plenty of examples of place-based advocacy, too many students want to argue that "Everyone should visit x place because it's really cool." Not a particularly interesting argument, especially after the umpteenth repetition. 

So today's task is to revise the assignment structure to shut off access to that particular shortcut without opening doors to other shortcuts I can't yet imagine. If only I could call on some academic superhero with the power to foresee every possible point of weakness in a prompt and obliterate it before it's enshrined in print! Where's Dr. Syllabus-Saver when I need him?