It’s always bad luck to tell people about your plans. The results of a study revealed that ninety-five percent of smokers who announce their New Year’s resolution to quit smoking fail to quit for longer than a few weeks. Another study revealed that ninety-five percent of all smokers who make no public or private resolution fail to quit too. I was wondering if I should create a syllabus this semester, so I find comfort in those statistics.
Ever since I read the results of that deep research about plans, I don’t give much thought to writing a syllabus for teaching a freshman writing class. If I can’t figure out what I’ll do, I don’t even attempt to write a new one. Sometimes, I submit one that I wrote years ago. I may change the font, but that’s about all. One year, I failed to change the fall date to the spring date but no one noticed. Since then, I don’t put dates on my syllabi. If I change textbooks, I don’t bother to change the name of the textbook. So far, nobody has questioned it.
The department chair doesn’t question my syllabus when I do turn one in as long as I turn it in on time with everyone else’s. That’s when I volunteer to head the syllabus committee and collect as many syllabi as I can. I don’t bug anyone about a late syllabus. I know that everyone is busy. I also know that if I give anyone grief about a late syllabus, some day that person will head the syllabus committee and give me grief when I decide not to submit a syllabus. What goes around comes around.
When I’ve gathered as many syllabi as I can, I place mine in the bottom of the last quarter. That way I know that when the department chair gets to my syllabus, she’ll be too tired to spend much time looking at it.
My method is a good one. It saves everyone time and effort—especially me.
No comments:
Post a Comment