This Semester's Freshman Syllabus

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 find comfort in those statistics because I have made no plan for this semester’s syllabus. I’m already two weeks late.

Since I read the results of that deep research about plans, I don’t feel so bad about not writing a syllabus for teaching a freshman writing class. If I can’t decide what I’ll do, I don’t even attempt to write a new syllabus. 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 usually 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 twenty-five percent. That way I know that when the department chair gets to my syllabus, she’ll be too tired to pick it apart.

The syllabus committee person came to collect my syllabus two weeks ago. I didn’t have one, so I’ll just wait until someone comes looking for it. I’ll print out an old one and back date to the first day of the fall semester and swear that I personally turned it in to the department chair. 

My method is a good method. It saves everyone time and effort—especially me.