Fall semester begins next week. That means that we’re having all kinds of meetings this week.
I just got back from a morning of meetings. Tomorrow will be worse: I’ll be in meetings all day long.
But wait, you say, aren’t you on sabbatical? I am, but it’s a one semester leave, I have to get back in the saddle in January, and they present a lot of new stuff at the start of fall term, including some significant changes to the Morris Core Curriculum, so I had to show up this week so that I’m not clueless for spring term.
It was not fun. I found myself thinking that Aristotle never had to count credits, but I’m feeling like I’m supposed to be an accountant, with 7 (or is it 8?) categories that students have to work through in order to graduate. We also were given a 10-page assortment of information that we must include in our syllabi…which has me wondering, if every single class every term has to include all this same stuff, isn’t that a massive duplication of effort? And are any students going to bother to read all this repetitive material, most of which has nothing to do with the content of my courses? Twenty five years ago, when I started here, every syllabus had a paragraph or two of boilerplate at the end, with a link to where the student can get more details.
Now the curriculum is a collection of fiddly little details and every syllabus has a massive addendum that dwarfs the actual description of course content.
Good thing I just have one more day of administrative noise, and then 15+ weeks of blissful spider research which might reduce my cranky surliness a bit.
But don’t count on it.
Nobody told me there would be dancing!
Not to worry, PZ. By the time Spring semester roles around university education for the hoi polloi will be terminated. You’ll be free to pursue your life long dream of flipping burgers.
You should take a vacation in Australia, the country with the most spider species. Plus, they speak English there (not the spiders). Spend some of that hard earned retirement money while you can still enjoy it. You don’t want to leave any for your kids, do you? Live it up. You know what they say about the clock ticking.
Retirement? I’m not retired, and never will be.
Best I can do is once I die and am incinerated, maybe someone in Australia will accept my ashes and scatter them someplace with lots of spiders.
I don’t know what LMS Morris uses, but I put all of the ten-page boilerplate there under a “General Resources” tab with links.
@2: robo
Did you mean flipping burghers (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Burgher)?
That doesn’t sound too bad. Can we flip them out of their board room windows?
@PZ
Sure, can handle that. Does Macedon ranges sound good, or would you rather the Blue Mountains where there are more funnelwebs?
You’re only just now getting to the 15+ pages of useless boilerplate?? I’m only just now realizing how much of a backwater Morris is—we passed that milestone a decade or more ago. The best approach is to create a web page with all the boilerplate then link to it in the syllabus. An alternative, if the bureaucrats prohibit that sensible approach, is to create an official syllabus with everything in it (which no one will ever read), and a TLDR syllabus summary that has only the useful stuff, with a pointer to the official syllabus. The problem with that approach is cache coherency—when a change is needed it has to be made in both.
PZ — you could have those ashes spread pretty much anywhere in Australia, not to mention almost any land surface in the world except Antarctica.
Kevin Karplus@8 — The old method of burying real intentions in a wall of fine print doesn’t work in the era of computerised text search. Perhaps we should adapt leet speek and offer G3nd3r Studeez 101.
I’ve seen the “syllabus as contract” go and return. When I started teaching at UMass Amherst in the ’90s, we were told to be excruciatingly explicit about course policies. Then we were told that such detail kept students from reading the syllabus, so we should drop them or put them in an appendix on the course website (and, later, LMS). Since around 2018 or 2019, we were required once more to include boilerplate on academic honesty (now “academic integrity”), Title IX, and ADA accommodations. Fortunately, for the last year we have the option of just mentioning that the policies exist and linking to a web version.