Tomorrow is the first day of the Spring semester as the cycle of higher academics begins again. The students have been moving into the residence halls over the weekend and will show up for classes in varying ways. Most of the new students will dress their best to make a good impression while most of the old timers will dress for comfort.
Thankfully, I’ve never seen a student wear one of these.
Some students will arrive to class early to get a good seat and make sure they don’t miss anything. Some will arrive a few minutes before class with a drink bottle in their hand. Others will come in a few minutes late. Either the new schedule got to them, or they didn’t time their drive correctly.
Bumper to Bumber, Baby
No matter how they get to class or how they are dressed, the students will be introduced to what the faculty members have been working on. Tomorrow is an important day. It is Syllabus Day and should be celebrated throughout the land. This is the document that lays out the semester and what is going to happen within the class.
The syllabus has all kinds of information. Required reading. Attendance policy. Class rules. However, the students are always ready to skip over to the assignment page. I can almost hear the wheels turning as they look at the page length of papers and the number of tests they will have to take. There are a lot of percentages on there that tell the students how important each item is. Here’s a hint. THEY ARE ALL IMPORTANT!!!
I’m not kidding.
Between classes is also an exciting time. New students are looking for rooms, and old students are hanging out with old friends. Some of them drop by the offices of their teachers to talk about anything other than academics. The time between classes is always. It’s amazing how quiet the hallways get when classes are in session.
The beginning of the semester is an exciting time. Everything is new, and the day-to-day grind hasn’t hit yet. Students are going to hear things that they have never heard before, and teachers are preparing to go over information that they know by heart. Good teachers introduce new scholarship into their classes, but the basics usually remain the same.
This week, I will talk about the post-Civil War period, the Renaissance and the United States of the 1940s. Along the way, I will do what I always do – teach History.
SBI: A Thinning Crowd 
So what are you teaching this semester?
I have HIS 202, HIS 192 and US 1941 to the Present.
Happy New Semester although I am on df and doesn’t feel any difference 😉
Thanks. It will start in about 6 minutes.
I’m trying to figure out if I can get away with wearing one of those Forever Lazy onesies one day…
You are a professional librarian, so I would think not.
The syllabus – required of all subject area teachers in high school , but such a waste of time. With AIDS awareness, Say No To Drugs, anger management, African American month, Hispanic month, Women get covered in March, assemblies, pep rallies, absences – you never get to cover half of it. Then when the kids can’t pass the state subject area exam the finger gets pointed at the teacher. One problem with syllabus is that students who work ahead of schedule, despite admonition not to, complete work that is inadequate because they cannot incorporate material or methodology not yet learned which makes the “ahead of time” assignment less than admissible quality.
I know what you mean. We have so many things that we have to put in there that it takes forever to get to the important stuff. But, we go over every time.
That’s one class I always wanted to take!