Mary C. Henry

It's that time of year again. The students will be arriving this week and classes will be starting next Monday. I feel pretty ready, since I started working on class planning extra early this year, but I still need to finalize some things and catch up on some new reading assignments. We have a lunch with the new graduate students this week, but otherwise, everything happens next week. I am teaching five days a week this semester. That may seem like an unreasonable complaint, but teaching is not the only work I do. I need time for research and service*, too- not to mention time to plan what I teach. I like semesters when I have one or two days a week that I can work at home. My schedule this semester won't allow that, so I'll have to be more creative about planning my days and work schedule. I'll post more as the semester gets rolling! *I am missing an OGA meeting next week, since I have class. If I didn't teach every day, I might have been able to go! (If it weren...

One of the first things I do to prepare for a class is to write the syllabus. It's the first document the students receive and contains all of the vital information about the course, such as required books, expectations, grading policy, and the schedule for the semester. Mine have tended to get longer and longer- especially for the large general education course that I teach. My syllabus for GEO 121 is currently four pages of text, a page with the schedule, and an additional page describing the requirements that the course fills. For my upper-level courses, they tend to be shorter (three or four pages total). Why is that syllabus so long? First, I like to explain more about the course content than in other courses. Most students taking GEO 121 are not geography majors and never will be. They have registered for the course because they need it to a fill a requirement (a physical science with a lab) and usually have very little interest in the subject (although maybe this changes at...