The syllabus

By -
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 the end of the semester for some!). I also go into more depth about note-taking, appropriate class behavior, and in-class policies. For about half of the students, this is their first semester (or year) in college and they may be adjusting to widely differing policies and practices in their different classes. Another reason for adding so much detail is that it makes it easier to enforce rules and grading policies if I can point to the syllabus. There are always students who dispute grades and policies and having a document that contains all of my rules and expectations makes things easier for me. I can hold students to it.

It takes a lot of time to write a detailed syllabus (much less to revise one- other than the schedule) and I spend the first day of each course going over the main points in the syllabus. However, I suspect that some (most?) students never read over it in detail. I am going to be giving a quiz about my syllabus for GEO 121 this semester. I will be giving weekly online quizzes and the first quiz will cover some of the main points from the syllabus. It will be very interesting to see how the students do on that quiz!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back to classes with almost no concern for COVID

By -
Image
Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash   Classes start next Monday and I will be there with my KN95 mask on. I might be the only one since Miami University is not requiring masks despite CDC recommendations for our county being to the contrary. I can't see how this will go well. People are still being hospitalized and dying of COVID. Why should we pretend otherwise? I had hoped they would start with masks with all the students returning to campus, but that is not the case. It's very frustrating. I am not immune compromised, but I'm sure there are those on campus on who are. This policy just seems very misguided. I watched the webinar posted on the U website and that was even more worrying to me. It sounds like they want to rely 100% on personal responsibility for keeping COVID numbers down. Yes, there are people who will be careful, but not everyone!  So that's how I'm feeling a week out from classes. I do get to teach Landscape Ecology again- it's only
Read more

Teaching with Documentaries

By -
As I prepare for fall classes, I am having my annual dilemma over content I want to share with my students. This semester I'm teaching two classes that I've taught before: 1) Global Perspectives on Natural Disasters and 2) Global Change (I'm team-teaching the second one). In both classes, I use a textbook but also assign additional readings and show short and long documentaries during class.  I like to think of the videos as multimedia reading assignments that give students something to think about and discuss. But just like articles and books, I can only show the same documentaries for a while until they become outdated. So each time I have to decide if it's time to retire that favorite video or show it one more time. A great example is The Trouble with Malaria . It's an episode of the CBC series " The Nature of Things " and gives an excellent overview of the disease and struggles to fight it. But it was made 20 years ago! I've been showing it in GE
Read more

Summer Plans

By -
We've reached the halfway point of the summer here at Miami (we start classes on August 24th), so it seems like a good time to take stock of what I've accomplished and what I still plan to do this summer. Progress Most of my work this summer has focused on REU and with the help of my student, we have made some good progress on a project. After some debate, I decided to stick with using some methodology that we've already used in this research, but apply it to different data. Most of the work done so far on this project (and the pilot study before the grant) focused on using fall imagery to detect Amur honeysuckle in forested areas. This shrub expands its leaves earlier in spring and retains them later in fall than the overstory tree species, and thus far, we have used fall imagery in our analysis (we felt that too many other plants were also green in spring). Recently, I started to reconsider this approach and tested some spring images for a conference presentation this spr
Read more