If you are a good college instructor, you provide a haven for your students. By haven, I mean that you give them structure and order in a world of chaos and nonsense. There is a world outside the classroom, and it is a tempest of confusion, trickery, deception, wild-goose chases, chimeras, and misguided Holy Grails. Inside a young person’s mind, the world can resemble a jumble of blurry lines, flashing lights, and static on a 1960s television with a faulty UHF antenna. As an instructor, you have to pull your students out of that blinding, cacophonous television set.
Your first job is to understand that they are rather comfortable living there. Just as a fish doesn’t know it’s wet after spending its entire life in water, students don’t necessarily know they live in confusion because confusion is their default environment. You have to make them see the disorder of their living space, persuade them that it is not normal, and convince them to look for an exit.
This part of your class does not feel like a haven because it is disruptive. You must, as Kafka writes of good literature, be the axe that breaks their frozen ocean. You must create tumult. Students should occasionally feel as if the ground has been removed from beneath their feet. They should feel disoriented, even vertiginous.
But this is where the haven enters. It is your course syllabus.
The syllabus contains your purpose—not merely the official student learning outcomes but what educators Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe call Enduring Understandings. These are the large ideas students should carry with them long after the class is over. If you’re teaching a unit on the life of Frederick Douglass, for example, you don’t merely teach the courage of an adolescent who defied laws forbidding him to read and write. You teach that the interiority produced by advanced literacy allows a person to understand and crave freedom in ways that would otherwise be unavailable.
But your syllabus contains more than course purpose, student learning outcomes, and Enduring Understandings. It contains the manual for implementing those goals. You give students a purpose, a structure, a timeline, and a method.
That is the haven.
There is something very American about the course syllabus. By American, I mean that our culture is embedded in the optimistic belief that we can fix things. The world is broken because, in part, people are broken, but give us the right how-to manual and we will get to work. Because we grow up with this belief, we tend to take free will and self-agency for granted. We can improve particular forms of intelligence, critical thinking, communication skills, marital intimacy, leadership, and financial stewardship. We can learn to write screenplays, become comedians, actors, yoga instructors, computer programmers, and whatever else the instructional manual promises.
We recognize few bounds. We can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. We can transcend economic and social class and ascend to the highest altitudes of American finance and status, where presumably everyone has a personal chef and a diversified portfolio.
College instructors participate in this national faith. Depending on what course we teach, we provide a syllabus that is more than a schedule of due dates. It is more than a manual. It is an affirmation of self-agency and the hope of self-reinvention. It provides a haven of order and structure in a world of chaos.
So being an instructor is a big deal. In fact, the word instructor doesn’t capture the gravitas of our calling. Perhaps another term is required. Perhaps we should be called priestocrats. Our very existence and role in society constitute an argument for self-improvement, self-agency, and order in a chaotic world.
As someone who has taught college and written syllabi for forty years, do I really believe all this?
I honestly don’t know.
But I do know this: Writing a syllabus is enormously comforting because it makes me feel ordered and structured in a world of chaos. A syllabus gives me the sensation of control. I love writing them so much that I can imagine retiring from teaching less than a year from now and continuing to write syllabi “just for fun.” I will scour essays from various authors, discover some thematic through-line connecting them, and create an imaginary sixteen-week course complete with reading and writing assignments. There will be an Enduring Understanding, of course. There will be a telos, a higher purpose. There will probably be due dates even though no students exist.
I will never stop writing syllabi because I have the Syllabus Gene.
The gene revealed itself early. When I was thirteen, I became an Olympic weightlifter and, shortly afterward, a bodybuilder. I spent hours in my father’s office, where he had a beautiful blue IBM Selectric typewriter. I would type workouts, read them over, revise them, throw away the paper, and begin again. Each new version seemed to bring me closer to the haven of the Perfect Workout, the program that would optimize my fitness and provide the order I craved.
The world was chaotic. The average man looked like a tomato with four toothpicks sticking out of him, and by God, I was going to create a manual that would spare me that indignity.
Looking back, the connection seems obvious. The thirteen-year-old typing workout schedules on an IBM Selectric and the college instructor constructing sixteen-week composition courses are essentially the same person. Give me chaos and I will make categories. Give me confusion and I will create a sequence. Give me sixteen weeks and I will assign due dates.
Perhaps that is what I have been doing for forty years. I thought I was creating a haven for my students. Maybe I was creating one for myself as well.
So I am retiring from teaching college writing.
But I will always write a syllabus.
My sanity depends on it.
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