Take My Advice: A Slightly Silly Guide to the Syllabus, Part II

The best syllabi can get your blood pumping at the thought of the journey ahead; the worst can make you feel panic and dread before you've even begun. Some syllabi do a bit of both. Below, a continuation of last week's slightly silly guide to the syllabus, which hopes to shake a stick at the question: how can both instructors and students use syllabi better? 

Office Hours:
For instructors: As I mentioned last week, office hours can be a source of frustration when it seems as though no one knows you have them or when they are. You may consider doing something that I tried out last year: having one set of office hours you establish at the beginning, and letting students give feedback on when the second set would be. To do this, I structured the top of my syllabus like so:

I then added a section to the bottom of my typical first day sheet with a calendar encouraging students to mark the times that were best for them. I tallied up the most popular times, eliminated the ones that wouldn't work with my schedule, and selected the winning time. This not only makes it more likely that students will have no other standing obligations that prevent them from coming to office hours, but also gives students a role in planning the course and suggests that office hours are important and useful enough to make accessible to as many as possible. 

Office hours can also be frustrating in other ways. When I taught Reacting to the Past: Conflict and Unity in American History the first time, we were in a classroom in the same building as my office. Students preparing for future sessions of a Reacting game frequently wanted to chat with me about their objectives, their assignments, and the historical context that might help them win. They frequently wanted to do this after class, and it was easy to oblige them even if the classroom was in use the next period-- we simply migrated up the stairs like a gaggle of birds alighting in a tree. That worked so beautifully that of course the next semester I was placed in a room across the quad, which completely changed how I could hold meetings with students. The lack of familiarity with the location of my office led to fewer people coming to office hours. If this happens to you, you might consider getting very specific with the location of your office on the syllabus, walking everyone to the building if it's not too far away, or scheduling early group or one-on-one meetings in your office to make sure everyone knows where it is and what to expect once they get there. 

For students: Again, as I said last time, there are fully one hundred different advice documents for college students which urge them to go to office hours. I won't argue with that advice nor simply echo it, but I will give you a few tidbits which might help you use that time more effectively. 

• You don't have to have a fully formed thought, though you should come with a topic in mind. 
• It will help you to do this before you even start worrying about the paper. Often office hours are crowded when the paper is due because people are seeking advice on drafts, which is great! However, if you come to your instructor with your half-formed thought or question two weeks in advance of the paper, it is highly unlikely that you will leave that room without hearing "you could address this in your paper" at least once. That discussion will make the planning and writing process a lot easier and may save you some hasty last-minute revisions if you discover that, for example, you used a source to talk about World War I that is actually about World War II (Hey, it happens to the best of us).
• We often make quizzes, tests, and paper assignments based on what we think people are interested in or are thinking about. We often steer review sessions or top-of-the-hour explanations of topics towards questions we have received from people in the class. One of the ways we gauge these things is by what people ask about in office hours.
• If you can't come to office hours, don't be afraid to make an appointment. Most instructors are happy to do so-- as long as you actually show up. 

Phew, that was a big section! Office hours: so simple, yet inspiring so many feelings-- I've even talked about them a bit in an earlier post. On to other syllabus sections: 

Images (usually front and center on the first page):
(This section presented in the irresistibly imitatable style of David Ives' Sure Thing.)
For instructors: 
"Look at these beautiful images, so lovingly presented! They will sure fill up some space on this page!"
(Bell.)
"They will sure make the students think my course is fun!"
(Bell.)
"These really capture the spirit of the course and serve...pedagogical ends?"
(Tense silence.) 

For students: 
"Someone designed this in color, and then printed it in black and white. Is this.. a lady? A building? I can't tell what it is. So, where's the section on grading?"


Grading /Grade Scale:
For instructors: This is perhaps the section I take the least amount of pleasure in making. I want it to be clear to students, meaningful to the course itself, and possible to calculate-- features which are harder to harmonize than it might seem. Give your later self a gift-- keep this section as simple as possible. Sure, you could have "In-class writing," "Quizzes," and "Participation" as three separate categories. But you could also just put them all under the umbrella of "Participation" and explain that this category is made up of several different kinds of work. This isn't to say that you can never separate things out-- if you think that quizzes are particularly important to emphasize and want to make them their own category, do so! It will help if you really consider what themes and skills you want to emphasize in the course. If you are interested in promoting writing skills, writing assignments should take a sizable portion of the grade; if you are more focused on encouraging students to engage with the material at their own pace, participation might be more central to your calculations. Keeping things both simple and meaningful will help you at the end of the semester when you are calculating grades and realize that somewhere amidst all the percentages you've lost the plot. 

For students: For some of you, this is the first place you look; for others, you will only try to make sense of it as the semester winds up and you try to figure out what you should have in the course. As I've implied above, most of us don't find great passion in figuring out the grade breakdown, so try to look beyond the rigidity of the numbers and figure out what they mean. For example:

• A high percentage given to participation (arguably, anything 20% or higher) means that discussion and engagement probably plays a big role in what the instructor wants the course to be. For some, this may mean they expect everyone to straight up speak to the group at least once per class; others take a broader approach to what participation is, including things like active listening and making space for less intense one-on-one discussions of material. 
• History courses can vary widely in terms of assessment. Are there quizzes, tests, and essays, and how is each weighted? Quizzes can serve as a sort of gauge for attendance; they can be part of participation; they can stand alone as a small or large percentage category, Looking at the grade scale with an analytical eye will help you determine how much the instructor values each of these things and distribute your efforts accordingly. (It's also great practice for doing the actual work of historical analysis, which generally involves analyzing aspects of a document. Win-win?)

Schedule:
For instructors: "Wait, did I forget to account for Labor Day?" If you are including a schedule in your syllabus, you could easily spend half of the writing time trying to get the dates right. I have no fresh and handy tips on this horrible process. Godspeed. 

For students: This is probably the most critical part of the syllabus for your purposes, because as I'm sure you've heard roughly one million times by now, no one will remind you about due dates in college. (This is not exactly true. Everyone I know reminds students about due dates a lot, at least for big assignments). More significantly, then, the schedule lets you know what you're supposed to be reading for each meeting, and this is something that you will likely not get reminded on every week-- assume that there's always reading, and that it's on the syllabus, and that someone will tell you if that's not the case. It's easy to develop a sort of tunnel vision for the schedule-- what is the very next thing I have to do?-- but try to find some time between week one and week two to glance over the whole thing and see if you can get a sense of the arc of the course in terms of themes, assignments, and readings. Is the course moving chronologically? (Probably.) If so, you know roughly what book you will need at what time. When is the first paper due? The timing will give you an idea of the probable topics for the paper. Getting a sense of how things are arranged makes moving through the course easier. 

Final Thoughts: 
There are, of course, lots of other sections that can appear on a syllabus-- accessibility/ accommodations statements, policies on late work (which I've touched on a bit elsewhere), breakdowns of particular assignment types or pet peeves of the instructor. 

Honestly, I end this piece not with some overarching advice or wisdom but with more questions. As I look back at old syllabi of my own from classes I've taught and taken, at syllabi posted online from classes at other schools, and at advice on crafting syllabi, I'm struck and somewhat dismayed by how forbidding in tone they can be. There's an element of fear to a syllabus, of self-protection. There's a lot of bolding and underlining, all caps instructions, and incredibly specific instructions, all likely there because there have been Incidents in the past. I'm not passing judgment idly here-- my syllabi also read as more combative than I would like. Interestingly, in graduate level syllabi many of the more defensive sections disappear, leaving the rationale, the calendar, and perhaps the grade scale. Is it possible to preserve the clarity of expectations that these undergraduate level syllabi embody without sounding quite so legalistic about it all? Are syllabi really "contracts" in addition to "road maps"?And if so, must a contract be written as though someone is trying to pull a fast one, or can it be a source of mutual comfort and protection? 


Related Links:
Advice for instructors on maximizing office hours from U of I's LAS Teaching Academy. 
"Sure Thing" appears in All in the Timing, along with the similarly multiple "Variations on the Death of Trotsky." 
In addition to old syllabi of my own, the many history course syllabi on this site helped to jog my memory on common syllabus categories. 

Take My Advice: A Slightly Silly Guide to the Syllabus, Part I

If I had a dollar for every time I heard, "It's on the syllabus!" I'd have enough money to heat the TA office to a tolerable temperature. Instructors are commonly annoyed that students don't seem to read them. However, it's also true that students have a reason to be skeptical about the syllabus or simply find it confusing to navigate. Example: A student goes to a professor's listed office hours, only to find them absent from their office. The next week, they hope to meet with their TA, emailing to make sure they know when to come by. "My office hours are on the syllabus." Yes, so were the professor's, and look how well that went!

So, what does a syllabus mean to everyone using it, and how can we use it better? I don't have all the answers to that, obviously, and there's no hard and fast rule about how to do it. I'm a simplifier who likes a small syllabus; some of the best classes I took as an undergrad had twenty-plus page syllabi. There's also a lot of instructions out there about writing or reading a syllabus (okay, a lot of the ones about reading them just basically say: do it). This isn't a head-to-toe guide; it's just a few tidbits about common syllabus sections, and some advice for instructors and students about coding and decoding them. 

Description/Rationale/Objectives/Whatever:
For instructors: This is the essence of the course, and you probably spent a bunch of time thinking about what you would write here, especially if you had to propose this course and get someone to sign off on the concept. You are probably either proud of how smart it sounds or worried that it doesn't sound smart enough. However, this is honestly the least helpful part of the syllabus unless someone is on the fence about taking the course and wants to be wooed by the subject matter or themes specifically, which is probably a small contingent. It's gotta be there, but I'm inclined to keep it brief on the paper and do the "history is fun" sales pitch live. Besides, though the designer of the course obviously has themes and issues the course will engage, the students bring so much to the direction of the discussion in some courses that it's hard to predict the places you might go. 

For students: This will probably be incomprehensible until you are at least halfway into the course because if you knew all this stuff you wouldn't need to take the course. Hey, that's not always a bad thing. One of the most precious moments of my academic life was our Queer Theory/Queer Lives class revisiting the course description from our syllabus at the end of the semester and finding that we actually understood it, when on the first day we had found it completely incomprehensible. So, don't worry too much about this section-- worry about what the instructor is saying about the course. 

Materials:
For instructors: "If I put the materials here and strongly urge everyone to have them and get them all immediately, everyone will get them and everything will be perfect and birds will sing every morning outside my office window!" This is untrue (and not just because there are no windows in most of the graduate teachers' offices). I also believed this and I only had two books last time I taught and I was still wrong. This is also not generally because students don't want to buy the books (although who wants to buy textbooks?), but because the bookstore, Amazon, and all publishers everywhere are out to get you and will find some way to throw everything off. Case in point-- both semesters of last year in which despite my clear request of a particular ISBN number, the bookstore continued to order half that edition and half of an older edition which had the wrong page numbers and confused everyone, including me.  

In all seriousness, you can mitigate this somewhat by preparing your syllabus to not use a book for at least the first week, and then making clear in the syllabus what time of the semester everyone will need each text. This will give the online shoppers time to actually get the backordered book, the cash-strapped the ability to prioritize which one to buy first, and you a couple of days to call the bookstore and figure out what exactly is happening down there.

For students: Ideally this is all of the stuff you need to get for the course, but in practice these sometimes fail to get updated between semesters. Also, this is almost never all you have to read for a history course, as there are articles, primary sources, etc which are often distributed by TAs or instructors. Compare this list to the Schedule/Calendar section of the syllabus if you want to get a sense of the things being read or the amount of reading there will be. 

Plagiarism/Academic (Dis)honesty Policy:
For instructors: You have to put this in here and probably in some specific way, so you probably just plopped it in there and moved on. Done! This is another of those things that I think is better expressed in the classroom-- through active discussion of good research and writing practices, rather than threats of punishment and intimations that you are suspicious of all of your students. 

For students: No one wants to put this in their syllabus because they are really more invested in the positives of the course than the negatives. More than likely this piece will not give you a good idea of what plagiarism is and isn't, so please, feel free to ask your questions about plagiarism in... Office Hours! A section of the syllabus I'll talk about next week, among others. 

Have advice, complaints, or commendations about different parts of the syllabus? Let me know! 

What's History: Scrapbooks Old and New

I get excited about teaching history when I have the opportunity to dig into the strangeness of the past and make it seem more familiar. The more banal details of the past can seem completely strange when you think too hard about them-- for example, many of the details from Nancy Tomes' The Gospel of Germs, which describes the process by which Americans came to accept the germ theory of disease through public health campaigns and advertising pressures, and the ways in which the knowledge changed the way they lived. 

A child drinking from a common cup.

One of her chapters highlights the backlash against the "common cup," a shared vessel used at public drinking fountains and religious communion ceremonies. While some congregations still use a shared communion vessel, the public fountain cup has disappeared. The cleanliness crusades Tomes describes have eradicated the practice of the common cup so effectively that it is difficult for the modern reader to conceptualize it as ever feeling natural to anyone to drink out of a cup that a hundred other people have used just this morning. It seems mystifying to try and understand the past when you sit down to think about how many of the elements of daily life for the people we study, whether a hundred or a thousand years, a mile or four thousand miles separate from us, seem so far from anything we would do.

Scrapbooks and commonplace books have raised similar questions for me about daily habits (though with less of an "ick" factor). Scrapbooking in the modern day is a fairly conservative, family -oriented practice-- it is widely considered the province of middle-class women who create souped-up photo albums, with borders and accents so adorable they make me wish I remembered to take pictures of anything. Scrapbooks have an entirely different history, however. The practice of keeping a scrapbook or commonplace book was fairly ubiquitous, particularly in the nineteenth century. Ellen Gruber Garvey posits anywhere from tens to hundreds of thousands of nineteenth-century USians were scrapbookers, crossing class and racial lines. I've also found a plethora of early- to mid- twentieth century volumes while conducting my own research. Kept by mothers and doctors and actors and writers and philanthropists and children, scrapbooks were a common part of life, consistently updated by many of their compilers. 

In one of my proudest witticisms to date, I once quipped while interning at an archive that "'Miscellaneous' means 'I don't feel like describing it.' 'Ephemera' means, 'I don't know what it is, and I don't feel like describing it." Scrapbooks have often been categorized as one of the larger examples of this ephemera (other examples I've stumbled across: racy greeting cards, ticket stubs, and-- my favorite-- a leaky jar of hair gel and a comb). Unlike a diary, there is a collaging aspect to scrapbooks and commonplace books. Pictures, advertisements, quotations, cards, and other scraps of life are assembled within their pages to create a picture of a whole: either a person's life, or a particular experience, or the things that inspired someone intellectually, or an event or subject they wished to study or recall in depth. 

There's kind of a murkiness as to the differences between the commonplace book, the diary, and the scrapbook-- some examples blend aspects of all of them. Generally, I think of a diary as for one's own thoughts and experiences; commonplace books as for writing down snippets read somewhere; the scrapbook connotes a more visual presentation of artifacts like photos, clippings, cards, et cetera. Even beyond these distinctions there are a wide variety of scrapbooks; Garvey's book Writing With Scissors focuses mostly on assemblages of newspaper clippings, while the anthology The Scrapbook in American Life features articles on a variety of different types of scrapbook contents from paper dolls to trade cards made by advertisers to children's memorabilia.

I've been interested in the concept of these compiled works for a long time-- I first began thinking about them after attending one of the two keynote lectures at the Gender, Race, and Representation in Magazines and New Media conference at Cornell in 2013, in which Garvey discussed how African American scrapbooking served as a tool of resistance. Yet it remains hard for me to grasp how people have diligently applied themselves to keeping such a centralized record of the things they read and treasure. I have no such centralized methods in my own life-- I write things down in one of a hundred different places. I have four different cloud accounts with a multiplicity of hiding places for things to be, my browser tabs and favorites are out of control, and my Kindle just got replaced and with it all of my saved quotations (which Kindle calls "My Clippings") from the last six months. Then again, the collections of many scrapbookers reveal a similar disorganization, with dates and materials out of order, files full of items that never made it in the scrapbook, different books picked up and put down at various times in the complier's life. At the end of the day, even the most beautifully organized scrapbooks are only, as the editors of The Scrapbook in American Life write, "partial, coded accounts-- very small tellings of memory." (3) 

Obviously, I’m not the first to think about how these formats translate to a modern day approach. Garvey suggests in Writing With Scissors that "Scrapbooks are the direct ancestors of our digital information management." (10) She writes that much like we currently often feel overwhelmed by the wealth of digital information floating around us without end, so too did nineteenth-century readers when faced with the printing and newspaper boom after the Civil War-- both scrapbooking and digital management and curation methods like indexing, blogrolls, and Pinterest help the compiler make information easier to find and understand. Others have written about bringing back relatives of the scrapbook such as the commonplace book. This Thought Catalog piece, among others, argues for today's writers to use commonplace books (interestingly, though "some of the greatest men and women in history" have used them, only men warrant direct mentions, and Thomas Jefferson and Bill Gates get a cool two each). 

So how does all of this relate to teaching? Talking about scrapbooking is a great way to talk about how historians make history through the analysis of documents and materials.  Obviously it's easy enough to throw out a comment about how "Facebook and Pinterest and your Kindle notes are modern scrapbooks! Maybe even your hard drive could be considered such!" This may or may not be a useful connection for student, particularly if your example is dated (I barely remember blogrolls in action, so I doubt my students do; there are rumors that even Facebook was pretty much abandoned by teens in 2013 , so… maybe start talking about the 'gram?  This is a problem you'll have to solve in your own way).

In short, I'm not sure peppering the lecture with hip social media lingo is the most useful way to use this information. I'm dreaming up an activity instead, one which asks students to determine for themselves what serves as their closest approximation to a scrapbook or commonplace book. They could choose to reflect on their Facebook or Twitter feed, their Snapchat story, or their OneNote notebook; maybe they even keep a physical scrapbook themselves.

Students will identify five aspects (tweets, links, pages, items of any kind) of their resource that deal with a particular theme or couple of themes, things like Religion, Family, Politics, Health, Recreation, Friends, Current Events, Identity, Sport, Location, Motivation... there could be others. They would then answer the following questions on their own time: 

For each theme chosen, determine what the text in question has to say about it, whether directly or subtly, and frame this as a coherent thesis statement. Do your tweets suggest an avid attention to all political events, or do you tend to be interested in one particular theme or region? If you make Kindle highlights or save quotations in some way, do you choose things that you think will be of practical use, or do you select based on inspirational or aesthetic qualities?

How is the medium you chose different from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scrapbooking? What does one make possible that is impossible in the other?

Garvey says that "Like nineteenth-century scrapbook makers, the present-day scrapbookers engage in what I call performing archivalness, acts and gestures of preservation, they express the will to save, organize, and transmit knowledge through a homemade archive." (20) What does it mean to "perform archivalness"? Do you "perform archivalness" in this resource?

The editors of The Scrapbook in American Life suggest that scrapbooks hold a wealth of interpretable meaning, but "at the same time, they are but partial, coded accounts-- very small tellings of memory." (3) What does your resource leave out about your life or the times in which you have lived?

Were there any of these themes that were entirely or mostly absent from your resource? What might that lead a historian to conclude about you, that topic, or that resource? 

Once completed, students could compare the resources they chose in class and discuss their findings, particularly regarding the historical interpretations that could be drawn about each. This activity could be really useful for a methods or intro to historical interpretation course; it could also be useful in a Gilded Age or US survey course depending on the books and primary sources you chose to go with it. It's a good reminder that sources always tell a story, but never the whole story, and that someday, we'll all be living in the mystifying, distant past. 

Related Links:

A fun article on individualized communion cups with some commentary from Tomes.

An introduction to commonplace books and links to commonplace books at Harvard. 

Shorter Garvey discussions of her approach to scrapbooks in these articles from Lambda Literary and CBS News. 

A discussion about the archival preservation challenges scrapbooks present, along with some lovely pictures of scrapbooks from the National Museum of American History's Archives Center. 

Books: Writing With Scissors; The Scrapbook in American Life