beginning-of-semester stuff

Have finished this semester's syllabi. Six pages of fine print. Five pages of fine print. Another six pages of fine print. I know this is mostly down to the fact that I've finally gotten organized and included detailed directions for the written assignments in the syllabus, instead of making them up at the last minute, but it still feels slightly excessive.

I had a vague recollection that most of my undergrad profs just handed us a list of readings and dates, but now that I think about it, this isn't strictly accurate -- or rather, they typically handed out other stuff with the list of readings and dates. Favorite Undergrad Prof Ever had a six-page document full of guidelines for writing papers, ending with a page-long rant on Why Grades Serve the System and Not the Students. I've adapted and imitated freely, although I don't think I could bring off the bits that could only have been written by an old New Yorker with tenure and an attitude ("You would have to be a fool, in any case, to think you had to tell me that Shakespeare's first name is William...") I kept the grading rant, or rather wrote my own gentler Southern hippie-chick version, complete with quotations from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Maybe it is better to front-load one's philosophy, opinions, and quirks, even if it takes six pages to do it. Students have a right to know what they're getting into.

So much for the two literature classes. For the comp class I have the luxury of actually assigning a chunk of ZatAoMM a bit later in the semester, as well as a charming article that appeared in the Washington Post in 1993, Robert Day's "The ABCs of Enlightenment." I was a senior in high school when it came out, and my AP English teacher liked it so much that he ran off copies for the whole class. (He was an older guy with a cop mustache who referred to the entire Romantic movement as "a load of crap," and he pissed me off no end by giving me a C on a paper because I said Clytemnestra was the most sympathetic character in the Oresteia. He was also the most brilliant teacher I've ever had the privilege of seeing in action. I'm not a worthy successor, and the prospect of teaching the Oresteia next week brings that home acutely. But I like sharing the article when I can.)

Anyway, some excerpts:

Alphabets. In themselves they are interesting. So is college interesting in itself: as in learning for its own sake. You don't need to go to the Career Placement Office your first week on campus. Yes, you'll want a job when you graduate. But you'll need an education first, and the kind of education that awaits you will light up the job search in ways you cannot now imagine. If you think you need to be something by the time you graduate, tell youself you want to be enlightened. If you don't know what enlightened means (exactly), look it up (do that now to get in practice for those term papers). You might also want to keep the idea of enlightenment (or the 18th-century European philosophy of the same name) in mind: It's a good North Star for any student lost in a sea of academic requirements.

In the meantime, did you know that the world "alphabet" is a combination of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta -- thus, in Greek, "alphabet" stands for the whole collection of Greek letters, just as our "ABCs stands for A through Z -- not to mention a number of other concepts of completion. Language is lovely. The history of language is inexhaustably lovely. Trust me. I am your first professor.

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French. Did you pick a college or university that does not require a foreign language? Then require it of yourself. Whose education is it, anyway? Bsides, how do you expect to spend August in Paris if you don't know "une fleur" from "une mauvaise herbe"? Miss Stein (at 27 rue de Fleurus) would be disappointed.

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Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by the Philological Society. It was the poet W. H. Auden's favorite book. You might get over a fascination for alphabets, but no well-educated person ever gets over a fascination for dictionaries. Keep one open in your dorm room at all times.

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Question. Of course. And often.

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Why? Almost always a good question.

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Zeal. Somewhere I read a definition of a student as a person in zealous and voluntary pursuit of language. That's you.