A Course That Can Be Recursed
thinking about the ideal freshman writing class
I love summer break — which has basically started for me, with the cessation of classes last Tuesday and a lot of my students having turned their final work in early.1 And I love it, among other reasons, because, paradoxically, it’s a time when I feel like I can really finally understand my job well enough to have a chance in hell of doing it right.
It’s been several years since my last serious syllabus overhaul. I used to do them nearly every semester, or at least every year. Usually a white-paper rewrite of anything is intimidating, but a white-paper syllabus rewrite is fun, energizing somehow. It’s an assignment that has enough built-in constraints (the requirements of the program you’re teaching in, the fundamentals of the course, the number of days in a semester, etc.) that it’s less overwhelming than, say, beginning a novel, and at the same time, it offers some of the same creative satisfactions. You’re telling the most encompassing story you reasonably can about what your subject is and how to do it. And unlike most writing occasions I face, I actually have some idea what my audience will be like.
To me, the ideal first-year or introductory writing course would take the word “course” somewhat literally: it would be like a well-designed racecourse, say, in a cross-country tournament, where each time you run it you realize (in the midst of your suffering) that it offers all sorts of sights you didn’t really take in last week, or last year.