Fun, Summer Syllabus Writing

Since the end of the semester, I’ve been having a lot of fun. And I haven’t been thinking very much. Or a better way of putting it is that I haven’t been thinking anything that I felt worth recording, or I haven’t been motivated to record what I have been thinking. Anyway, fun is the death of philosophy. Except that doing philosophy in itself is fun. So, philosophy cannot grow from fun– fun, however, often results from philosophy. Start with fun, and philosophy will not continue. Start with a lack of fun, and through philosophy, fun may be experienced.

Anyway, I’m slowly getting back to work. Today, I’m writing the syllabi for the summer. They are classes that I have taught before (Ethics and Introduction to Philosophy), so much will be the same. However, I always go back over the teaching objectives and classroom policies to see how it can be improved. I consider the experiments I made in my recent syllabi and consider how it changed the class, and if the changes were positive, I apply those changes to more than one syllabus. 

In the official syllabus on which instructors must model their own syllabus, their is an official plagiarism policy. I am required to include this in my syllabus, and I have done so in the past. However, as I think about plagiarism, particularly in the context of a class that focuses on argumentative writing and displaying the reasons for which the writer believes something to be true, I believe there is more to be said about plagiarism than simply the ‘rules’ that one ought not to break. Therefore, one thing that I will be working on today is a special commentary on plagiarism that I will attach to the official statement.

Second,  I am going to revise my learning objectives. Again, we are given some required learning objectives, but are allowed to include more. The learning objectives/outcomes that I created for last semester worked well, and perhaps I will not change them much. However, a recent peer review (well, the reviewer was a much more experienced professor) stated that while my objectives were overall excellent, they could be improved by using a few more active verbs. Honestly, writing is not my strong point, at least in relation to my peers, so I accept that this criticism is worth considering, even if I do not see it at this point and may ultimately disagree. Here are the learning objectives that I currently have listed on my syllabus:

1. Students will enhance their critical reading skills. Philosophy is inherently argumentative. This means, first, that the student will enhance their ability to distinguish sentences that express chief points, subordinate points, evidence, rationale, illustrations, and non-essential parts of an essay.

2. Students will enhance their critical writing skills. The writing assignments in this class are all argumentative and require that the student makes effective use of support (evidence and rationale) to prove subordinate points, and use subordinate points to support a clear, specific thesis (chief claim). Second, the student will learn how to organize these elements chiefly in order to make the argument appealing and easy to understand for the audience.

3. Students will enhance their critical discussion skills. This involves constructing different types of questions about the text, and then facilitating a conversation by critically responding to responses. Students will all be required to lead discussions throughout the semester.

4. Ultimately, students will enhance their critical thinking skills. The distinction here is somewhat arbitrary, because the previous objectives all involve critical thinking in specific forms. However, there are areas of critical thinking that are not covered in the previous categories. For the purposes of this class, critical thinking is involved in (1) finding error and (2) deducing which extra, unjustified beliefs were involved in producing that error. This attempt can be found in reading, writing, and discussion.

 Any thoughts? 

I’m not sure if the readers of this blog are aware of it, but I do have a bit of tracking software on this blog. It can’t track who is reading, but there are certainly consistent patterns that suggest there are a couple of individuals who check up on this blog regularly. You should feel welcome to post commentary 🙂 Anonymous feedback is quite alright.