The Dreaded Syllabi

I'm very excited to start teaching again in a couple of weeks. What I'm not excited about is writing the syllabi for my classes. Planning a whole semester's worth of work at one time can be overwhelming. I'm teaching two new classes this Fall--British Lit I and Honors Critical Thinking and Speaking, and I'm teaching two sections of Comp I, which I've taught many times before. But, for some unknown reason back in the Spring, I decided that it would be good to adopt a new textbook instead of just keeping the one I'd been using. What in the world was I thinking?

So, now I have three syllabi to design. Being the on-top-of-things type of person I am, I went in to the office the other day to get started. I'll just do the one for Comp I, I thought, and get it out of the way. After all, that should be the easy one. I worked on it a little while, left to meet my husband for lunch, and came back to a computer that refused to boot up because, it kindly informed me, there were important files missing.

So, I just called tech support and went to Little Rock instead. The best laid plans of mice and men . . .

Those Were the Days

My husband stopped by to visit our neighbor the other afternoon, and his little girl, now in first grade, ran up to give him a hug.

“Hey!” he said. “What are you learning in school now?”

She sighed really big, wrinkled her nose, and complained: “Double digits!”

Hearts and Flowers

I’m one of a group of women who were asked to teach a fifth-and-sixth grade girls class on Wednesday nights. We each were to take a turn, and last week was mine. My topic? “Being Cool and Popular.”

After recovering from the emotional trauma of recalling now not cool and popular I was, I began to plan my lesson. I decided to begin by getting them to define “popular” for me, to give me some characteristics of popular people.

Good looking. Lots of friends. Good at sports. Likes to be the center of attention. Great clothes. Has all the up-to-date gadgets. Mean sometimes. Has a cool car.

So far so good. I write these on the board.

Then one girl shyly says, “They have good handwriting.”

What? I pause for a minute, wondering what to do with this seemingly random contribution.

Then I remember. Way back before cool cars or football or iphones even mattered. I remembered girls who crossed their t’s at a jaunty angle, who looped the end of letters just so, who dotted i’s with hearts and flowers while the rest of us valiantly attempted to do a passable imitation of their artistic embellishments on the standard cursive script that marched around the room on top of the blackboard.

Boy, those were the days.

Genre Troubles

Our adult Sunday School class finished up a series on the parables last Sunday with the parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders, and I can never think of this Bible passage without remembering an incident from my childhood.

One Sunday when I was four- or five-years-old, our Sunday School teacher gave us an assignment. During the coming week, we were to ask our parents to help us to learn one of the parables, and then, next Sunday, we’d each share our parable with the class.

I went home and told my Mom about the assignment, but she never helped me learn a parable.

The next Sunday, the teacher went around the room asking each child to share his or her parable. When it was my turn, I told the teacher I didn’t have one. The teacher was surprised but kindly moved on to the next child.

After class, my Mom asked me how I did telling my parable. “I didn’t have one to share,” I replied.

Stunned, my Mom said, “Of course you did. Don’t you remember? We talked about the wise man building his house on the rock, and the foolish man building his house on the sand? And then the foolish man’s house fell down?”

“Oh, Mom,” I said, with the full disdain of childhood. “Of course I remembertalking about that. But that’s a song, not a parable.”

Probably not the first or last time I embarrassed my mother.



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Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park and creator of the TV show ER, died on Tuesday at age 66.

His first novel, The Andromeda Strain, was published in 1969 while he was still attending Harvard Medical School.