Frost knows syllabi!

The spring semester begins tomorrow, and somehow I am not scrambling to finish that last syllabus. I seem to have sorted things there--which only means that now I'm scrambling to set up Blackboard sites for all my classes. A net loss, come to think of it...

Syllabus revision is a (bi)annual ritual for the professorial crowd--not really a clean slate, but a chance to start over, for sure. You want to cut your workload, but you want to cover more material, but you want to make it easier on yourself, but you want to get better outcomes from your students, but... You see how this goes. Prof friends of mine reading this: you know what I mean.

Last semester, I taught a first-year seminar for the first time: an honors course on Central European cinema. The culmination of the class was to present at the college's undergraduate symposium with frosh and sophomores from across the college--sort of an in-house NCUR, if you will.

And part of what makes NCUR great is that you get to hear a discussion on Don Quixote, a panel on quantum physics, and a poster-board session on service learning...all before lunch. And so I felt at home hearing my student paper on the interplay between Polish film and its socialist-era contexts presented amongst several presentations doing close textual analysis of US poetry.

The poem that hit me across the head was by Robert Frost (somewhere RHS junior-year English teacher Mr. Mackey is nodding wisely) called "The Armful." It struck me that what Frost describes here is what professors go through as they try to revamp their courses (yet again!) in the hopes that they can it just a little bit closer to where it "should" be. Here's the poem, in its entirety:

For every parcel I stoop down to seize
I lose some other off my arms and knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns--
Extremes too hard to comprehend at once,
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load.

Classes start tomorrow...only four months until syllabus revision starts all over again. Camus would say: Surely we must be happy.