What Sorcery is This?

1 Comment on What Sorcery is This?

I decided to turn over some of the power in the classroom to my students this semester in the Freshman Orientation course I teach. Students often come into the course thinking it will be a waste of time and end up leaving the course feeling that the course wasn’t really relevant. My idea was to get them involved in the syllabus creation process. Essentially I provided the class with some general course objectives and explained that they could do anything with this class as long as their decisions matched the core objectives of the course. I think part of me knew what to expect, but I didn’t realize it would be such a difficult task for these first year students to share their ideas. We started to get some good ideas toward the end, but it took a while. I essence, today’s comic captures what I believe happened. I’m hopeful that our next class meeting will result in some refinement of the syllabus so that the students taking the course are really getting the content they believe will honestly be of most help to them.