Desperately Seeking Syllabi

There’s a moment I cherish at the beginning of any semester at Colby. To the musical rustling of crisp sheets of paper, the professor distributes a three or four page document of gloriousness. What percentage of my grade does participation count for? How many exams in the semester? What are page requirements for papers (double-spaced in Times New Roman font, of course)? Look no further. The class syllabus has it all.

Before you consider me too much of a Hermione Granger, “I just read through letters K to M in the dictionary for fun!” type, take a moment to imagine the horrors and chaos of life without syllabi. Unclear assignment requirements! Homework that springs up on you! No explanation of the edition of the textbooks you should get, so your page 16 is the professor’s 78! Makes you shudder, right? What kind of country’s education system would eschew the organization and centralization of a syllabus, a commodity as necessary to a student’s life as internet and running water?

Welcome to the French classroom.

I probably should have guessed it from the moment I found out French universities still don’t have online course registration, but I blithely assumed that at least when it came to printed paper the French had mastered basic classroom documentation. I assumed wrong. Instead, ten minutes at a time in each class are devoted to a review of the assignments: “What do you mean, you forgot you had to buy this obscure study packet unavailable at almost all Parisian bookstores?” the professors will ask us. “Didn’t you catch the offhand comment I made at the end of class three weeks ago?”

Perhaps worst of all – and here, I’ll allow any Hermione Granger comparisons – I consider the syllabus to be a contract. If I fail to do an assignment in the syllabus that was my responsibility, I deserve the consequences. Similarly, if a professor decides to lump in an extra exam with one week’s notice, I’m miffed. So it was with astonishment that I witnessed various students in my history class at the Sorbonne raise their hands and ask the teacher: “Do you think we can move the due date for the essay? To read all three books you’ve assigned will take a while.”

Any Colby professor would have raised the syllabus in the air with the implicit understanding of tough luck; you should have gotten started on your work sooner. Any Colby student would have at least known to phrase a request for an extension in different wording than a critique of the workload.

And that’s the beauty of the syllabus. It keeps both parties accountable for their part, and it fosters a genuine respect for the learning process you don’t find in a system where you can bargain your way to easier assignments. The challenges of the class should be about genuinely mastering the new material, not about trying to decipher exactly what line spacing and margin sizes the professor is expecting on the term paper.