Reflections on the first assignment

I thought this project was interesting. I definently thought it was going to be super easy. I mean, how could it be hard? I read 12 to 15 syllabi a year. I feel like I could quote some of them in my sleep. But this proved to be much more difficult than I anticipated. The hardest part of this project was the course description. One obvious reason, because it's a class I just made up and I don't know much about the material being discussed. Of course it's easy though to come up with an attendance policy that you like and a grading scale that you like and a fun required text or hell, maybe even no required text. But the actual layout of what will be learned and what you want your students to gain from that class is a much different story. You have to dig a bit deeper than just "that would be fun".

An interesting thing I noticed in all of my personal syllabi was that every single one had the exact same thing down for the academic policy. I know that there is a suggested wording of the academic policy in the syllabi guidelines but like when we discussed in class, many professors probably don't even know about the guidelines. So that made me think that the wording wasn't so much as suggested as it was mandated. So not wanting to ruffle good ol' Nancy's feathers, I decided to keep in line and I too included the same word for word academic policy.

I chose a strict attendance policy for my class because as I have found out over several years of college, a strict attendance policy means I will go to my classes. If I know I can skip a class, it makes it so hard to get out of bed at six in the morning to head up to class. I also liked the bulk of the grade depending on exams because I personally am a fantastic test taker and work well under academic pressure.

I chose Dream Interpretation specifically because I learned a bit about it in my high school religion class and I loved it. I read books upon books about symbology and everyone at my work used to come find me to tell me their dreams so I could interpret them. I have kind of fallen out of my obsession with dream analysis, however I still have my dream dictionary near by so when I have a weird one I can look up things. I also looked up Dream Interpretation on onestop to make sure there wasn't a class for it already and I couldn't find one but I may have been looking at the wrong places. Sometimes OneStop is confusing.

So all in all, this project took me a great deal longer than I expected but I'm glad I took the time to invent my own class and perhaps one day I may even be taking it!