Happy New Year everyone!
I've got some catching up to do around here so I might as well start with something I've been meaning to post for a while.
At the end of November Katie Roiphe wrote about David Foster Wallace's syllabuses for Slate, The Extraordinary Syllabus of David Foster Wallace (23/11/12):
Wallace doesn’t accept the silent social contract between students and professors: He takes apart and analyzes and makes explicit, in a way that is almost painful, all of the tiny conventional unspoken agreements usually made between professors and their students. “Even in a seminar class,” his syllabus states, “it seems a little silly to require participation. Some students who are cripplingly shy, or who can’t always formulate their best thoughts and questions in the rapid back-and-forth of a group discussion, are nevertheless good and serious students. On the other hand, as Prof --- points out supra, our class can’t really function if there isn’t student participation—it will become just me giving a half-assed ad-lib lecture for 90 minutes, which (trust me) will be horrible in all kinds of ways.”
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