Brother, can you spare some chalk?
Posted on August 17, 2004 @ 1:41 pm
I just spent ten minutes at Kinko’s getting a quote on printing forty syllabi for the class I’m teaching this semester. That’s right — thanks to the university’s ongoing budget crunch (shocking, I know, in this age of economic recovery), I actually have to pay to copy my own syllabi. Here’s where things really start to make sense, though. While copying syllabi in our department is strictly verboten, we’re allowed to make literally as many copies as we want of any other handouts (for instance, supplemental readings) throughout the course of the semester.
So, I can’t make forty copies of my four-page syllabus — arguably one of the most important handouts of the entire semester — but I can copy the first thirty pages of Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy and distribute those to my students without anyone so much as batting an eyelash.
Last semester, I snuck in under the guise of copying a “handout” and instead copied my syllabi while nobody was looking. Word on the streets, however, is that they’ve tightened security around the copy room this year. Oh, well…
Posted by Jess | Filed Under Life in a Nutshell |
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You don’t know how badly I wish you were kidding.
I had a teacher for one class that re-printed huge amounts of things which I’m sure well-exceded the $15.00 materials charge I had to pay.
I just sent a copy of this post to your superiors. Bwahahahah!
Why not just make a PDF, point your students at it, and let them print it? Sure, some of your students may not have access at home, but the school has labs, right? If you explain to them why you’re doing it that way, they would probably understand.
Jack: It’s available online as a PDF already; I just don’t like the uncertainly of not putting it directly in their hands. Plus, most departments still allow their professors to hand out syllabi. If I’m the only instructor a student has who doesn’t distribute a syllabus on the first day, I come off looking like some kind of slacker.
Perhaps I was a different kind of student, but I would have cut you some slack.
Maybe somebody else needs to manage your department’s budget…