Syllabus woes

I spent about 4 hours yesterday working on my syllabus for the business writing course I'm teaching this summer. The syllabus is dense. There is a lot here. There is a lot I want to do in 8 weeks. It might be awesome.

I spend a long time thinking about teaching, more than most people I know. A lot of people teaching this same course have only tweaked their syllabus a little; I've overhauled mine 3 times. This is the first semester of teaching the course that I haven't changed ALL of the reading.

I'm nervous. This doesn't look a thing like a typical business writing course. I know exactly the reasons why we're doing this instead of learning the genres out of Locker, but what if my students don't get it? What if we can't pull it off? I think I'm going to need to trust one day at a time on this one. It's easy when you don't need your students to participate in order to pull a course off. But seriously, this is not the banking theory of education (quote, Paulo Freire). You don't learn writing by me telling you about writing. You learn writing by writing. And you learn rhetoric by becoming aware of your choices. And so, that is what will be doing this semester.