Dear all, I found the contributions on this topic very useful, and I appreciate Anne Eisenberg's willingness to share her syllabus and guidelines with us.
I am writing, however, to say that the way we are constantly adding information, instructions, explanations, guidelines, etc. to our syllabi, in a kind of endless and fruitless attempt to cope with every eventuality reminds me of my ethnomethodology seminars with Harold Garfinkel, many years ago. One of the exercises he gave us was to write a list of things to take along in case we receive a credible forecast that "the big one" would happen any time soon. Of course, we all had the same experience: we thought it was a silly thing to assign, started with a few things and soon after we would have needed a truck to take all we thought we would need to take ... The endlessness of this kind process had a technical name I do not recall; does any one remember? :) Martha
