people are starting to plan their syllabi...

I am impressed. I am brain-dead, but impressed.

At this minute I am sitting in our meeting room, and the Orientation group is over there talking in pairs, developing statements of purpose for their syllabi. They are as tired as I am, all of us having now been through 2 and a half days of really thick thick presentations and discussions about students at Tech and rhetoric and assignments and assignment sequences and technology policies and and and... and they are talking quietly, enthusiastically, and very smartly (at least the conversations I can overhear) about how their syllabi will shape their relationships with their classes and what sorts of tone of voice they want to use in order to encourage and support learning.

And then (I got sucked away from writing the above and am now back) they made very sharp observations about the sample syllabi we passed out.

And now (written 1 hour later when I get a chance to come back to the machine) we are done for the week -- people are heading out to rest and space out and I need to do that too.

Thank you all, once again.