Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

It’s the day before course card distribution, which is also the day for the departmental workshop.
The department workshop this year is different from the last few years. Every year, the faculty was divided into several committees which improvements to the various courses the department offered. Every year, the committees would suggest changes to the textbook or the topics covered or to the grading system.

On the part of the textbooks, sometimes it was essential when new editions of the books came out. As to the others, it depended on who was heading the committee at the time. Sometimes they’d go back to a method that was scrapped just two years before.
But it got wasteful throwing out extra copies of the old syllabi to make new ones every year. Besides how good must the previous changes have been if it’s going to be revised the year after, and so on.

The new (returning) chairman decided that the committees can decide to leave well enough alone, and only concentrate on compelling changes to the syllabi. The focus of the workshop was changed to five specific and previously untackled areas: direction and scope of researches, quality of overall instruction, outreach and extracurricular thrusts, recruitment of new enrollees, and community and team-building.

I belong to the recruitment committee, obviously, given the young and universal appeal of astronomy.
What surprised me was that our committee was tasked for student retention as well. In other words, making sure freshmen finding the course too difficult won’t shift to an apparently easier course.

There were only three of us who showed up for the committee, despite having been five or more assigned weeks before. I was the one who wrote down all the suggestions. I also collated them, placed them on a transparency, and presented them to the rest of the department.

The one they stuck to, besides the survey of the majors, was the activities for visiting high schools, and the dedicated “big brother/sister” that the freshmen may approach when they have problems with their course in general. It will be implements this coming schoolyear.