I’ve never been particularly good at self-promotion. As my last post indicated, I think of myself as someone who is an academic despite my intellectual limitations and professional failures — which makes for poor spin. Plus, I’ve always hated the fact that so much of academia seems to be about puffing up your accomplishments, padding the ol’ CV, making sure everyone knows about your latest coup … there is just so much bad behavior that centers around this desperate need to one-up the next guy.

One area in which I am bad at marketing myself is in my syllabuses. I tend to choose familiar and boring course titles like:

[Name of Nation] Poetry
Women Writers in [Specific Historical Period]
[Major Theme] in [National Literature]

I know, I know … very uninspired. And, they often don’t reflect the creativity or innovation that I bring to the materials we’re going to cover.

I was thinking about the fact that I need to spiff up my course titles after attending the first back-to-school event in my department last week, at which I was reminded once again how far a good topic and catchy class title can go.

A few years ago — before I even started teaching at State U. — a colleague taught a class that was organized around a thought-provoking topic. I give her credit for really coming up with something interesting and novel. But, let’s get serious: she taught the course once and over five years ago. Yet, it never fails to get resurrected at departmental functions. Inevitably, someone brings it up, everyone nods sagely as they reflect upon the brilliance of this course, everyone looks at said colleague who gets to look humble, and then we move on.

At this most recent function, I discovered that another colleague’s class has entered into the same lexicon of Amazing Classes. Everyone was talking about how innovative it had been, how creative, etc. Once again, he has taught this class once, two years ago.

Okay, so there’s probably some sour grapes here but what I realized is that these two colleagues had done something I hadn’t which is: promote themselves. They had talked their classes up, come up with really clever and memorable course topics and titles, and generally made sure that everyone knew what they were up to. I am much more likely to downplay my classes, self-deprecate about the work/effort/insight I have put into them, and generally assume that it only matters to my students what I do in the classroom.

One thing I noticed about the two classes mentioned above is that they both took a well-known, canonical subject or author and put a little spin on it/him/her. In other words, one element was familiar while the other element was new, unlikely, and exciting. So, these classes were likely to appeal to everyone in the department, from the fuddy duddy geezer profs to the incoming fresh-from-grad-school hires.

Again, what’s frustrating to me is that I feel like I have taught some amazing classes that took a new approach, dealt with cutting-edge materials or issues, involved creative outings/field trips, assignments, etc. — but no one seems to know about them.

I’ve got to get in that syllabus game.