I especially like finding one, early in the semester, left lying around a classroom (if there’s a sneaker tread across the front page, all the better). It’s always more fun to read something you’re not supposed to, isn’t it?

This isn’t a snarky pleasure, I swear. I just like thinking about what the professor must be like, what it’s like to be in this class, what happened in the past to shape the course (like someone recently wrote, most policies in asyllabus are responses to past problems).

I’m not sure what all this little habit says about me–and I’m not sure I want to look in that dark corner–but I’m pretty sure what it says about syllabi: that, ultimately, they are character-driven stories.