Back-to-school series · Part 3

Your Syllabus in 20 Minutes—and the AI-Policy Paragraph

The easy part is making the document. The hard part is writing one hundred words you can still defend in October.

A syllabus should not take three hours. Most of it is known information wearing a new date: course description, materials, grading, attendance, late work, contact information. The slow part is finding everything, deciding what changed, and formatting it again.

So do not start with a blank page. Start with evidence.

Build the source packet

Put last year’s syllabus, the current school calendar, your grading categories, and any district-required language in one folder. Remove student names and anything confidential. Then ask for a revised draft that preserves every policy you did not explicitly change.

That last sentence matters. A confident-looking invented deadline is worse than a visible blank.

Run the twenty-minute clock

1. Minutes 0–5: gather the source packet and list what changed.
2. Minutes 5–8: generate the first draft.
3. Minutes 8–15: verify policies, dates, percentages, links, and names.
4. Minutes 15–20: read it aloud and remove anything you would never say to a student.

At twenty minutes, you should have a clean working document. Do not waste the saved time adjusting the width of a table nobody reads.

The hardest hundred words

Your AI-use policy is different. It is not boilerplate, because it describes what learning means in your room. “AI is prohibited” is easy to write and difficult to enforce. “Use AI responsibly” sounds generous but tells a fourteen-year-old almost nothing.

A workable policy answers four questions:

• When is AI allowed?
• What must remain the student’s own thinking and writing?
• How should permitted use be disclosed?
• What happens when the process is unclear?

A practical middle position

You may use AI when I explicitly allow it for a task, such as brainstorming, practice, or feedback. Unless I say otherwise, the reading, thinking, drafting, and final language must be your own. If you use AI, include a short note explaining what tool you used and how. I may ask you to discuss or reproduce part of your process. Undisclosed AI-generated work will be treated as work whose authorship cannot be verified, and we will redo it together.

Do not copy that paragraph blindly. Decide what you can observe and enforce. If your policy depends on detecting AI from prose alone, it is not yet a policy; it is a future argument.

The final test

Give the syllabus to three imaginary readers: a student looking for the late-work rule, a parent trying to contact you, and an administrator checking required language. Can each find the answer in thirty seconds?

If yes, stop. The syllabus has done its job. Save your care for the people who will walk into the room.