A Designing Principle

Fall is nigh. Already I can look out my window and watch the leaves fly past. My tree—I’ve written about it before, my pandemic friend—still looks summery and festooned with green, but I can hear it gathering from its extremities the ingredients of a big sigh, an exhalation of all the effort expended over the past few months to grow, to be a perch for birds and squirrels, to offer shade, to adapt to days of rain and days of dry weather. Everyone I run into says summer went by too quickly. No one is excited to return to busyness and responsibility. Soon enough, everyone will be looking forward to the pleasures of fall, but not yet. Only a very light sweater is called for so far.

In my last post I said I was thinking of changing a few things about this Substack, perhaps the title, perhaps offering the option of paying for it. I heard from many of you about these possibilities, and the upshot is, I am not changing anything for now. Thank you for sending me your thoughts.

Welcome to all the new subscribers who signed up over the last couple of months. I’m pleased you are here, and hope you find something stimulating from time to time.

Today I want to talk about an idea I learned this summer that deeply excited me. It came out of a course I took in syllabus design. It might seem redundant for someone who has been writing syllabuses/syllabi for decades to take such a course, but I love to learn new things and love having a teacher. In this case it was Catherine Clepper, an energetic and knowledgable guide through lots of reading about current educational theory and lots of exercises to shake up entrenched ideas about class attendance, grades, use of AI, and so on. I very much felt like an old dog learning new tricks. The idea of not taking attendance reminded me of the position papers I wrote for our school “newspaper” about dismantling the dress code and other such urgent changes swirling in the ether of the late ‘60s. I ran it by my undergrads the other day to see if they preferred an attendance grade or not, and they seemed relieved to not have to worry about it. I am too. Of course I said I expected them to attend all the classes, but enforcement would come from within them, not from the Quickly Attendance app. We shall see. To be clear, this wasn’t a recommended policy, but an option to consider. I want to give it a try.

What really grabbed me was the idea of Backwards Design. By which was meant designing the syllabus from the endpoint, the realization of the course objectives, backward through all the steps and readings and assignments necessary to fulfill those objectives and scaffolding the work from that vantage point. I appreciated this idea instantly and wholeheartedly and wrote my syllabus accordingly. (The course is The Contemporary Short Story, writing intensive.) I suppose I was primed for it by having run across related ideas before. Remember the chestnut about picturing what people might say about you at your funeral and adjusting your behavior accordingly—now? That’s Backwards Design. And what about The Secret? Remember that? It is also based on backwards design; if you set your heart on a beach house (“I live in a beach house”) what are the steps that will have gotten you to that ocean view? Where are you now on that path—what’s the assignment for today that will end with that objective accomplished?

It’s different than thinking in terms of goals and what you need to do to achieve them. There is no goal; there is a new state of being, a done deal that is in the future but also present, as present actions confirm it. I began to design my summer days according to this idea, and I wrote a syllabus for myself alone with the course objective of handing in the novel I am presently writing, and writing the assignments backwards to where I am now. It is a form of visualization and a form of positive thinking (By December you will have read and studied 25 modern short stories…) and a form of obviating options. It eliminates second guessing, dithering, procrastination. It’s a done deal, and all you have to do is to do it.

Thought experiment. Rather than the universe beginning with the Big Bang and hurtling outward, what if it was created by backwards design, and we are living in the middle? What if God rested first, and then considered what He did the day before?

Have a great week.