The word syllabus makes me think of “syllabus week,” those opening days of a college semester, when there was still time to switch out of an arduous course. I was a picky student, I’ll admit; if my would-be professor was lacking in sense of humor, or assigning too many readings, I’d just jump ship for something else.
This process, repeated over and over for years, imbued the word syllabus with a degree of pessimism. Not that it was ever such an inspiring word to begin with. The 17th century meaning, which has more or less been retained today, makes it sound like a list of chores: “concise table of headings of a discourse.”
Now I’m nearly 10 years removed from my bachelor’s degree, and it pains me to remember the myriad ways that I once fought back against the assignments, questions, challenges — and even encouragments — I encountered in school.
Why? What’s changed? I just miss learning. I didn’t know what I had. I’m not alone in this realization. There’s a reason that adults audit courses, that middle-aged men become history buffs, that Duolingo is worth $15 billion. Curiosity’s creeks, so far as they don’t dry up, need somewhere to run to. And when academic-style learning is an alternative to the doldrums of adult life, instead of the only, over-scheduled show in town, it all of a sudden feels refreshing, freeing, even addicting.
All to say I’ve come to embrace that word — syllabus. In fact: over the last couple months, I slowly cobbled together one of my own. Here’s how I did it, what it entailed and why I think you should make one, too.
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That’s what I’d call this course, I suppose, if I were the man standing in front of the chalkboard, making my case to a syllabus week classroom.
Since late July, I’ve been working through a self-assigned unit on the United States of the 1870s. You know: the Wild West. Think cattle drives, saloons, American-Indian wars, riverboats, buffalo hunts and Custer. The postbellum years, when the spread of utility poles, Army forts and rail lines brought “civilization” to the frontier once and for all.
I can’t say I was ever that taken with the period in the past, neither the Disney version nor the many lawless Westerns. But I’m hooked now. The complicated characters who rattled around those plains and rivers will forever occupy a compressed era of in-between, and that deeply fascinates me. Here’s what I “studied” to get a feel for the subject:
- Podcast: The Rest Is History, Episodes 446-456
- Novel: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
- Art: National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
- TV: Deadwood on HBO
The Joys of This Particular Syllabus
The Rest Is History is hosted by Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland, two Oxbridge-trained historians with acerbic wit and a penchant for long-winded diversions. Which explains why it took them over 10 hours to chart the rise and fall of General Armstrong Custer, the last days of the Lakota people, the backstories of Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull and Red Cloud and the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
I enjoyed every second of it. I liked to listen to them as I walked around the park over my lunch hour. They’re experts at juicing humor from history’s smallest details (e.g. Custer seemed to love hair product as much as the Crow people…though they used bear grease), but know how to pivot into a more somber, speculative tone when reckoning with heavy material (e.g. the Washita River Massacre).
Lonesome Dove, meanwhile, is Larry McMurtry’s masterpiece, the Pulitzer-winning tale of two former Texas Rangers who decide to embark on one last adventure: a cattle drive from the banks of the Rio Grande to the northern wilds of Montana.
All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers.
T.k. Whipple, Study out the land and epigraph to Lonesome Dove
Woodrow Call is the laconic and dependable captain. He worships honesty, duty, a hard day’s work. But there’s something he can’t shake, something gnawing at his soul. Augustus McCrae is his partner, a junk-philosopher who prefers to drink whisky on the porch and watch the sunset. He loves his two blue pigs, good conversation, prostitutes, and Latin. (Though he can’t read it.) Both men are revered throughout the West. They’re essentially superheroes, having spent decades fighting Mexicans, American Indians and outlaws with nary a scratch. These two are more than friends: they’re compañeros.
I devoured this book. I’m a notoriously slow reader, as I’ve outlined before. But I read all 843 pages in little over a month. Beyond broadening my understanding of the Old West (the text takes place in roughly 1876, and is pockmarked with chaparral, rattlesnakes, river drownings, horse traders, you name it), Lonesome Dove was one of the best reads of my life. I appear to have this in common with the likes of Stephen King and Jia Talentino. I could write thousands of words on what this book has to say about meaning, morality, masculinity…but that can wait for another day.
Last but not least, the National Museum of the American Indian is a block from the National Mall, and part of the Smithsonian Institution. You can walk right in. I did so on recent trip to D.C., and spent an hour or so touring its four floors. I got to look at actual artifacts from the years in which the Lakota mobilized against Custer and other American frontier generals: weapons, sketches, shirts woven with locks of hair.
Of course, I also got to expand the syllabus a little bit and check out items adjacent to the period. Most interesting: the wampum belt the Lenape gave to William Penn in 1683, as part of a colonial peace treaty. As for Deadwood, a Western series starring Timothy Olyphant and Ian McShane, that’ll be the final segment of this syllabus! I’ll start next week — and plan to reread this New Yorker profile of showrunner David Milch.
How to Construct Your Own
I don’t think it’s necessary to start with a specific topic and build out your syllabus from there. Instead, just dovetail from the last thing that you read or watched that really captivated your curiosity. Whatever that was definitely concerned a topic. Say: motorcycles, The Ramones, baseball, Japanese immigration to Latin America. Now pair three adjacent “texts,” potentially in three other mediums, in order to go deeper on the topic.
The rules don’t need to be rigid. In fact they shouldn’t be — then it’ll start to feel like work, which would completely defeat the point.
You also should feel free to add stuff as you go. Part of the aversion I felt, way back in those syllabus weeks, was seeing the whole semester written out before me. Knowing I’d be responsible for X, Y and Z, no matter what, and on a strict timeline besides. Even when I stuck with the class (and liked my professor), I felt that the process sucked away a little bit of the topic’s soul.
But within this model, you can explore concepts at your leisure, and jump to the next lily pad (or to a different one, you hadn’t noticed earlier), whenever ready. Such is the pleasure of self-imposed “semi-structure.” We adults have it at our disposal, if we choose to use it. It’s where curiosity and discipline meet for the maximum reward: you focus long enough to learn something real and true…and you find yourself curious enough to want to learn more.
In a scatterbrained age of alternative facts, pseudointellectual influencers and AI-generated slop, what could possibly be more valuable than that?
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