F3 Declaration

            Alex carefully aimed his dart, then let it fly at the memo he had put on his dartboard. It made a satisfying thunk as the dart hit the signature. The department chair, Paul Crateris, had put out the memo. Alex didn’t have much against Paul, but didn’t particularly like the man, either. Just a sycophant, an empty suit trying to kiss up to the higher admins until he can score an associate dean position.
The memo was literally the work of the higher ups, once again passing down policy about teaching and methodology when most of them had not set foot into a classroom in ten years, if ever.

            “It’s wrong,” he told the dart before letting it fly. This one thunked an inch from the giant red X Alex had drawn through the middle paragraph. Time was that education actually meant something, that exploration and intellectual development trumped everything. This . . . this takes it all away, and it’s aimed at the students, even if indirectly. Most of them won’t even understand what’s really going on. What’s needed is to teach them what this really means for them, give them a chance to debate it, to have a . . . congress.

            Alex tossed the last without looking, and it thunked into his office door, but he had already moved on. He pulled up the syllabus for his Colonial American History course, and he began to design a new project.

            We’ll debate this policy as a proxy for what the colonists debated, then the students can write their own Declaration of Independence. Who knows, maybe it will spread across campus.