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[educator1]

We've gotten beyond the OP's basic gripe, but the discussion is important.
There is a big difference between being told WHAT to teach and being told HOW to teach.

Being in a mathematically oriented field, the idea that there is a set of skills that students that successfully completed the introductory course will possess when entering the intermediate course is critical. We are all told WHAT to teach to a certain extent (what ENG 101 instructor re-defines the class as Organic Chemistry?). Having standard broad objectives and common expectations is, in my mind, the basic professional responsibility of an academic department, especially in multi-section courses.

I can relate to profxfiles difficulties with student incompetence with the basics of writing. Our composition courses are good at getting students to express how they feel about a topic, but are horrible at teaching students how to deal with reporting research outcomes as opposed to opinions.

[kedves]

I'm repeating myself from the thread on composition, but I think it's unrealistic to expect students to change a lifetime of writing habits, and overcome a life full of other influences on their writing, in one or two semesters of comp.  AandSDean's course objectives are beautifully clear and complete, I believe in them, they are similar to mine for a different course, and they have an important purpose to set a goal for students and instructors to work towards--but really, only students who get an A in English 101 will meet them at my school, and some of those A students will have a hard time transferring what they learned there to other courses.

Like most people, I get a lot of students with weird and bad habits or who haven't learned fundamentals such as "paragraphs are a good thing."   I assume their composition instructors tried, but it didn't take.  But it is not too difficult to tell students things such as, "This is what scholarly sources are and here's why you need them," "Here's how to come up with good search terms for the journal index,"  "This is social science; we don't need an interest-grabbing introduction; we think what you found is interesting enough for us," "It's not a fact if it's not backed up by a citation," "Hey, knock it off with the exclamation marks," "If the story you're telling is not about you, take out the 'I',"  "Here's how to make a table," "Pretend you're not writing for me but for someone who doesn't know this stuff already," and so on. 

What they learn, more or less (A to C), in composition are an improved version of the basic ingredients, the idea that college writing takes more time than high school writing, and the notion that writing has to be adapted to fit the demands of the situation and they must listen and read carefully to know what those are.  They have a shaky understanding of why writing matters.  I can work with that--as long as someone has not told them earlier that their bad habits are good or right.  Writing is a journey for the students and we are all guides.  It is not a Matrix-like system in which the information can be directly uploaded through the socket at the back of their heads.

The OP's frustration is not one I really understand.  I'm in a very broad field--the whole of human social life is our topic for the intro course--and I have looked at dozens of other instructors' syllabi for this course and my upper-level courses over the years.  They are very similar to one another, as are the course descriptions, entailing learning objectives, in the course catalogs across universities.  All of the intro textbooks have more or less the same chapters, in almost the same order, depending on the size of the book, and the basic content of course books for the upper-level courses is similar as well.  A truly original person, a real loony tune, could come up with something completely different, but that would still probably meet the course objectives if the course included graded assignments and a sensible grade distribution.

[der_gadfly]

Not bellyaching, not kvetching, just observing. 3 new preps, ...... it is a lot. It would have been nice to see some consistency across all sections of the course, but that is not the case, and there is nothing I can do to change that. So great, I get to teach what I want.... I can use the prior outlines as a guide for what seems to be common ground, and make sure to cover that material, then dance around the rest.

In math and the sciences, the constructivist concept applies well: course objectives are much easier than in Comp and Lit courses. Now IF the course is a graduation requirement, and all students have to pass it, then it seems to me that there is a reason why it is required: to bring students through a particular content area with some specific desired outcomes in terms of knowledge/skills. For example, a required history course should challenge the students to "...discuss the events and persons in the context of political, economic and social standards prevalent during [time period] in [area] in a properly formatted, grammatically correct and logical [essay/research paper]...". IF the course is one that fulfills a graduation requirement, but is one of several options (as are mine), then they need to address certain institutional goals. For a 'dream course' none of this really applies.

Format... bottom line, all 'styles' address a common purpose: to identify the source of information. If a person knows and can use one, then the switch should not be that onerous. To 'fail' a student on the first assignment because they have not used the proper format is a bit draconian IMHO, because we are there to teach them to learn. Students should make steady improvement, not be perfect on day one.

I too was in a situation like aneumey: a lot of talk about course in a can, and never really liked that. What we did was come up with a required learning assessment in each of 6-7 required courses, and it was worth perhaps 20% of the course grade. The balance was up to the individual instructor. This approach seemed to appease most people, including our assessment person. Sine we used a lot of contingency faculty, with a revolving door of new faces each year, it also helped THEM get their preps done, since this pretty much covered a few weeks of material, leaving less to worry about. We never told anyone that they cannot use any particular method: some prefer discussion, some give copius notes, others used a lot of handouts that the students filled in and could use as study sheets, some used a lot of short writing assignments, some used multiple guess, but in the end, that one assignment would be the final standard by which we knew that the students had been exposed to our departmental objectives in a meaningful manner. All this developed internally as a natural result of frustration at the upper level when we had to cover too much remediation of the basics. Our graduating basketweaving students did not know how to construct a basic basket, or properly prepare the canes for creating animal-shaped baskets, which was a skill expected by prospective employers. Rather than be told what to do, our department was highly proactive and a lot of the issues we had were resolved.

Of course YMMV, and nothing works in every situation. Still, it would be nice to know that as an institutional newbie, I had some concrete guidance. Oh well, back to tossing together some general lecture notes while I wait for my textbooks to arrive.

I have looked carefully at similar course outlines from other institutions, checked textbook chapter headings from different texts, and sure enough Kedves, I have enough to go on, at least until my textbook ancillaries arrive. Thanks all for the comments, even those that slapped me back to reality: sometimes we have trouble making changes to new systems that are so drastically different from past experiences.