Teaching Day. Your syllabus is not a contract.

It is convocation week. Your syllabus is due to the department before a single student walks in, and you already know how the term goes from here: eleven pages, a grading table, and a week two inbox full of questions that were answered on page four the whole time.

We tell ourselves students do not read. Try the test before you accept that. Open your own syllabus on your phone, do not scroll, and count the words a student passes before they reach one sentence about what this course will make them able to do.

If that sentence is on page two, it was never a reading problem. It is a layout problem, and it takes about thirty minutes to fix without deleting one thing your department requires.

Today's free working session walks you through it on one real syllabus: The First Screen Rewrite. Thirteen questions, nothing saved to a server, and you finish holding a finished first screen you can paste into the file you are submitting this week.

One question, and it takes one sentence to answer: what is the very first line a student actually sees on your syllabus right now, before any scrolling? Paste it exactly as it reads. No editing it first.