Planning can be dangerous

Super productive day. Look out freshman. I spent the better part of today revising the syllabus for my new course. The course is called something ridiculous like, Applied theatre: American idol meets David Letterman blah, blah, blah. I just called it Applied Theatre but, the powers that be were afraid no one would sign up for it and asked that I give it a jazzy subtitle. I have no idea what my title really means but I suspect my students are expecting a blow off class. After today's big revision I can tell you that it will not be a blow off class at all.
While I expect we will have fun, play improv games, and explore a lot of interesting topics, we are also going to be reading Freire, Giroux, Chomsky, hooks and others. They have a tremendous amount of writing in addition to performance. And, lots of self-reflection. I expect that by mid-semester they will be exhausted and wishing they signed up for something that sounded more difficult but actually turned out to be silly. Instead, they signed up for something that sounded silly and is going to be quite demanding.
That said, I am really proud of this syllabus and I have high hopes for the course. I am quite nervous since the course is brand new and I have no idea what to expect. Still, I believe it has a great deal of potential. Only time (and this blog) will tell.