I’ve got a terrible cold. Hubby took the boys to Octoberfest up at Bear Mountain. He’s meeting up with some buddies, and I’m here pouting at home. I hate when people have fun without me.

So, I’m making myself another pot of tea and settling down at the computer. I’ve got a bunch of work to do on my syllabi for next semester.

Yesterday, I worked out some of the details for an Introduction to Politics class. This is the first time I’m teaching this class, though I’ve done Introduction to American Government many times. Introduction to Politics is a requirement. It’s intended to teach students terms like power and legitimacy, so they can hit the ground running when they start taking more politics classes.

Since I’ve never taught this class before, the first thing I did was goggle “introduction to politics syllabus” to see what others have done. Then I figured out what was the most popular textbook on the topic by using amazon and google. Then, I went to the website for the text ordered a deskcopy and printed out the table of contents. How did people do this without the Internet?

I got hung up when I looked for a companion book to go along with the textbook. I wanted to offer a reader of primary material to get the students hooked on the topic. Something juicy. Something that would be a fun read and easily lead to class debate. It had to be short excerpts of a variety of material. I searched Amazon using terms like “classics” and “selected readings.” They have readers for the various subfields, but not a general overview.

Sigh. That means a course packet. How I hate putting those together. It’s lots of legwork. I don’t have time to find pristine versions in the library, so they are going to get my underlined copies of Marx and Machiavelli and Putnam.

My next step is to decide what should be in this course packet. I’m looking for short, classic, debatable, and accessable. Sometimes that’s going to get a semi-comatose teenager to jump out of his/her chair and shout “YES!” I mean something other than free booze and pornography. Taking suggestions.

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