The Summer Nobody Sees

While students are away, I take every course apart and rebuild it.

Summer Series, Part I of II
The invisible work behind rebuilding a course. Part II asks why I refuse to leave a successful course alone.

August is my busiest teaching month. I just do not teach a single class.

Instead, I sit in shorts, surrounded by too many browser tabs and an irresponsible number of espressos, taking my courses apart.

I rewrite assessments. I rebuild the Notion course manuals. I change the artwork, the pacing, the email sequences, the milestones, the cases, the field visits, and the people I bring into the room. I call last year’s guests and ask how we can make their intervention sharper.

I abandon activities that worked perfectly well because “perfectly well” is not the standard.

By September, perhaps five per cent of a course remains untouched.

A course can easily consume another fifty hours during the summer. I do all of this unpaid, while living the familiar adjunct contradiction: rebuilding next year’s courses before I know how many of next year’s courses will still be mine. None of those hours appear on a timetable. Nobody sees the deleted slides, the failed experiments, or the afternoon lost deciding whether an exercise belongs before lunch or after it.

This is the slightly ridiculous part of my profession. I am supposedly on holiday, but I am also wondering whether a venture capital pitch format could improve a strategy defence, whether a hackathon could replace a lecture, and whether students should receive less explanation and more pressure.

It’s damn exhausting. But it’s also one of the most creative parts of my year.

Business schools usually count classroom hours. They should also recognise course renewal as real academic work. A professor repeating last year’s material and a professor rebuilding the entire learning experience are not doing the same job.

Every September, students think they are taking one of my courses.

They are not.

They are taking the newest version.

But the invisible work is only half the story. The more important question is why I refuse to leave a successful course alone.

In Part II, I explain why “unrecycled teaching” is not novelty, perfectionism, or personal obsession.

It’s responsibility.

Next Sunday: Part II, Unrecycled Is a Promise
Why I rebuild courses that already work, and why relevance requires professors to remain students themselves.