Unrecycled Is a Promise
Why changing a course every year is not novelty, but responsibility.
Summer Series, Part II of II
In Part I, I revealed the invisible summer work behind rebuilding my courses. This time, the more important question: why do it at all?
Read Part I →
I have never understood the pride some professors take in saying they have taught the same course for ten years.
Perhaps that works if knowledge is the product.
I don’t think it is anymore.
Students can access explanations, frameworks, examples, summaries, and increasingly polished answers in seconds. Meanwhile, the companies they are preparing to join keep changing how they communicate, recruit, innovate, decide, and fail.
AI alone has rewritten part of the workplace faster than most curricula can schedule a committee meeting.
A course cannot remain frozen while the world around it moves.
That does not mean changing everything for novelty. Some slides survive. Good ideas deserve to. Unrecycled teaching means refusing to confuse familiarity with quality. It means asking every year whether the experience still prepares students for the reality waiting outside the classroom.
So each summer, I become a student again.
I read outside education. I watch how startups pitch, how investors challenge assumptions, how teams make decisions under pressure, and how people now hold attention. Then I bring those observations back and rebuild the course around what students need to practise, not merely what I need to cover.
Business schools should require every course to show what changed, why it changed, and what evidence shaped the redesign.
Not another administrative form. A serious conversation about relevance, followed by visible experimentation.
I do not have the perfect model. I test, watch, ask students what worked, admit what did not, and rebuild again.
That is why this blog is called “Unrecycled Educator.”
It’s not branding. It is a promise I make to my students, and an inconvenience I repeatedly create for myself.
Start with Part I: The Summer Nobody Sees →
And if this series speaks to you, help it travel. Send it to a professor trying to change things, a student expecting more, or a parent wondering what business school actually delivers.
Better business education will not spread by itself.