The Thought Occurs

Monday, 27 October 2025

FACULTY WORKSHOPS ON RESISTING THE GRAMMAR OF DEADLINES

Event Title: “Liberating Lecturers: Unshackling Time and Syntax”

Location: The Room of Perpetual Flexibility (formerly Room 3B, Faculty of Administration)
Organised by:

  • The Department of Temporal Liberation

  • Office for Nonlinear Pedagogy

  • Bureau of Redundant Forms


WORKSHOP PHILOSOPHY

Deadlines are linguistic chains.
Grammatical conventions enforce temporal tyranny.
Faculty must learn to resist the subtle microaggressions of the colonising colon (:) and the oppressive semi-colon (;).

This workshop equips lecturers to:

  • Delay verbs indefinitely

  • Stretch sentences across multiple semesters

  • Replace “due dates” with “emergent inspirations”


SESSION BREAKDOWN

1. Unpunctuating Your Lectures

  • Remove all colons, semi-colons, and exclamation marks from slides

  • Replace periods with a collective sigh

  • Encourage sentences that “wander, explore, and occasionally return”

2. Temporal Fluidity for Assessment

  • Assignments submitted when “student feels the energy of the cosmos”

  • Late penalties abolished; early submission discouraged

  • Grading occurs only when faculty achieve mood alignment

3. Syntax as Resistance

  • Rewrite learning outcomes as sprawling questions, e.g.,

    “Might the student, wandering through the verdant labyrinth of epistemic possibilities, engage with the content?”

  • Encourage students to respond in free-form narrative, dance, or haiku


FACULTY TESTIMONIALS

DR. LINA FERNTANGLE (she/they):

“I used to panic about submission deadlines.
Now I wait for the universe to indicate readiness.
Students are more creative, and so am I.”

PROFESSOR NYLA THREAD (they/fae):

“I abolished grading periods.
I now assess only by listening to the whispers of the syllabus as it meanders through the semester.”


VISUALS & PROPS

  • Hourglasses filled with sand from various deserts, symbolising relative time

  • Clocks running backward, sideways, or upside down

  • Posters: “The Colon is a Coloniser”, “Deadlines Are Dictators”, “Embrace Ellipses … Always …”


SLOGAN

“Liberate the faculty. Liberate the sentence. Liberate the moment.”

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