I'm a university instructor, so, like yours, my scaffold changes about three times a year. And one of the main reasons I moved to an electronic calendar (first I used Palm and then switched to ICal) was because i couldn't bear writing in recurrent meetings either and becuase it is very important to me to be able to shift between temporal views (day, month, week, etc.) quickly and easily. I wish ICal allowed for a bi-weekly view like Palm does, but I guess you can't have everything.

I use different calendars for the "scaffolding" and the random things. That way if I have memorized somethign that's recurrent, I can just turn it off if I don't want to see it. I have several different calendars grouped into three folders: Work, Home, and Reminders (these are items that don't have a hard due date, but need to get done by some random date I select). I turn the specific folders off and on depending on what I need/want to see.

I also sync OmniFocus with Ical, so there is an OmniFocus folder with items that are listed on the "to do" function of ICal--I turn those on and off as necessary as well.

Having the scaffold available also reminds me of the relative cost of adding in another meeting or schedule to my overall work week and helps keep me honest about scheduling time for things like research, reading, etc.