My lovely readers might have noticed yet another toy on the sidebar. I discovered LibraryThing.com on Julie Clawson's blog, and I've been fiddling with it intermittently since. Right now I've got the blog gizmo set to random because I don't particularly like the "most recently added" setting. Anyway, check out the site--it's easy to use and doesn't involve coughing up any personal information beyond the contents of one's bookshelves.
31 October 2006
30 October 2006
Educating the Guardians
I love talking with freshmen about what the heck they're in college for. That was the subject today, and as usual, Plato provided us a clear, theory-heavy model against which students could push.
Without much effort at all I got both classes thinking about atoms and electrons and the fact that, even though none of us has actually seen an electron, we all believe in them and in fact live electricity-powered lives, secure within a theory no less theory-laden than Plato's theory of justice.
My hope is that we'll get some good freedom papers cooking. We finish up the education section Wednesday, then get into Plato's exploration of false justice/freedom/goodness.
Without much effort at all I got both classes thinking about atoms and electrons and the fact that, even though none of us has actually seen an electron, we all believe in them and in fact live electricity-powered lives, secure within a theory no less theory-laden than Plato's theory of justice.
My hope is that we'll get some good freedom papers cooking. We finish up the education section Wednesday, then get into Plato's exploration of false justice/freedom/goodness.
26 October 2006
Resistance to Civil Government
I stayed away from my standard manner of teaching Thoreau's anti-government essay, and my delivery suffered. In the past I've spent the whole period "playing Thoreau," taking what I take to be his position and answering students' questions in-character.
This semester, because we've spent so much time with Plato, I decided instead to focus the discussion on how Thoreau agrees with and departs from Plato. I think the intellectual content might have been better, but I fear that I took the sting out of Thoreau, and to take the sting out of Thoreau rather negates the primary benefit of reading it as a class.
Tomorrow I'm going to try to get all thirty-five remaining essays graded and marked. If I can manage four an hour, that's a work day. Then, in November, I can devote my time almost exclusively to finishing my own semester's projects. Here's hoping...
This semester, because we've spent so much time with Plato, I decided instead to focus the discussion on how Thoreau agrees with and departs from Plato. I think the intellectual content might have been better, but I fear that I took the sting out of Thoreau, and to take the sting out of Thoreau rather negates the primary benefit of reading it as a class.
Tomorrow I'm going to try to get all thirty-five remaining essays graded and marked. If I can manage four an hour, that's a work day. Then, in November, I can devote my time almost exclusively to finishing my own semester's projects. Here's hoping...
24 October 2006
How many of you are there?
I've been Googling about, and I think the other one lives in Washington state.
Revsion and Such
No new Plato material until next Monday, so I get to ramble a bit. (I don't think anyone would stop me were I to ramble anyway, but I need to give myself an excuse on occasion.)
I'm genuinely pleased with what I've seen on this third paper. Last year I had my classes do some research in their potential major or career fields, and the results were miserably spotty. Half a dozen or so wrote genuinely good papers, some didn't have any idea what they wanted to do and thus wrote mediocre papers, and the majority picked the hottest on-every-evening's-news-broadcast topic and wrote that up. Boring overall.
I shouldn't count my chickens before they hatch, but from the buzz I've overheard, this year's papers ought to be both better to read and better for initiating four (or five or six) years of college-level thinking. This year, since I'm teaching Plato rather than an anthology, I'm having them take Republic and one other premodern text (my rough cutoff line is John Milton) and write a paper on some social division, be between teacher and student, domestic and foreign, old and young, men and women, parents and children, or whatever. To develop some rudimentary research skills I'm also requiring that they integrate into their arguments two scholarly sources.
A number of my students have picked biblical texts, and I'm satisfied if that means they've spent a couple weeks thinking rigorously about how the Bible differs from Plato, arguably one of the other great influences on Western thought. Others have picked some protomodern stuff along the lines of Shakespeare and Marlowe. Again, the cross-genre potential means they've had to do some thinking. Still others have gone to Erasmus, Hammurabi, other Plato dialogues, Boethius, and others. I realize that few if any will go to the effort of reading other folks' papers, but at minimum they've done some thinking about two texts that existed before 1700 and that differ from one another. That they can see some historical complexity means that they've done some thinking that otherwise they wouldn't have done.
I hope they've started thinking about the final paper--the assignment for paper four is thus:
What is freedom, and are you free?
For this one we're going to be mixing some Thoreau and some Milton and some Aristotle in with the Plato, and within a week the ones who read are going to have to read Thoreau's case that governments necessarily impede conscience and then Plato's that only a properly aristocratic government can develop conscience. This ought to be fun.
Thoreau's tomorrow. I suppose I ought to plan that lesson.
I'm genuinely pleased with what I've seen on this third paper. Last year I had my classes do some research in their potential major or career fields, and the results were miserably spotty. Half a dozen or so wrote genuinely good papers, some didn't have any idea what they wanted to do and thus wrote mediocre papers, and the majority picked the hottest on-every-evening's-news-broadcast topic and wrote that up. Boring overall.
I shouldn't count my chickens before they hatch, but from the buzz I've overheard, this year's papers ought to be both better to read and better for initiating four (or five or six) years of college-level thinking. This year, since I'm teaching Plato rather than an anthology, I'm having them take Republic and one other premodern text (my rough cutoff line is John Milton) and write a paper on some social division, be between teacher and student, domestic and foreign, old and young, men and women, parents and children, or whatever. To develop some rudimentary research skills I'm also requiring that they integrate into their arguments two scholarly sources.
A number of my students have picked biblical texts, and I'm satisfied if that means they've spent a couple weeks thinking rigorously about how the Bible differs from Plato, arguably one of the other great influences on Western thought. Others have picked some protomodern stuff along the lines of Shakespeare and Marlowe. Again, the cross-genre potential means they've had to do some thinking. Still others have gone to Erasmus, Hammurabi, other Plato dialogues, Boethius, and others. I realize that few if any will go to the effort of reading other folks' papers, but at minimum they've done some thinking about two texts that existed before 1700 and that differ from one another. That they can see some historical complexity means that they've done some thinking that otherwise they wouldn't have done.
I hope they've started thinking about the final paper--the assignment for paper four is thus:
What is freedom, and are you free?
For this one we're going to be mixing some Thoreau and some Milton and some Aristotle in with the Plato, and within a week the ones who read are going to have to read Thoreau's case that governments necessarily impede conscience and then Plato's that only a properly aristocratic government can develop conscience. This ought to be fun.
Thoreau's tomorrow. I suppose I ought to plan that lesson.
20 October 2006
Plato's cave
Just my luck--the day comes to teach Plato's allegory of the cave, and my voice is failing because of a cold. Ah, well. I think that most famous bit of Plato will serve nicely to introduce paper 4, the most philosophical of the papers and thus the hardest. The assignment is to say what freedom is and whether or to what extent each paper's writer is free. Last time I assigned this paper, some fell predictably into high school civics essays, and others couldn't pull together their thoughts on education and responsibility and money, but some rose to the occasion and really did some good thinking on paper. I imagine I'll get the same in this paper.
We also talked a bit about The Matrix and C.S. Lewis's The Silver Chair and their connections to this most famous episode, and we talked at some length about the allegory's place in the larger argument. All the while, though, I was fighting my throat, so what could have been a great moment in the class rather fizzled.
Monday is revision day, but on Wednesday those who come to class are going to discuss Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government." That ought to provide a radical enough departure from Plato's live-for-the-city ethos that the class can do some good thinking about freedom and what it means.
We also talked a bit about The Matrix and C.S. Lewis's The Silver Chair and their connections to this most famous episode, and we talked at some length about the allegory's place in the larger argument. All the while, though, I was fighting my throat, so what could have been a great moment in the class rather fizzled.
Monday is revision day, but on Wednesday those who come to class are going to discuss Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government." That ought to provide a radical enough departure from Plato's live-for-the-city ethos that the class can do some good thinking about freedom and what it means.
16 October 2006
Human Nature, Empiricism, and Idealism
Today I was far more articulate in 10:00 than in 9:00. I'm trying to use our class's online discussion board to alleviate my ineptitude early, but I'm going to have to do some serious recovering in class Wednesday.
The discussion was supposed to be about Plato's critique of the sophists as moral empiricists, folks who look at the ways people live together and conclude that the best way of living must be the seizure of power within those groups. Plato, contrasting strongly, argues for a moral idealism, the evaluation of good or bad cities and people based on their proximity to or distance from a reasoned ideal of conduct.
So on our WebCT board, I posted this question for them:
What is human nature?
I don't think many of them read this blog (though I've posted a link to it on WebCT), so I'll go ahead and start some thinking on the question.
What I call in class "pop culture" meanings for words are often our launching-points for discussions. When I present the above question to the classes, my hunch is that their answers are going to come either from some sort of evangelical Protestant theology (Calvin lite, if you will) or from some sort of basic understanding of economics or Freudian psychology. What's going to bind them together (I'm guessing, of course) is that all of them will assume that "human nature" is a limiting factor on political possibilities, an insurmountable selfishness that makes sustained communal living impossible.
Plato, of course (along with the book of Acts, if I'm reading it right), denies the absoluteness of that determination, claiming instead that education (in Plato's system) or conversion (in Acts) makes a more real sort of community possible. In other words, what we see when we look at embodied communities is not human nature but human-nature-corrupted.
I'm not sure where I stand on this question, which will make leading the discussion easier. I've been just as influenced as anyone by the American project, a system of rules and checks that limits the ability of any one person to act too autonomously in matters of government. But I also think that genuinely good people can be genuinely good leaders, defying claims that human greed is insurmountable. I hope this discussion runs better than this morning's did.
The discussion was supposed to be about Plato's critique of the sophists as moral empiricists, folks who look at the ways people live together and conclude that the best way of living must be the seizure of power within those groups. Plato, contrasting strongly, argues for a moral idealism, the evaluation of good or bad cities and people based on their proximity to or distance from a reasoned ideal of conduct.
So on our WebCT board, I posted this question for them:
What is human nature?
I don't think many of them read this blog (though I've posted a link to it on WebCT), so I'll go ahead and start some thinking on the question.
What I call in class "pop culture" meanings for words are often our launching-points for discussions. When I present the above question to the classes, my hunch is that their answers are going to come either from some sort of evangelical Protestant theology (Calvin lite, if you will) or from some sort of basic understanding of economics or Freudian psychology. What's going to bind them together (I'm guessing, of course) is that all of them will assume that "human nature" is a limiting factor on political possibilities, an insurmountable selfishness that makes sustained communal living impossible.
Plato, of course (along with the book of Acts, if I'm reading it right), denies the absoluteness of that determination, claiming instead that education (in Plato's system) or conversion (in Acts) makes a more real sort of community possible. In other words, what we see when we look at embodied communities is not human nature but human-nature-corrupted.
I'm not sure where I stand on this question, which will make leading the discussion easier. I've been just as influenced as anyone by the American project, a system of rules and checks that limits the ability of any one person to act too autonomously in matters of government. But I also think that genuinely good people can be genuinely good leaders, defying claims that human greed is insurmountable. I hope this discussion runs better than this morning's did.
12 October 2006
Particular Plato
My discussions over sex and child-rearing in Plato were less than satisfactory; I could not keep together the disparate elements and form them into coherent discussions. Plato's jumps from new ways of marriage to child-rearing practices to the use of sex to motivate soldiers to the culture of hero-worship to the treatment of Greek captives and corpses in war to the control of the community's population levels outjumped me, and we lacked a center the last couple days.
When I go in Friday, I'm going to emphasize that with those discussions, we get Plato actually working out in detail the theory that he took so long to set up beforehand and that we as readers must engage the general theory even if the particulars fall short. I pointed to that with an exercise I had the students do (they were to formulate a thesis that critiques Plato's general project), but I never explicitly stated it.
Midterms are still kicking my butt. The Latin and Old English exams are out of the way, but I still have several pages to write on my Spenser paper, and I've only marked up a third or so of my freshmen's papers. I've still miles to go before I sleep.
When I go in Friday, I'm going to emphasize that with those discussions, we get Plato actually working out in detail the theory that he took so long to set up beforehand and that we as readers must engage the general theory even if the particulars fall short. I pointed to that with an exercise I had the students do (they were to formulate a thesis that critiques Plato's general project), but I never explicitly stated it.
Midterms are still kicking my butt. The Latin and Old English exams are out of the way, but I still have several pages to write on my Spenser paper, and I've only marked up a third or so of my freshmen's papers. I've still miles to go before I sleep.
06 October 2006
Moral education and levels of engagement
The weather report this morning called for highs in the seventies and partly-cloudy skies, so I decided to take my classes outside. 10:00 really is just a quiet group of people; even outside of the tunnel that is Park 123, they didn't talk much. I can deal with that; it just means that I'm going to have to structure discussions differently.
Today's reading was the culmination of Plato's definition of morality. We rehearsed the argument, namely that morality consists of the reason's governing the apetites with the help of the passions, and the students seemed to follow the logic. We talked about modern suspicions about reason and the distinction English still maintains in the words "rational" and "rationalize." Overall we had a good class.
At the end of each class I asked them what they thought about UGA's occasional desire to incorporate moral learning into the curriculum. Almost all agreed that the "alcohol meetings" under which fraternities and sororities suffer are infantilizing and resemble what Plato prescribes for pre-rational children. The verdict was split with regards to instruction in what Plato and Aristotle would call moral reasoning. Some said that what capacity for moral reasoning we might develop has already developed before we arrive on campus. Others thought that we could still develop morally.
If this looks like I'm lobbying for that job should it appear, perhaps I am. If indeed the university gets serious about some sort of moral education into the undergrad experience, I'd probably put my resume in for the job. I suppose I'd treat it in Platonic terms: I wouldn't necessarily want that responsibility, but I'd be afraid that some idjit would get the job and really muck things up.
Today's reading was the culmination of Plato's definition of morality. We rehearsed the argument, namely that morality consists of the reason's governing the apetites with the help of the passions, and the students seemed to follow the logic. We talked about modern suspicions about reason and the distinction English still maintains in the words "rational" and "rationalize." Overall we had a good class.
At the end of each class I asked them what they thought about UGA's occasional desire to incorporate moral learning into the curriculum. Almost all agreed that the "alcohol meetings" under which fraternities and sororities suffer are infantilizing and resemble what Plato prescribes for pre-rational children. The verdict was split with regards to instruction in what Plato and Aristotle would call moral reasoning. Some said that what capacity for moral reasoning we might develop has already developed before we arrive on campus. Others thought that we could still develop morally.
If this looks like I'm lobbying for that job should it appear, perhaps I am. If indeed the university gets serious about some sort of moral education into the undergrad experience, I'd probably put my resume in for the job. I suppose I'd treat it in Platonic terms: I wouldn't necessarily want that responsibility, but I'd be afraid that some idjit would get the job and really muck things up.
05 October 2006
Upcoming sermon
Amos 5:6-15:
6Seek the Lord and live, or he will break out against the house of Joseph like fire, and it will devour Bethel, with no one to quench it. 7Ah, you that turn justice to wormwood, and bring righteousness to the ground! 8The one who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning, and darkens the day into night, who calls for the waters of the sea, and pours them out on the surface of the earth, the Lord is his name, 9who makes destruction flash out against the strong, so that destruction comes upon the fortress. 10They hate the one who reproves in the gate, and they abhor the one who speaks the truth. 11Therefore because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine. 12For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins— you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate. 13Therefore the prudent will keep silent in such a time; for it is an evil time. 14Seek good and not evil, that you may live; and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you, just as you have said. 15Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate; it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.
There's my text for October 15. I'll preach about a seven-minute homily on that, then Ben will do the same for Mark 10:17-31. Then I'll do a brief (one-minute, roughly) improvisational oration based on his sermon, then he'll do one based on my response, and so on. It went over very well the first time, and I imagine it will again this time.
Once again I find myself taking Erasmus's side over Luther's; the presence of these strong imperatives, and the absence of hand-wringing appeals to "the fall" simply do not allow room for Luther's sin-awareness-turned-cynicism that one sees when the Peasants' Revolt goes down. YHWH expects Israel to be just because YHWH said so, and there will be no excuses for the exploitation that characterizes their life together. There will, however, be punishment. Just as the poor build houses for the rich, so the rich have paid for houses for the invaders (or, more likely, for the rats).
The bit that strikes me most about this passage in Amos is the assumed correspondence between God's orderly and good creation and the expectation that Israel's life together will be orderly and good. There's no sense of inevitability there, no hedging of bets because of "human nature" or "economic forces." I don't see how I can avoid setting up that tone in my part of the sermon on October 15, but I also don't see how I can avoid hitting Ben's strong Lutheran reading of the Mark passage as a truck hits a deer.
I suppose we'll have to see...
6Seek the Lord and live, or he will break out against the house of Joseph like fire, and it will devour Bethel, with no one to quench it. 7Ah, you that turn justice to wormwood, and bring righteousness to the ground! 8The one who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning, and darkens the day into night, who calls for the waters of the sea, and pours them out on the surface of the earth, the Lord is his name, 9who makes destruction flash out against the strong, so that destruction comes upon the fortress. 10They hate the one who reproves in the gate, and they abhor the one who speaks the truth. 11Therefore because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine. 12For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins— you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate. 13Therefore the prudent will keep silent in such a time; for it is an evil time. 14Seek good and not evil, that you may live; and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you, just as you have said. 15Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate; it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.
There's my text for October 15. I'll preach about a seven-minute homily on that, then Ben will do the same for Mark 10:17-31. Then I'll do a brief (one-minute, roughly) improvisational oration based on his sermon, then he'll do one based on my response, and so on. It went over very well the first time, and I imagine it will again this time.
Once again I find myself taking Erasmus's side over Luther's; the presence of these strong imperatives, and the absence of hand-wringing appeals to "the fall" simply do not allow room for Luther's sin-awareness-turned-cynicism that one sees when the Peasants' Revolt goes down. YHWH expects Israel to be just because YHWH said so, and there will be no excuses for the exploitation that characterizes their life together. There will, however, be punishment. Just as the poor build houses for the rich, so the rich have paid for houses for the invaders (or, more likely, for the rats).
The bit that strikes me most about this passage in Amos is the assumed correspondence between God's orderly and good creation and the expectation that Israel's life together will be orderly and good. There's no sense of inevitability there, no hedging of bets because of "human nature" or "economic forces." I don't see how I can avoid setting up that tone in my part of the sermon on October 15, but I also don't see how I can avoid hitting Ben's strong Lutheran reading of the Mark passage as a truck hits a deer.
I suppose we'll have to see...
04 October 2006
Common Good and indoctrination
The last couple days' discussion haven't left a consistent impression upon my memory. In the afternoon I remember them going well, yet by evening, I can't articulate whether or not I taught anything, much less what I might have taught.
Monday we dug into the question of community size and common good in 9:00. Plato insists that a community that becomes too large is not a community any more. My students seemed to think that UGA is still a community, despite its size, but I don't think I led the conversation down too many roads helpful for answering that. My impression is that UGA is less a community, dedicated to an intelligible common good, and more a shopping mall of sorts. One picks up staple credit-hours from mine and others' required classes, invests in skill-set-stock in one's major classes, and buys overpriced drinks at clubs on weekends. Yes, the metaphor became less abstract on that last one. Deal with it.
In 10:00 our discussion dealt more with the question of Plato's noble lie. Again, students' willingness to accept a lying government shocked me. We also had a fairly fruitful discussion about why a community would want guardians rather than a democracy.
Today's discussion focused more on indoctrination and Plato's unflinching praise of it. My students, in a way that surprised me, seemed for the most part willing to accept indoctrination as a potentially good thing. Hauerwas, I'm sure, would be pleased. I'm not. Of course, I have to blame myself for that lapsed teaching moment--had I set up the discussion better, perhaps I could have rendered a bit more of the shock of Plato's praise of brainwashing. Perhaps not.
And here I sit, having graded (but not marked up) about a third of their second papers. Back to the grind.
Monday we dug into the question of community size and common good in 9:00. Plato insists that a community that becomes too large is not a community any more. My students seemed to think that UGA is still a community, despite its size, but I don't think I led the conversation down too many roads helpful for answering that. My impression is that UGA is less a community, dedicated to an intelligible common good, and more a shopping mall of sorts. One picks up staple credit-hours from mine and others' required classes, invests in skill-set-stock in one's major classes, and buys overpriced drinks at clubs on weekends. Yes, the metaphor became less abstract on that last one. Deal with it.
In 10:00 our discussion dealt more with the question of Plato's noble lie. Again, students' willingness to accept a lying government shocked me. We also had a fairly fruitful discussion about why a community would want guardians rather than a democracy.
Today's discussion focused more on indoctrination and Plato's unflinching praise of it. My students, in a way that surprised me, seemed for the most part willing to accept indoctrination as a potentially good thing. Hauerwas, I'm sure, would be pleased. I'm not. Of course, I have to blame myself for that lapsed teaching moment--had I set up the discussion better, perhaps I could have rendered a bit more of the shock of Plato's praise of brainwashing. Perhaps not.
And here I sit, having graded (but not marked up) about a third of their second papers. Back to the grind.
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