The last sprint is on. I've taught my last class (we're still meeting, but it's all peer revision from here on out), Spenser class has seen its last meeting, and only four Latin and four Old English classes remain. I can't remember a semester coming to a crashing halt as fast as this one is about to, but that's probably my bad memory more than anything else.
The Spenser paper is going to get done, though it's going to kill me getting there. The final exams will come and go, and once they're in the books, they're in the books. I still have about twenty-five papers and eighty portfolios to grade, but those also eventually get done.
I'm going to make it!
28 November 2006
25 November 2006
Gearing up for Final Paper
For the first semester in a long time, I'm only going to be working on one paper during the home stretch, and I've already got that half-written. I'm going to try to force myself through a Marxist history of early-modern pre-capital and use it in my analysis (just to pacify the professor), but I'm mainly going to be focusing on the virtue of temperance in Platonic and Aristotelian molds, the permutations that happen in Calvin's Institutes, and how money fits into those ethical systems in into Guyon's encounter with Mammon in book 2 of Faerie Queene. Undoubtedly my take will be a hair "conservative" for folks with (what I call) faddish tastes, but I'm to the point now that "conservative" (still not sure what that means) just has to be the way I do things. I'm good at it.
Mary's father and uncle are coming in tonight and leaving tomorrow for Mississippi. That'll cut off my access to a fair chunk of the house, but one morning won't kill me or Micah. The house is pretty much ready for company, and I know Mary is looking forward to seeing people.
Mary's father and uncle are coming in tonight and leaving tomorrow for Mississippi. That'll cut off my access to a fair chunk of the house, but one morning won't kill me or Micah. The house is pretty much ready for company, and I know Mary is looking forward to seeing people.
21 November 2006
On Education and the End of the Semester
We wrapped up the discussion part of the semester yesterday with a conversation about John Milton's treatise "On Education." As I usually do when I teach that fun little text, I started by having the class list all of the things Milton would have Englishmen learn by the time they're 21 years old. One class came up with 46 things, the other 48. Take a look at the treatise, and you'll see that these are not simple things: Milton would have us all know trigonometry, agriculture, sword-fighting, Aramaic, metaphysics, medicine, and law among others.
But the overall aim of the piece is more ambitious yet:
We talked about the significantly less-ambitious aims of our own university as an introduction to the portfolio's reflective essay, in which each student will attempt to articulate what exactly happened since August 16.
Since the part of the semester in which I lecture is over, I've been doing some thinking about the course of things. First of all, if I do freshman comp next fall, I'm almost certainly doing Plato again; the text just begs to be taught to eighteen-year-olds. Second, I'm going to do some fiddling with WebCT and write a series of quizzes to keep the little boogers honest. Requiring discussion questions assumes that I'm going to take class time to check them (which I didn't); if I set up quizzes on WebCT, the honesty check should take care of itself. Finally, I'm going to ask the class whether the reading load was too heavy. If not, I might just teach Machiavelli's Il Principe alongside Plato's Republic as an introduction to all kinds of moral questions. But I'll ask my classes first; I wouldn't want to presume a greater importance for my class than what the class warrants.
But the overall aim of the piece is more ambitious yet:
The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.That's right. Education, properly done, ought to come pretty darn close to reversing Original Sin.
We talked about the significantly less-ambitious aims of our own university as an introduction to the portfolio's reflective essay, in which each student will attempt to articulate what exactly happened since August 16.
Since the part of the semester in which I lecture is over, I've been doing some thinking about the course of things. First of all, if I do freshman comp next fall, I'm almost certainly doing Plato again; the text just begs to be taught to eighteen-year-olds. Second, I'm going to do some fiddling with WebCT and write a series of quizzes to keep the little boogers honest. Requiring discussion questions assumes that I'm going to take class time to check them (which I didn't); if I set up quizzes on WebCT, the honesty check should take care of itself. Finally, I'm going to ask the class whether the reading load was too heavy. If not, I might just teach Machiavelli's Il Principe alongside Plato's Republic as an introduction to all kinds of moral questions. But I'll ask my classes first; I wouldn't want to presume a greater importance for my class than what the class warrants.
15 November 2006
The end of Republic
It would be kind of cool if this blog post landed on some Star Wars fan's google search.
That aside, we actually finished up Monday with his bizarre section on reincarnation. I'm still not sure whether the story of Er is allegory or doctrine or some clever combination of the two, but I do think that Plato's joke at the very end is just silly.
In today's class we looked at the unapologetically empiricist first book of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and I think the class got a genuine grasp on that ancient difference between idealists and inductivists. After three months of Plato, Aristotle's moral conservatism is almost jarring, and I wonder which way my classes leaned.
The rest of the semester will have to do with constructing and revising the portfolio. That disappoints me somewhat, but I know that I should be focusing on my Spenser paper anyway, so I'll not cry too much.
Now I've got roughly three hours to work until I have to talk to the composition pedagogy class about special sections. I've got a basic working idea of what I'll talk about, and I've only got to fill up eight minutes, but it's still a hair nervewracking.
That aside, we actually finished up Monday with his bizarre section on reincarnation. I'm still not sure whether the story of Er is allegory or doctrine or some clever combination of the two, but I do think that Plato's joke at the very end is just silly.
In today's class we looked at the unapologetically empiricist first book of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and I think the class got a genuine grasp on that ancient difference between idealists and inductivists. After three months of Plato, Aristotle's moral conservatism is almost jarring, and I wonder which way my classes leaned.
The rest of the semester will have to do with constructing and revising the portfolio. That disappoints me somewhat, but I know that I should be focusing on my Spenser paper anyway, so I'll not cry too much.
Now I've got roughly three hours to work until I have to talk to the composition pedagogy class about special sections. I've got a basic working idea of what I'll talk about, and I've only got to fill up eight minutes, but it's still a hair nervewracking.
11 November 2006
09 November 2006
Better Ways
We finished what I would call the ethical part of Republic in class yesterday, and I'm pleased with the bulk of the semester's discussions. Even if some (or most) of the folks in my classes never pick up a copy of Plato again (I hope they do), they've been exposed to and had to think about questions of goodness, justice, human community, idealism, and half a dozen other things.
And now that we've covered what we covered yesterday, they all know that morality is not only better than immorality but 729 times better than immorality! (Republic section 587e) The next time my freshmen are tempted to immorality, and their WWJD bracelets are out of morality-batteries (moratteries?), they can remember what Plato told them, and they'll say, "Why would I want to do that? To do the good thing would be 729 times better!"
Perhaps not.
Plato finished up this section with quite a vivid metaphor: the one who is satisfied with apetite-pleasing pleasure is as one who climbs halfway up a mountain and congratulates himself on reaching the top, only to return to the bottom, then go up halfway, and so on. The one whose pleasures are philosophic reach the height of the mountain. We had some good times discussing why Plato thinks philosophy is better than sex, but I think that everyone present could appreciate this image.
This Friday we're discussing Plato's famous attack on poetry, and Monday, in addition to the semester's customer satisfaction surveys, we're talking about Plato's funky reincarnation chapter. Both ought to be fun.
In other realms, I finished up Chesterton's Orthodoxy during my office hours today. I hate to alienate any readers who love the Inklings and their ilk, but I wasn't all that impressed. The book itself just did not live up to the glowing recommendations that came before. In one chapter, I found myself thinking, paragraph by paragraph, "Okay. He's a Humean empiricist. He's surprised every time the door opens to the same street outside, and he thinks it's foolish to assume that the same door will do the same thing tomorrow. He can get on to the next chapter." In another, I thought, "Okay, he's a moral relativist. He thinks that Enlightenment wars are awful but that Christian wars are great. Next chapter, please." None of the chapters left me speechless in the ways that Augustine or Dante or even Barth leaves me speechless; I just wanted to get past his logical-fallacy-for-this-chapter and finish. But I suppose now I can say that I've read Chesterton and found him wanting rather than admitting that I've never read Chesterton. That's a little bit better.
And now that we've covered what we covered yesterday, they all know that morality is not only better than immorality but 729 times better than immorality! (Republic section 587e) The next time my freshmen are tempted to immorality, and their WWJD bracelets are out of morality-batteries (moratteries?), they can remember what Plato told them, and they'll say, "Why would I want to do that? To do the good thing would be 729 times better!"
Perhaps not.
Plato finished up this section with quite a vivid metaphor: the one who is satisfied with apetite-pleasing pleasure is as one who climbs halfway up a mountain and congratulates himself on reaching the top, only to return to the bottom, then go up halfway, and so on. The one whose pleasures are philosophic reach the height of the mountain. We had some good times discussing why Plato thinks philosophy is better than sex, but I think that everyone present could appreciate this image.
This Friday we're discussing Plato's famous attack on poetry, and Monday, in addition to the semester's customer satisfaction surveys, we're talking about Plato's funky reincarnation chapter. Both ought to be fun.
In other realms, I finished up Chesterton's Orthodoxy during my office hours today. I hate to alienate any readers who love the Inklings and their ilk, but I wasn't all that impressed. The book itself just did not live up to the glowing recommendations that came before. In one chapter, I found myself thinking, paragraph by paragraph, "Okay. He's a Humean empiricist. He's surprised every time the door opens to the same street outside, and he thinks it's foolish to assume that the same door will do the same thing tomorrow. He can get on to the next chapter." In another, I thought, "Okay, he's a moral relativist. He thinks that Enlightenment wars are awful but that Christian wars are great. Next chapter, please." None of the chapters left me speechless in the ways that Augustine or Dante or even Barth leaves me speechless; I just wanted to get past his logical-fallacy-for-this-chapter and finish. But I suppose now I can say that I've read Chesterton and found him wanting rather than admitting that I've never read Chesterton. That's a little bit better.
07 November 2006
Tyranny
We had some pretty good discussions yesterday in class. Plato finally got to the dictatorial personality and the dictatorial community. The contrast between the two is sharp: in a dictatorial society, the dictator is the most fearsome person Plato describes. In a dictatorial psyche, the picture is more like Beavis than like Stalin. The insight is wonderful: any community, in the Platonic imagination, exists sub specie aeternitatis. Thus the best sorts of communities exist knowing and submitting to the Good, while those that deny or defy the Good are the worst, the tyrannies.
I hope that my students take this section well in mind as they work on their papers; a philosophy of the good, be that philosophy theological (as it is when I do politics) or Marxist-historical or Nietzschean or consumeristically relativistic, is going to determine to some extent what freedom looks like. I'm curious to see what this round of papers will look like.
I hope that my students take this section well in mind as they work on their papers; a philosophy of the good, be that philosophy theological (as it is when I do politics) or Marxist-historical or Nietzschean or consumeristically relativistic, is going to determine to some extent what freedom looks like. I'm curious to see what this round of papers will look like.
04 November 2006
Freedom and choice
I've got my routine down for teaching academic writing, but teaching philosophy is still before me.
I tried to teach the philosophical distinctions between positive freedom/freedom-for and negative freedom/freedom-from yesterday, and I'm not sure I was clear at all. The context for the conversation was Plato's comparison between democracy on one hand and true aristocracy on the other--his contention seems to be that democracy offers more raw choices in any given moment and thus might seem freer but that, given the undisciplined soul's tendency to seek pleasure even in spite of goodness, such "freedom" actually enslaves the better parts of our communities and our souls to the worse parts. My students seemed to get Plato's logic, but I still had trouble breaking down the iron bond that connects freedom as abstraction with autonomous choice as action. My students still seemed to regard Plato's option as not-freedom rather than a different sort of freedom. That's not necessarily bad; perhaps my grasp on the English word "free" is too tenuous and lets in too many sorts of connotations. All the same, I'm still wondering whether I could have taught it better.
I've finished grading the class's research papers. Some really stepped up and articulated intelligent analyses and argued theoretical and ethical points. Others gave me catalogues of observations. I suppose I should expect that from a class of freshman writers; not everyone is going to get it now, and not everyone is going to get it when I'm teaching it. That some have encourages me.
Monday we finish up Plato's chapter on corrupt communities with his discussion of madman's rule. Waterfield, our translator, calls it dictatorship, but it reminds me more of Animal from the Muppets running the city--whatever whim strikes the madman, he chases after it. There's really neither past nor future for this leader; there's only his whims. Such is the embodiment of absolute immorality in Plato's imagination. And in the same imagination, such atemporality is just one step further down the road from democracy.
I tried to teach the philosophical distinctions between positive freedom/freedom-for and negative freedom/freedom-from yesterday, and I'm not sure I was clear at all. The context for the conversation was Plato's comparison between democracy on one hand and true aristocracy on the other--his contention seems to be that democracy offers more raw choices in any given moment and thus might seem freer but that, given the undisciplined soul's tendency to seek pleasure even in spite of goodness, such "freedom" actually enslaves the better parts of our communities and our souls to the worse parts. My students seemed to get Plato's logic, but I still had trouble breaking down the iron bond that connects freedom as abstraction with autonomous choice as action. My students still seemed to regard Plato's option as not-freedom rather than a different sort of freedom. That's not necessarily bad; perhaps my grasp on the English word "free" is too tenuous and lets in too many sorts of connotations. All the same, I'm still wondering whether I could have taught it better.
I've finished grading the class's research papers. Some really stepped up and articulated intelligent analyses and argued theoretical and ethical points. Others gave me catalogues of observations. I suppose I should expect that from a class of freshman writers; not everyone is going to get it now, and not everyone is going to get it when I'm teaching it. That some have encourages me.
Monday we finish up Plato's chapter on corrupt communities with his discussion of madman's rule. Waterfield, our translator, calls it dictatorship, but it reminds me more of Animal from the Muppets running the city--whatever whim strikes the madman, he chases after it. There's really neither past nor future for this leader; there's only his whims. Such is the embodiment of absolute immorality in Plato's imagination. And in the same imagination, such atemporality is just one step further down the road from democracy.
02 November 2006
My Anti-Democratic Rant
No, I've not become a Republican. At least not the kind that wears elephant pins.
Yesterday in class I made up for my lost Thoreau time and took on the role of Plato, arguing with some force that for the really important things in life, people didn't trust democracy. Nobody wants to admit and deny medical students based on a county-wide popular vote, and no college is going to let the students vote for the office of English teacher. I railed at the class, telling them that their insistence that the less able have an equal say in who governs indicates an apathy towards justice. Some were amused by my bad acting, but some got genuinely mad. I like that.
Of course, there are good and intelligible reasons to prefer popular elections for political officers. But I wasn't going to give them those reasons; part of the challenge of being an American college student ought to be the struggle to articulate the good, not just to jot down the teacher's definition of the good for the sake of reproducing it on the final exam.
Yesterday in class I made up for my lost Thoreau time and took on the role of Plato, arguing with some force that for the really important things in life, people didn't trust democracy. Nobody wants to admit and deny medical students based on a county-wide popular vote, and no college is going to let the students vote for the office of English teacher. I railed at the class, telling them that their insistence that the less able have an equal say in who governs indicates an apathy towards justice. Some were amused by my bad acting, but some got genuinely mad. I like that.
Of course, there are good and intelligible reasons to prefer popular elections for political officers. But I wasn't going to give them those reasons; part of the challenge of being an American college student ought to be the struggle to articulate the good, not just to jot down the teacher's definition of the good for the sake of reproducing it on the final exam.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
