400 posts! Woo hoo!
Also, I've now translated 319 lines of Beowulf, or 10% of the thing! Hwaet!
27 January 2007
26 January 2007
Psalms and Pedagogy
We're two days into the Psalms unit now, and classes are picking up fast. I don't know whether I've just packed the first two papers too closely towards the semester's beginning or whether my own classes are hindering my ability to expend energy on my teaching, but paper two's revision meetings start next Friday, and I still don't feel like I know my classes.
We've been close-reading thus far for parallelism (taught them some Lowth the first day) and sub-generic structure (lament, praise, didactic, etc.), then comparing them to 17th-century poems (Donne today). I'm hoping that writing this paper will give them enough poetry that they feel like they've been in a lit class, but frankly, I'm ready to get into David and Job. That's where the really good conversations and the really fun classes get rolling.
My three classes really are going to put me under if I get behind at all; I've been proactive and early-starting thus far; I've just got to make sure that I don't make it out of spring break without some pages written on my final papers. I'm almost certain at this point that I'm going to stop attending Latin in April to focus solely on term papers. I can pick up those Wheelock chapters and get ready to roll on LATN 2001 in the summer.
We've been close-reading thus far for parallelism (taught them some Lowth the first day) and sub-generic structure (lament, praise, didactic, etc.), then comparing them to 17th-century poems (Donne today). I'm hoping that writing this paper will give them enough poetry that they feel like they've been in a lit class, but frankly, I'm ready to get into David and Job. That's where the really good conversations and the really fun classes get rolling.
My three classes really are going to put me under if I get behind at all; I've been proactive and early-starting thus far; I've just got to make sure that I don't make it out of spring break without some pages written on my final papers. I'm almost certain at this point that I'm going to stop attending Latin in April to focus solely on term papers. I can pick up those Wheelock chapters and get ready to roll on LATN 2001 in the summer.
20 January 2007
I take it back
Okay, you know that last post in which I said my students were overly compliant?
Forget it.
On the class's online discussion board, the pro-Joseph brigade has made a charge. Let the games begin!
Forget it.
On the class's online discussion board, the pro-Joseph brigade has made a charge. Let the games begin!
Ambiguous Joseph
I spent a fair bit of time in my classes on Friday laying out my theories about agency and grammar and why excessive passive and expletive constructions hinder good academic writing, so we had too little time, as usual, to talk about Joseph.
This group of students, I think, tends too far towards malleability (or at least shows of malleability), and I'm going to have to watch it. When I focused our attention on Joseph's dark side, last year's classes fought me, clinging tenaciously to Joseph as a positive exemplar. I'm used to that; I can always get Socratic on them and make them think harder about it. This year's group almost immediately turned on Joseph, finding nothing but fault in him. I'm not sure whether they're doing this out of a genuinely shaky grasp on the story or to say what they think I want to hear, but either way, I had to give a talk to each class about Joseph's complexity and ambiguity so that they wouldn't leave this (very brief) unit thinking him an utter scumbag.
I collect the first brief paper Wednesday and get started on our Psalms and 17th-century poetry unit. I've got the skeleton of a lecture about English and Hebrew poetic conventions ready, but I need to spend some more time on it between now and Wednesday.
This group of students, I think, tends too far towards malleability (or at least shows of malleability), and I'm going to have to watch it. When I focused our attention on Joseph's dark side, last year's classes fought me, clinging tenaciously to Joseph as a positive exemplar. I'm used to that; I can always get Socratic on them and make them think harder about it. This year's group almost immediately turned on Joseph, finding nothing but fault in him. I'm not sure whether they're doing this out of a genuinely shaky grasp on the story or to say what they think I want to hear, but either way, I had to give a talk to each class about Joseph's complexity and ambiguity so that they wouldn't leave this (very brief) unit thinking him an utter scumbag.
I collect the first brief paper Wednesday and get started on our Psalms and 17th-century poetry unit. I've got the skeleton of a lecture about English and Hebrew poetic conventions ready, but I need to spend some more time on it between now and Wednesday.
18 January 2007
Fifteen bucks
I found a small, 128MB mp3 player at Toys R Us for fifteen bucks. Since I only use such devices when I run, and since an hour and twenty minutes' music covers more time than my out-of-shape legs can, it's a great purchase.
In Hebrew Bible teaching news, the first day of Joseph went entirely too quicly, so quickly that I ran out of time in both sections before I could get to writing instruction. I'll have to start next class with writing and then launch into discussions of the narrative and the Robert Alter chapter I'm having them read.
I'm looking forward already to teaching the Psalms again, and I think that the revision groups for that paper will once again prove most helpful.
In Hebrew Bible teaching news, the first day of Joseph went entirely too quicly, so quickly that I ran out of time in both sections before I could get to writing instruction. I'll have to start next class with writing and then launch into discussions of the narrative and the Robert Alter chapter I'm having them read.
I'm looking forward already to teaching the Psalms again, and I think that the revision groups for that paper will once again prove most helpful.
13 January 2007
How 'bout them Colts
Well, two playoff games and zero touchdowns given up...
And half a dozen (I think) Manning interceptions with one touchdown thrown.
I suppose the playoff season is a strange place to live.
Lord help our Colts!
And half a dozen (I think) Manning interceptions with one touchdown thrown.
I suppose the playoff season is a strange place to live.
Lord help our Colts!
12 January 2007
Let 'er Rip
Drop/Add period ended at midnight last night, and the semester proper is under way.
We did get-to-know-each-other stuff today, mainly so we could get into the texts with a little less tension in the air. Monday we begin Joseph, and I've already forgotten my Harper-Collins Study Bible in my office for the first time this semester. For this text that's no big deal; I can plan my lesson with just the text in front of me, and the narrative is long enough that we'll only be able to discuss a couple episodes in depth anyway.
In the final hours of drop/add, my class numbers dropped to 20 for 8:00 and remained at 22 for 9:00. I imagine I'll lose some to brown-bottle flu (those early Friday mornings will do that), but at least I begin with fewer than the maximum 44-paper sets to grade. Once again I've got a preponderance of sophomores in my classes; I never got that many for "regular" ENGL 1102, but both times I've tried special sections, the sophomores (and juniors) have showed up. I just hope that they can remember that the class is for freshmen and not infect my younger students with boredom (as my juniors last spring did).
Beowulf is going to be interesting; in our first week, we translated ten of the fifty-two assigned lines of poetry as a class. Next week we have another sixty to take on; I wonder whether we'll dip into the first week or start where the syllabus starts on Wednesday or just do the good episodes. Dr. Evans also assigned critical articles that we're to present to the class, and I drew the one on medieval poetry and patristics, so that part should be fun.
Now I must settle in to the task of reading two hundred pages of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit for Wednesday night. The first chunk (that is to say, seven pages) hasn't been nearly as painful as I remember Hegel being when I was a senior in college. I suppose I've grown in my reading ability since then.
We did get-to-know-each-other stuff today, mainly so we could get into the texts with a little less tension in the air. Monday we begin Joseph, and I've already forgotten my Harper-Collins Study Bible in my office for the first time this semester. For this text that's no big deal; I can plan my lesson with just the text in front of me, and the narrative is long enough that we'll only be able to discuss a couple episodes in depth anyway.
In the final hours of drop/add, my class numbers dropped to 20 for 8:00 and remained at 22 for 9:00. I imagine I'll lose some to brown-bottle flu (those early Friday mornings will do that), but at least I begin with fewer than the maximum 44-paper sets to grade. Once again I've got a preponderance of sophomores in my classes; I never got that many for "regular" ENGL 1102, but both times I've tried special sections, the sophomores (and juniors) have showed up. I just hope that they can remember that the class is for freshmen and not infect my younger students with boredom (as my juniors last spring did).
Beowulf is going to be interesting; in our first week, we translated ten of the fifty-two assigned lines of poetry as a class. Next week we have another sixty to take on; I wonder whether we'll dip into the first week or start where the syllabus starts on Wednesday or just do the good episodes. Dr. Evans also assigned critical articles that we're to present to the class, and I drew the one on medieval poetry and patristics, so that part should be fun.
Now I must settle in to the task of reading two hundred pages of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit for Wednesday night. The first chunk (that is to say, seven pages) hasn't been nearly as painful as I remember Hegel being when I was a senior in college. I suppose I've grown in my reading ability since then.
11 January 2007
Back to the Grind
All of my spring classes have now met, and the semester's going to be a rough one. I'm already feeling tired thinking of all the hours I'm going to spend reading Hegel and translating Beowulf. But when I make it through, I'll nearly be a Jedi.
My Hebrew Bible and/as Literature classes have met twice, and at midnight tonight the rosters get finalized so that I can start the genuine class on Friday. We spent yesterday's class period close-reading Genesis 12 and giving the students a taste of what is to come over the course of the semester.
I'm going to try to make the focus of this semester's instruction the concept of intellectual traditions, those practices within which people have lived and live that make sense of things like texts and life and God. We discussed them briefly in the first class and really dug into what sort of tradition that Genesis 12 (the beginning of the Abram/Abraham narratives) constitutes as opposed to the opening chapters of the gospel of Mark or the opening lectures in a political science-type course.
I really hit a stride and connected with the students while teaching Plato last semester; I hope that I can do likewise this spring.
My Hebrew Bible and/as Literature classes have met twice, and at midnight tonight the rosters get finalized so that I can start the genuine class on Friday. We spent yesterday's class period close-reading Genesis 12 and giving the students a taste of what is to come over the course of the semester.
I'm going to try to make the focus of this semester's instruction the concept of intellectual traditions, those practices within which people have lived and live that make sense of things like texts and life and God. We discussed them briefly in the first class and really dug into what sort of tradition that Genesis 12 (the beginning of the Abram/Abraham narratives) constitutes as opposed to the opening chapters of the gospel of Mark or the opening lectures in a political science-type course.
I really hit a stride and connected with the students while teaching Plato last semester; I hope that I can do likewise this spring.
09 January 2007
Post-Christmas Revisited
First, I'd like to thank the folks who commented on my first, haphazard post-Christmas post for reading and thinking with me. The following (still haphazard) reflections will attempt to respond to some of those comments.
When I talk about a group's appropriating a common symbol and making it a shibboleth for one faction, I don't necessarily need to assert an all-encompassing conspiracy or even to attribute agency to any one strategist. For instance, when the Qumran community (the Dead Sea Scrolls folks) appropriated the biblical prophets and made them weapons in polemics against the Jerusalem hierarchy, I don't necessarily think that the council got together in some sort of "strategy meeting" to vote on using the prophets, and I don't think that the intellectual architects of the War Scroll or the Temple Scroll had some cynical plan in mind to win political points. In that case I think that the folks who claimed the prophets genuinely believed the prophets to be on their side, and the Sadduccee rejection of the prophets as Scripture must have had at least something to do with an analogous rejection of Pharisaical and Qumranish politics.
In the case of the so-called "War on Christmas," I imagine that, were one to trace its origins, one would find not a Washington think-tank but nostalgic old-timers who remember when "Merry Christmas," a bit of benign cultural carry-over from the old English ways (where John Lennon and Harry Potter alike can muse about Christmas) that seemed to be fading into the past as retailers (who, after all, are all about making money) began to forge a more specifically American neutrality. (Christmas has been around for hundreds of years in England, whereas in America nothing has been around for hundreds of years.)
I do think that when mass-media personalities grab hold of those old-timers' nostalgia and turn it into something akin to the "Freedom Fries" embarrassment, one can assert more strongly that something cynical is going but still need not posit a global conspiracy.
On the other hand, I think that most calls of "Merry Christmas" are in fact friendly or at worst benign. I don't think that the "enemies" in the so-called "War on Christmas" are Muslims and Hindus so much as Democrats. (I'm fairly certain that the same was the case with "Freedom Fries.") The political logic there is, I think, cynical and cyclical: One dares those who don't celebrate Christmas to take offense by means of more and more public assertions about "Judeo-Christian traditions" and such, taking the traditions away from an inherited Britishness and recasting them as vestiges of a former, more pristine "Christian America" that may or may not have at some point existed. The polarizing effect of such appropriation forces elected officials, who in fact have to live with both camps of culture warriors, to take safeguards against litigation (more often at the hands of Democrats than Hindus). Then one points to the safeguards, says something about "political correctness" (which nobody, in my experience, can define well), and increases the air of paranoia, playing to the fears of those who remember fondly the "old days" before the instigation began. In the meantime, those of us who don't have a horse in the culture wars race are forced to live in a world in which "Merry Christmas" is no longer something from a Dickens story, friendly enough and contentless enough not to threaten, but now the code word of a certain faction, something akin to a self-apellation as "pro-family" (who isn't?) or "values voter."
So to cut off this rambling (and still haphazard) reflection, I'd say that ninety-nine out of a hundred wishes of "Merry Christmas" have nothing to do with rendering Hindus "other," and ninety-nine out of a hundred wishes of "Happy Holidays" are not trying to obliterate American Christianity. The sadness that inspired the first post has less to do with most folks and more to do with the poisonous appropriation and negation that some folks are willing to undertake for the sake of controlling Congress.
When I talk about a group's appropriating a common symbol and making it a shibboleth for one faction, I don't necessarily need to assert an all-encompassing conspiracy or even to attribute agency to any one strategist. For instance, when the Qumran community (the Dead Sea Scrolls folks) appropriated the biblical prophets and made them weapons in polemics against the Jerusalem hierarchy, I don't necessarily think that the council got together in some sort of "strategy meeting" to vote on using the prophets, and I don't think that the intellectual architects of the War Scroll or the Temple Scroll had some cynical plan in mind to win political points. In that case I think that the folks who claimed the prophets genuinely believed the prophets to be on their side, and the Sadduccee rejection of the prophets as Scripture must have had at least something to do with an analogous rejection of Pharisaical and Qumranish politics.
In the case of the so-called "War on Christmas," I imagine that, were one to trace its origins, one would find not a Washington think-tank but nostalgic old-timers who remember when "Merry Christmas," a bit of benign cultural carry-over from the old English ways (where John Lennon and Harry Potter alike can muse about Christmas) that seemed to be fading into the past as retailers (who, after all, are all about making money) began to forge a more specifically American neutrality. (Christmas has been around for hundreds of years in England, whereas in America nothing has been around for hundreds of years.)
I do think that when mass-media personalities grab hold of those old-timers' nostalgia and turn it into something akin to the "Freedom Fries" embarrassment, one can assert more strongly that something cynical is going but still need not posit a global conspiracy.
On the other hand, I think that most calls of "Merry Christmas" are in fact friendly or at worst benign. I don't think that the "enemies" in the so-called "War on Christmas" are Muslims and Hindus so much as Democrats. (I'm fairly certain that the same was the case with "Freedom Fries.") The political logic there is, I think, cynical and cyclical: One dares those who don't celebrate Christmas to take offense by means of more and more public assertions about "Judeo-Christian traditions" and such, taking the traditions away from an inherited Britishness and recasting them as vestiges of a former, more pristine "Christian America" that may or may not have at some point existed. The polarizing effect of such appropriation forces elected officials, who in fact have to live with both camps of culture warriors, to take safeguards against litigation (more often at the hands of Democrats than Hindus). Then one points to the safeguards, says something about "political correctness" (which nobody, in my experience, can define well), and increases the air of paranoia, playing to the fears of those who remember fondly the "old days" before the instigation began. In the meantime, those of us who don't have a horse in the culture wars race are forced to live in a world in which "Merry Christmas" is no longer something from a Dickens story, friendly enough and contentless enough not to threaten, but now the code word of a certain faction, something akin to a self-apellation as "pro-family" (who isn't?) or "values voter."
So to cut off this rambling (and still haphazard) reflection, I'd say that ninety-nine out of a hundred wishes of "Merry Christmas" have nothing to do with rendering Hindus "other," and ninety-nine out of a hundred wishes of "Happy Holidays" are not trying to obliterate American Christianity. The sadness that inspired the first post has less to do with most folks and more to do with the poisonous appropriation and negation that some folks are willing to undertake for the sake of controlling Congress.
08 January 2007
04 January 2007
A Haphazard Post-Christmas Thought
If ever anyone actually fought a War on Christmas, I think they won this year. For the first time in my 29 years, I started feeling uneasy when people wished me a Merry Christmas. The greeting, friendly or at worst benign throughout my years, started in 2006 to sound like a Republican code word.
I never called myself "pro-life" for very long, and I thought that "family values" sounded a bit squirrelly even back in high school. But in the moment when I realized that "Christmas" had been tainted, claimed as property by a political party, I got mad. And when I get mad, it tends to last only a couple minutes, and then I start to think.
The booger about Christmas is that every stage of its development is contested territory. Its origins might or might not have something to do with Saturnalia, and the historical tradition that links it with Saturnalia might or might not have its own agenda. The consumer orgy might or might not be a deviation from a pristine ur-Christmas with all the Advent fasts and proper piety, and the urge to return to that pristine Christmas might or might not be a quasi-liturgical neo-Puritan impulse. Of course, I tend to see complexity where others don't. (Hate the phrase "over-think.")
The lazy but literate part of my self wants simply to fall back on Dickens and Irving, to claim some easy "middle ground" in which Christmas is at once sacred and secular and in which the archaeology of genetic moments is an unnecessary trifle and for which the proper response is not thought but revelry in whatever happens to be there. (BTW, "A Christmas Carol" is the obvious Dickens reference; Irving's Sketch-Book has a number of Christmas chapters.)
And then I realize that I've wandered far afield from the suspiciously-partisan-sounding insistences that in fact it's time for Merry Christmas and not for a Happy Holiday.
And then I realize that the spring semester begins in four days. Thank the heavens I can think about something simple then, like Old English participles or Heidegger.
I never called myself "pro-life" for very long, and I thought that "family values" sounded a bit squirrelly even back in high school. But in the moment when I realized that "Christmas" had been tainted, claimed as property by a political party, I got mad. And when I get mad, it tends to last only a couple minutes, and then I start to think.
The booger about Christmas is that every stage of its development is contested territory. Its origins might or might not have something to do with Saturnalia, and the historical tradition that links it with Saturnalia might or might not have its own agenda. The consumer orgy might or might not be a deviation from a pristine ur-Christmas with all the Advent fasts and proper piety, and the urge to return to that pristine Christmas might or might not be a quasi-liturgical neo-Puritan impulse. Of course, I tend to see complexity where others don't. (Hate the phrase "over-think.")
The lazy but literate part of my self wants simply to fall back on Dickens and Irving, to claim some easy "middle ground" in which Christmas is at once sacred and secular and in which the archaeology of genetic moments is an unnecessary trifle and for which the proper response is not thought but revelry in whatever happens to be there. (BTW, "A Christmas Carol" is the obvious Dickens reference; Irving's Sketch-Book has a number of Christmas chapters.)
And then I realize that I've wandered far afield from the suspiciously-partisan-sounding insistences that in fact it's time for Merry Christmas and not for a Happy Holiday.
And then I realize that the spring semester begins in four days. Thank the heavens I can think about something simple then, like Old English participles or Heidegger.
02 January 2007
Back from the North
11 days, 2200 miles, four family get-togethers, one stomach virus, and a case of strep later, and we're back!
Christmas pictures will be coming soon, but since Micah's contagious for one more day (he's doing quite well on an antibiotic and never, as far as I can tell, realized that he was sick), I'm not going to have any little-hands-free computer time tomorrow, so the impatient will simply have to learn patience.
Christmas pictures will be coming soon, but since Micah's contagious for one more day (he's doing quite well on an antibiotic and never, as far as I can tell, realized that he was sick), I'm not going to have any little-hands-free computer time tomorrow, so the impatient will simply have to learn patience.
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