Yes, folks, I think that the new blog is going to be my blog for the time being. If you've got hyperlinks or bookmarks, change 'em. If not, make some hyperlinks!
24 September 2007
22 September 2007
A New Face on Things
I'm not sure I'm going with Wordpress permanently, but it's been fun playing around with it.
To see this blog with some new duds, head on over to what might become the new Hardly the Last Word.
To see this blog with some new duds, head on over to what might become the new Hardly the Last Word.
18 September 2007
Another good day
We wrapped up our first unit on Republic proper today, and the discussions were quite good. I have to keep reminding the students (and myself) both how alien Plato's world was and how much we (the students and their teacher) are heirs to Plato's basic project.
Plato's big question in today's section was how to determine who should serve the community in which ways. Always looking for reasoned organization, Plato sets forth that ability, not ancestry, should decide who farms and who builds and who fights and who rules. There's still no hint of the individual's choosing her or his own vocation (as far as I can tell, they hadn't invented that yet), but it certainly assumes that communities can organize rationally their division of labor.
Such a distinction was at the heart of 11:00's discussion: is Plato forcing people to be what they do not want to be by training them according to their aptitudes, or does a desire to want to do something for a living only arise when choice-of-vocation is a stated category?
In 8:00 we spent more time focusing on protecting children from stories for which they're not ready. The group basically agreed with Plato's schema, in which the lewd and potentially misleading stories are reserved for those who have developed the faculties for apprehending them literately rather than as straightforward positive exempla. The sticking point for that group was that in Plato's system, there was no set rule for when that happened. They agreed that setting an arbitrary age (17 for R-rated movies, 21 for dance clubs) was too arbitrary fully to be reasonable, but they also weren't comfortable with putting such decisions in the hands of the community's guardians.
Tomorrow we start revision groups, a tiring time for me. But it's good enough pedagogically that I don't think I could do a semester of comp without them.
Plato's big question in today's section was how to determine who should serve the community in which ways. Always looking for reasoned organization, Plato sets forth that ability, not ancestry, should decide who farms and who builds and who fights and who rules. There's still no hint of the individual's choosing her or his own vocation (as far as I can tell, they hadn't invented that yet), but it certainly assumes that communities can organize rationally their division of labor.
Such a distinction was at the heart of 11:00's discussion: is Plato forcing people to be what they do not want to be by training them according to their aptitudes, or does a desire to want to do something for a living only arise when choice-of-vocation is a stated category?
In 8:00 we spent more time focusing on protecting children from stories for which they're not ready. The group basically agreed with Plato's schema, in which the lewd and potentially misleading stories are reserved for those who have developed the faculties for apprehending them literately rather than as straightforward positive exempla. The sticking point for that group was that in Plato's system, there was no set rule for when that happened. They agreed that setting an arbitrary age (17 for R-rated movies, 21 for dance clubs) was too arbitrary fully to be reasonable, but they also weren't comfortable with putting such decisions in the hands of the community's guardians.
Tomorrow we start revision groups, a tiring time for me. But it's good enough pedagogically that I don't think I could do a semester of comp without them.
15 September 2007
Plato meets Michael Vick
Thursday's classes were good, and I actually mananged to have two, very different conversations in them. Since I remember 11:00 a little better, I'll start with that.
Their main concern was that Plato considers obscuring information for the good of community not much of a problem. Although they did not phrase it this way, they thought that the act of deception itself disqualifies a guardian as good.
That's where Michael Vick comes in.
When I asked them what they would say to ten-year-olds who idolized Michael Vick, they started to realize the size of the question that Plato was dealing with. After all, nine months ago (give or take), Vick was as close to a classical hero as kids get in 2006--he went out into an open field with some of the biggest, strongest, fastest people on the planet and proved over and over that he could overcome them with his own quickness and vision. Then the newspapers revealed something else, something at least as scandalous (for us moderns) as Achilles' distaste for the afterlife. I asked them what they'd tell the kids.
Because I hadn't anticipated that being the big question of the day (this was also the section in which Plato says that visiting Corinthian prostitutes and consuming pastries are basically moral equivalents and in which he formulates what later becomes "Platonic love"), I didn't articulate things that well. But I think things went fairly smoothly.
In 8:00, as I anticipated, the discussion mostly dealt with that Platonic sense of friendship, in which the best among the community love each other without the sex for the sake of harmony. Putting that in an ancient Athenian context is always a trip.
That's all I've got right now. I've got my proposal for my spring course in, and I ought to have some good working time Monday, back here at the Bogart Library. Perhaps more then.
Their main concern was that Plato considers obscuring information for the good of community not much of a problem. Although they did not phrase it this way, they thought that the act of deception itself disqualifies a guardian as good.
That's where Michael Vick comes in.
When I asked them what they would say to ten-year-olds who idolized Michael Vick, they started to realize the size of the question that Plato was dealing with. After all, nine months ago (give or take), Vick was as close to a classical hero as kids get in 2006--he went out into an open field with some of the biggest, strongest, fastest people on the planet and proved over and over that he could overcome them with his own quickness and vision. Then the newspapers revealed something else, something at least as scandalous (for us moderns) as Achilles' distaste for the afterlife. I asked them what they'd tell the kids.
Because I hadn't anticipated that being the big question of the day (this was also the section in which Plato says that visiting Corinthian prostitutes and consuming pastries are basically moral equivalents and in which he formulates what later becomes "Platonic love"), I didn't articulate things that well. But I think things went fairly smoothly.
In 8:00, as I anticipated, the discussion mostly dealt with that Platonic sense of friendship, in which the best among the community love each other without the sex for the sake of harmony. Putting that in an ancient Athenian context is always a trip.
That's all I've got right now. I've got my proposal for my spring course in, and I ought to have some good working time Monday, back here at the Bogart Library. Perhaps more then.
11 September 2007
Thought Experiments
Today's reading in Plato was pretty much setup; the real argument begins in Thursday's reading. Nonetheless, my classes both engaged the text with some enthusiasm, and I finished my teaching day tired but pleased with the results.
The more I teach Plato, the more parallels strike me. The Ring of Gyges is obviously an influence on Tolkien; that's easy. But this time through, planning the lesson, I came to realize that Socrates' good man in his thought experiment bears a striking resemblance to Job--he's a genuinely righteous (the Greek dikaiosyne gets translated as "just" in Republic and "righteous" in Matthew) man who loses all the benefits of righteousness in heaven and in earth. Of course, the genius of Job is that the wronged righteous man speaks, and although I still don't think that the writer of Job necessarily knew Plato, I do think that the connection is undeniable.
As happened last year, this year's students are still working out what to do with Plato's highly specialized society. I reminded them that at least part of what he's doing is analogical, but nonetheless the question remains valid. And the pattern holds from last year: the students don't like the idea that one job is in store for a person's entire life, but when it comes to very important tasks (surgery and protection come up in every class), the students want specialists working in their behalf. Yes, this is a fun book to teach.
I also gave my preliminary "sex in Athens" speech to both sections today. Not surprisingly, a city in which the same man could have a boyfriend, a wife, and a prostitute when he felt the need struck the class as rotten. (It is in fact rotten.) But I have a hunch they'll read the sex sections of Republic a little more acutely when we get there, so I don't mind the relative embarrassment that I experience every time I have to give that talk.
Thursday we start talking about educating the guardians, always a fun time. I'll have to revisit the text before I start planning my attack, but this section always gets personal, and I like that.
The more I teach Plato, the more parallels strike me. The Ring of Gyges is obviously an influence on Tolkien; that's easy. But this time through, planning the lesson, I came to realize that Socrates' good man in his thought experiment bears a striking resemblance to Job--he's a genuinely righteous (the Greek dikaiosyne gets translated as "just" in Republic and "righteous" in Matthew) man who loses all the benefits of righteousness in heaven and in earth. Of course, the genius of Job is that the wronged righteous man speaks, and although I still don't think that the writer of Job necessarily knew Plato, I do think that the connection is undeniable.
As happened last year, this year's students are still working out what to do with Plato's highly specialized society. I reminded them that at least part of what he's doing is analogical, but nonetheless the question remains valid. And the pattern holds from last year: the students don't like the idea that one job is in store for a person's entire life, but when it comes to very important tasks (surgery and protection come up in every class), the students want specialists working in their behalf. Yes, this is a fun book to teach.
I also gave my preliminary "sex in Athens" speech to both sections today. Not surprisingly, a city in which the same man could have a boyfriend, a wife, and a prostitute when he felt the need struck the class as rotten. (It is in fact rotten.) But I have a hunch they'll read the sex sections of Republic a little more acutely when we get there, so I don't mind the relative embarrassment that I experience every time I have to give that talk.
Thursday we start talking about educating the guardians, always a fun time. I'll have to revisit the text before I start planning my attack, but this section always gets personal, and I like that.
07 September 2007
Freshmen can understand dialectic
Yesterday's classes were great; I really do have two good groups this year.
I did kick myself after 11:00 class for trying to railroad them into the same discussion that 8:00 had. It's a bad habit of mine, and I think I might be in the process of breaking the habit for some time still. All the same, they had read carefully enough that they pretty much took the discussion and ran with it. Like David in my Hebrew Bible classes, Socrates is always a conflicted figure, and some of my students loved him, and some of my students hated him.
One thing I did differently this year was actually to teach the dialectic form early on in the dialogue. We traced the brief exchange between Socrates and Simonides in terms of assertion and negation, and then we spent the bulk of the Plato-talk on the exchange between Thrasymachus and Socrates, noting the increasing length of each negation. Again, some students thought that such a method was great pedagogically and philosophically, and others wished that old Socrates would just get to the point. That's alright; there's more to come, and they'll get better at reading it, even if they never come to like it.
With regards to writing matters, I did an Open Document Presentation on hourglass structure and on internal organization within a paper. The former part people got pretty well, but I'm going to follow up on the former with a fuller presentation Tuesday on induction, deduction, and causality. With the talented group I've got, I imagine they'll do well on this first full-length paper. Some of them are already anxiety-ridden about it, but those are always the ones who work their tails off and end up learning how to write, so I'm not worried.
Our little book group is digging into Vonnegut's Mother Night, and already I'm hooked. Vonnegut is one of those novelists who at once says intelligent things and also makes me want to see what's on the next page. I dig that.
And although I was too busy to watch all of it, I was pleased to read that the Colts' defense, minus Cato June and Jason David and Booger McFarland and Corey Simon, still managed to hold Drew Brees, Reggie Bush, Deuce McAllister, and crew to ten points last night, and I was pleased again to see that even without Tarik Glen guarding his blindside, Peyton Manning threw for three touchdowns to his faithful receivers, and I was pleased once more that Joseph Addai had a killer game as a starter. I don't expect that they'll be able to play at this level the whole season (they always slump; last year they were just smart enough to do so at the end of the regular season), but I do enjoy when they play this way.
I did kick myself after 11:00 class for trying to railroad them into the same discussion that 8:00 had. It's a bad habit of mine, and I think I might be in the process of breaking the habit for some time still. All the same, they had read carefully enough that they pretty much took the discussion and ran with it. Like David in my Hebrew Bible classes, Socrates is always a conflicted figure, and some of my students loved him, and some of my students hated him.
One thing I did differently this year was actually to teach the dialectic form early on in the dialogue. We traced the brief exchange between Socrates and Simonides in terms of assertion and negation, and then we spent the bulk of the Plato-talk on the exchange between Thrasymachus and Socrates, noting the increasing length of each negation. Again, some students thought that such a method was great pedagogically and philosophically, and others wished that old Socrates would just get to the point. That's alright; there's more to come, and they'll get better at reading it, even if they never come to like it.
With regards to writing matters, I did an Open Document Presentation on hourglass structure and on internal organization within a paper. The former part people got pretty well, but I'm going to follow up on the former with a fuller presentation Tuesday on induction, deduction, and causality. With the talented group I've got, I imagine they'll do well on this first full-length paper. Some of them are already anxiety-ridden about it, but those are always the ones who work their tails off and end up learning how to write, so I'm not worried.
Our little book group is digging into Vonnegut's Mother Night, and already I'm hooked. Vonnegut is one of those novelists who at once says intelligent things and also makes me want to see what's on the next page. I dig that.
And although I was too busy to watch all of it, I was pleased to read that the Colts' defense, minus Cato June and Jason David and Booger McFarland and Corey Simon, still managed to hold Drew Brees, Reggie Bush, Deuce McAllister, and crew to ten points last night, and I was pleased again to see that even without Tarik Glen guarding his blindside, Peyton Manning threw for three touchdowns to his faithful receivers, and I was pleased once more that Joseph Addai had a killer game as a starter. I don't expect that they'll be able to play at this level the whole season (they always slump; last year they were just smart enough to do so at the end of the regular season), but I do enjoy when they play this way.
01 September 2007
Book Forthcoming
In case you've heard through the grapevine (or, perhaps, in case you haven't), a new Ooze.com book is coming out on September 22, and one of my essays is one of its chapters. Pretty cool, eh?
The image itself links to the amazon.com entry for it.
Weekend Reflections
This fall's first-year comp groups are getting off to a really good start. Nobody seems to have flaked out utterly on paper one, and so far the discussions of Plato have been quite good. We launch into the Republic this Tuesday, and I'm excited to take this group through it.
In conversation with Mary this week I realized why I've enjoyed teaching Plato even more than I have teaching Hebrew Bible in 1102. It's not the text at hand; both are fun texts to teach. It's the differences between the populations, and it's nobody's fault particularly. In 1101, I get almost exclusively first-semester college students, and they're ready to get groovin' on some college-level thought. Nothing could suit that better than Plato; with Plato one must simultaneously hold loosely to one's assumptions and remain steadfast in the pursuit of genuine goodness, beauty, and truth. That's the stuff of college, methinks.
On the other hand, when we do Hebrew Bible in the spring, we're dealing with texts with which many of the students are already familiar. I get a fair number of people who tested out of 1101 and resent having to take 1102. I get a fair number of people who are taking freshman classes as 21-year-olds. That's not to say that the class can't be good; it's just to say that I've got to work harder, and I'm going to hit more dead spots there. Those aren't unqualifiedly bad things; they're just realities.
In the larger world, another family values politician has been caught (apparently) soliciting anonymous sex, Michael Vick pled guilty to dogfighting, and I keep my nose buried in books for comprehensive exams. I think I need to read some Vonnegut. Good thing book group is right now.
In conversation with Mary this week I realized why I've enjoyed teaching Plato even more than I have teaching Hebrew Bible in 1102. It's not the text at hand; both are fun texts to teach. It's the differences between the populations, and it's nobody's fault particularly. In 1101, I get almost exclusively first-semester college students, and they're ready to get groovin' on some college-level thought. Nothing could suit that better than Plato; with Plato one must simultaneously hold loosely to one's assumptions and remain steadfast in the pursuit of genuine goodness, beauty, and truth. That's the stuff of college, methinks.
On the other hand, when we do Hebrew Bible in the spring, we're dealing with texts with which many of the students are already familiar. I get a fair number of people who tested out of 1101 and resent having to take 1102. I get a fair number of people who are taking freshman classes as 21-year-olds. That's not to say that the class can't be good; it's just to say that I've got to work harder, and I'm going to hit more dead spots there. Those aren't unqualifiedly bad things; they're just realities.
In the larger world, another family values politician has been caught (apparently) soliciting anonymous sex, Michael Vick pled guilty to dogfighting, and I keep my nose buried in books for comprehensive exams. I think I need to read some Vonnegut. Good thing book group is right now.
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