Antiquitopia

Just saw this today (via Invocatio ):  it is a Latin composition class that is quite creative.  Instead of composing boring prose, students learn how to compose magical spells.  Moreover, the entire class is based upon role-playing games; so, everyone takes on the identity of an ancient person and works on their Latin through the different developments in the game each week.  And when one reaches a new "level" in the game and score points, it affects one's grade. Perhaps something fun and educational to think about for any language teacher out there; might be interesting to apply to other types of classes, too.  Maybe in a Gospels class, everyone takes on a character in Gospel literature, see how that character develops each week in new readings?  If someone is, for example, Matthew/Levi, they would, furthermore, learn more in-depthly about ancient tax systems, tax farming, etc.?  Just thinking out loud.

I just finished reading Caroline Walker Bynum's Metamorphosis and Identity .  It is a good read--I finished it in a day.  It is a smart collection of essays. Although somewhat disparate (as is typical of collections of essays), she has some especially interesting historiographical reflections when delineating the problems surrounding the endurance of the self through different forms of change from quotidian aging and social changes to Ovidian metamorphosis, given primarily through the prism of werewolves.  Yes, werewolves!  Whatever one thinks of each individual essay, it is worth taking a look to see one of the better historians of the medieval period talk about werewolves to open up important insights into the 12th and 13th centuries.  Why werewolves?  The strange, the weird, and the awe-inducing are, in fact, important historiographical and, what is more, pedagogical tools that reveal and engage us and our students: ...we write the best history...

About a month ago, some fellow religion colleagues and I were having dinner and started bantering.  During the banter, I suggested a course on religion and food.  At the time, I was half-joking, but I have been occasionally thinking about it over the past month and increasingly think it would be an interesting course.  Anthropologists have long discussed food and culture, and so there is already a lot of theoretical material out there.  And different religious traditions have food laws, customs, etc.  There are the discussions of food and sacrifice, often looking at sacrifice as a meal or the ritualization of a meal at least.  There is, in Christianity, of course, the ritualized meal of the Eucharist. So I have been trying to think of different types of course that could approach religion through food.  There could be a comparative course that discusses different religious traditions through food, meals, cuisine.  There could be a course in my o...

Today in my Literature Humanities class, we were a bit reflective, reflecting over the year and critiquing our syllabus from the year. There was much catharsis, I think, in this discussion. There were several issues raised, but the root of much frustration with the syllabus is that there are simply too many works on it (other issues are that it is too western-focused, too androcentric, too historicist--the last refers to the structure or sequencing). And so this evening, I have begun to reflect what my ideal introductory literature course would be like. What if we started from scratch? I decided that my ideal course would be one in which we would read a single work for the entire semester in great detail intertwining our close readings with the various approaches that have been taken in studying literature (formal, Marxist, feminist, Freudian/Lacanian, historicist, new historicist, etc.), skills, theoretical approaches, and methods of reading and writing that would then be transfe...

Two Pennsylvania universities (Penn State and Temple) have instituted policies that give students pathways to file grievances against professors who have presented biased classroom lessons. It turns out to be a procedure to protect "conservative" students from the "liberal" bias of their professors, which conservative activists have labeled "liberal indoctrination." So, when they grow up and learn things from their parents, churches, or local politicians, that is not "indoctrination" as well? There is a degree to which much learning is indoctrination (whether "liberal" or "conservative" or whatever), and we should avoid creating cookie cutter students who arrive at the exact same conclusions that their professors give them. But more than anything higher education is about getting students to think for themselves, and often that means breaking down previously (and dearly) held conceptions, disabusing them of what they thoug...

I have been reading through more literary criticism as of late for teaching my class next year, Literature of the Humanities, and, while in an independent bookstore in St. Louis, I found a book of posthumously published essays by Italo Calvino, who wrote one of my favorite books, Invisible Cities . This book of essays is called, Why Read the Classics?, after its opening essay. I thought such a book would be very relevant for a class that is loaded with classic authors from Homer to Virginia Woolf. In this opening essay, he speaks of both "classics" and "your own classics," noting that classics are works that will shift over time, both in which works will be included as classics and in terms that our understanding of them will shift, not just as centuries pass, but even from our youth to our old-age. Classics are those works that we may read when young, forming us in some ways, and then revisit when older, never exhausting what it has to say to us. Each rereadi...

In the Chronicle today there is an article about a Law professor who has banned laptops from his classroom. The article notes that in this day and age, doing so is a very bold move by a professor. Some students claim that they can't receive a good education without their laptops. While some students need to take notes on a computer due to some learning difficulty, most students in my experience just surf the net, play games, do some online shopping, and IM their friends (who also may be in the class). When I TA, I often now sit up front so that I don't have to see the sea of computers with everything on their screen except their note sheet. Is banning them the solution? One could argue that, with laptops or not, students will be distracted. They will just stare listlessly out the window, or, uh, do what I did when I was bored in class--doodle. But doodling is NOT as much a temptation as whatever games you have on your computer, checking your email, and IMing your friends...

In the previous post, I pasted my closing comments to the "Instituting Religion" conference from April 10, and my friend Jodi raised some issues in the relationship between funding (and academic advancement) and teaching, noting that as long as research is the primary means of advancement within academe that teaching will get the short end of the stick. She also raises several important issues of the relationship between pedagogy and theory (bringing theoretical savvy to teaching and practical teaching experience to theory), between research and teaching (bringing research into teaching and teaching issues into research), and speaking in general about the contingency of context for these issues (concerning the type of school, its funding structures, and so on). Given all of these interrelationships, I thought it would be appropriate to announce to my blog-reading public my situation next year: I will be teaching Literature of the Humanities next year at Columbia, which, acc...

Finally, here are my closing remarks that I gave during the closing round-table discussion: I originally envisioned this conference as an ongoing dialogue. And I attempted to implement this in the very organization of the panels. The panels, in some ways, can be seen as interactive, with later panels commenting on the topics of earlier panels. With this in mind, I created the closing discussion as a “respondents’ panel,” in which the respondents could take the insights from their panels and put them directly into dialogue with one another in order to identify cross-panel themes as well as identify a few gaps in the conference, providing fertile directions for further inquiry. (Unfortunately, our third respondent, Jack Hawley, could not be with us, and so I am going to fill in for him, but by no means are my comments or interests reflective of his.) Bracketing issues suggested in the call for papers but not really discussed today, one key aspect of the institutional shapi...