Medieval People Doing Things

Elizabeth Chadwick, one of my favorite medieval fiction writers, blogged this video as one of her 'Friday Favorites' last week:

This is the kind of thing that is going to be roundly mocked by those without a soft spot for the middle ages. I might have liked a few more examples of illuminations from the manuscript, but there's still much to enjoy. I love the low-key, intensely practical daily activities and the 'clutter with a purpose' in the inside rooms: i.e., I have all this crap on a shelf because I'm making all my family's clothes or creating a beautiful book, not because I'm a hoarder.

Plus, toddlers love it. Lots of animals.

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I wish I could lecture like this: Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes

If you love myth, or just wish you could use more colorful language while teaching, check out Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes. A taste:

"… for a long, LONG time, the difference between a good story and a bad story was whether a bard could memorize it well enough to not get eviscerated by a mead hall full of drunken barbarians."

Discussing Cronus:

"So the moral of the story

is that if you are not ready to be a father

consider all of your options

before skipping directly to cannibalism."

I'm still reading it, so I'll no doubt have more quotes to share.

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'Sleeping Eros' and Educational Rigor

The spouse and I have been discussing whether 'less is more' in teaching, and if so, whether we should push back against that or embrace it. I had a classics-in-translation course I taught several times, and the year I got very (excessively?) rigorous with it was the year I got the worst set of final papers. Other years, when I occasionally let class out early and gaged readings by how much I thought they could absorb at one time, rather than how much they should, I had much better results.

My philosophy kind of boils down to this: pandering and what I call 'gumball machine pedagogy' are both counterproductive. Gumball pedagogy assumes that if you put certain exercises or information into students, identical results pop out. If they don't it's the teacher's fault for not putting in the right thing. I regret to say that senior faculty are particularly apt to inflict this attitude on junior faculty. If senior faculty don't get the results they desire, there are much more *complex* forces at work …

All of this came to mind while reading the NYT review of the Met's show 'Sleeping Eros.' The review begins "A shortage of cash sometimes proves beneficial," and goes on to extol the virtues of a small, relatively simple exhibition in which drawing exclusively from its own collection forces the museum to make unusual juxtapositions (like combining sculpture from antiquity and the Renaissance). Amy Dacyczyn calls it "creative deprivation," as in deprivation that enhances creativity. We might also think of it as the simple lack of overstimulation, a rare condition indeed in the days of google and "more is better" educational philosophy.

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