Where's Egbert Bakker when you need him?

Many weeks ago, before an unscheduled hiatus from blogging, I read Mary Beard's post on defending the traditional lecture. Her main point is that lectures are about "changing minds and attitudes" rather than conveying information. She expands on this point in an anecdotal kind of way appropriate to a blog entry.

Now, I'm in favor of keeping the traditional lecture because it's usually the laziest students who want you to put more stuff online, plus PhDs are screwed over enough without suddenly making it possible for one part-timer to teach thousands of students. And it's still true, even in these degenerate days, that face to face teaching creates an intellectual alchemy that can't be found elsewhere.

If a more formal defense of the traditional lecture is offered, I wonder if classicists who specialize in archaic performance culture could contribute something. After all, they constantly write and think about oral performances and the formation of culture. A 2008 essay by Anna Bonifazi on how performances of the Iliad and Odyssey engaged the audience in a process of "shared visualization" is a perfect example: ? argues that audiences and the poet were familiar with more versions of the Trojan cycle than could be covered in a single performance, and that the performer used certain Greek words beginning with au- to direct the audiences' 'gaze' to particular scenes, characters and episodes. If it could be demonstrated that a similar process takes place in a college lecture hall, it would be a perfect example of how the in-person lecture goes far beyond content delivery.

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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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College Misery: 'An Open Letter to My Spring Students'

College Misery can be over the top, but this entry is both funny and (based on my experience) accurate:

An Open Letter to My Spring Students....
Dear Flakes,
Hi. I've been getting your panicky emails ever since Christmas. Me, too; I'm nervous too!
Here are answers to the top 10 questions:

1. Yes, our MW class meets every Monday and every Wednesday, including the first Monday and Wednesday of the semester. Crazy! 

2.The books are in a building on campus called the bookstore. Take your registration slip, which shows your class number and section, and then move through space and time until you find a stack of books for your class. Buy those. Bring them. 

3. No, I didn't know what a great English teacher you had in high school. It should make our job even easier 

4. If I knew if it was going to snow next week, I'd be on channel 1 

5. It depends. If your class time is 8-9:20 am, then we start at 8 and end at 9:20. If it's another time, then follow the rules set down by the ancient Italian timekeeper Casio Timex and meet me in your classroom AT THOSE TIMES.

Read the whole thing. #1 and #5 sound like the kind of thing that should be made up, but aren't. Strangely, I don't think college students are too stupid to work out when their classes meet (usually), it's just that some of them think they look extra dedicated if they check every tiny basic detail with their profs.

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"Some people."

From mental multivitamin, a perfect example of how academia can dampen the imagination (for example, the ability to imagine a humorous class comment)…

The week we were to discuss Tess, he opened as always, with a leading question about our response to the novel. For whatever reason, the class was silent, almost guiltily so. Didn't they read it? I wondered. He asked again. The absence of pseudo-erudition became most uncomfortable. We can sit here all night, people, the professor sighed.
Well, I offered with a light laugh and a glance around the room, that Angel is rather a slow one, eh? Who knew he'd be such a pill?
I was being a smartass. The lone journalism major among this set of English prof wannabes, I turned in papers according to conventional standards -- double-spaced, one-inch margins -- and I actually read the books. Every book. Every page. Of course I realized that Angel was a creature of the conventions and limitations of his time, but wasn't it fun to call him out on his double standards from the relative comfort and social tolerance of the late 1980s?
I guess not.
The professor spent the next two hours using my remark to demonstrate how utterly "some people" missed the point of the novel, how "limited" readers are when they can only frame their responses from their own experience, and so on. And my classmates? Who hadn't even read the feckin' novel? What a bunch of sycophants they turned out to be: Oh, yes, professor. Some people. So limited. How foolish.  

That's a prof who's pretty sure of himself; most of the classics proffies I know would be filled with gratitude to realize that someone had done the reading that day ... and was willing to talk about it! Pin It

A Professor's 'Secret Plan'

This isn't strictly classics-related, but I had an email exchange yesterday that reminded me of this classic West Wing clip, where Josh makes a sarcastic comment in a press briefing that gets taken seriously:

In my upper-level classics in translation course one of their assignments is to compare any modern work (film or literature) to any ancient work we've read. I've put in place (I hope) safeguards to prevent frivolous or shallow papers, but the choice of topic is supposed to be wide open.

Nevertheless, I get emails like the one yesterday, asking if 17th century literature is okay, if 20th century literature is okay, if movies are acceptable, and on and on. Students are looking for secret limits or criteria that are. not. there.

These emails reflect the frequent, and unfortunate, assumption that professors have a secret plan to mess with their students. To throw in test questions unrelated to the material and then rub our hands together with glee. To assign paper with wide-open topics so we can trap people into choosing the one secretly forbidden topic.

It doesn't really bother me, and by no means is it a constant problem. Just another fascinating and odd little bit of student psychology. Pin It

The pressure on humanities faculty

I have a cousin who wants to become a professor in the humanities. My SO and I are horrified. We're not too miserable now, but we went through some really awful years and landed good jobs through sheer luck. We also fully expect the job market to be worse by the time cousin graduates.

My family is insistent that we not breathe a word of this. We're to be nothing but either neutral or supportive. I've gone so far as to recommend the Academic Job Search Handbook, but that's all. I've listened politely to a lot of talk from my aunt about how this career will 'fulfill' him.

A post on College Misery today reminded me why I want so urgently to warn my cousin. It's from someone who landed a tenure track job against all odds only to find out it's almost impossible to get tenure. 3/4 teaching load and 10-12 articles are required.

My biggest regret is not my “career failure” (I’ll be fine, in the end). Rather, it’s the fact that the state of higher education at this point in time leads to a glut of job seekers who should feel “lucky” to land a crappy job in a toxic department where they work under unreasonable conditions…as long as there’s dental! There’s something wrong with this system. 

SO and I are lucky enough to be at a school with very reasonable research requirements. Still, as an academic I've often found myself in situations similar to this one (an accomplishment turned nightmare because of crazy expectations). Is this the way things are going? Pin It

Achilles the vampire?

Last week's myth class perked up briefly when, in a sudden fit of inspiration (desperation?), I compared Achilles to a vampire. Prior to the poems' conclusion, he stops needing to eat and reaches almost demonic heights of rage, so I said that he was "almost an undead figure." The students seemed quite taken with this idea.

No doubt if I rewrote the poem to include some zombies and vampires (a la Jane Austen), some of them would actually read it.* Never mind that the work's humanity is supposed to be the point ...

*Emboldened by the fact that I'd already given the evals, I asked recently if anyone had actually done the reading. (This was after asking several factual questions about the text that no one would answer.) The response was, shall we say, less than heartening.

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Inventive spellings of classical names

Creative spellings I've witnessed or heard about this semester:

Opedidus Rex, the famous play by Sophocles

Oddyssey (the student was perhaps commenting on Odysseus' questioning of heroic ideals?)

Oddisseous

The 'profit' Tiresias

For the record, I don't grade on spelling and I have some respect for student's efforts to deal with words and names that are clearly not part of their everyday vocabulary. On the other hand, phonetic spellings like the third above make me wonder how often this particular student has seen the name in print, in his or her textbook. Pin It

Greek myth and the Hunger Games?

I want to/ consider it strategic to do some 'modern myth' before the semester ends in my Greek Myth class. I'd really like to break away from the old "Star Wars! Look, Luke is on a Hero's Journey!" type of thing.

And so, a question for my readers: have you tried to incorporate recent fantasy works or adaptations of Greek myth into your classes? E.g. Harry Potter, the Hunger Games series? How did it go? Pin It

What to do with a book

Experiential learning at its finest:

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Undergrad-friendly Greek drama films?

The Oedipus Rex movie my colleagues
 and I refer to as the "Burger King version".

Of all the great and glorious genres of Greek literature out there, my students seem to have the most trouble connecting with Greek drama. I'm not unsympathetic to their plight: Greek tragedy can seem austere and almost obsessively focused to a reader accustomed to reality TV and Twitter.

So I turn to the internet for a movie version of one of the dramas we are reading this semester. Let's not say a good movie version, so much as a version that won't instantly turn them off.

And I came up with ... nothing. Amazon Instant Video, Youtube, the school library, (Netflix is blocked on classroom computers)... all gave me zip.

The Bacchae? I could buy an 8-minute DVD of the film's conclusion. No thanks. Or I could show Dionysus in '69, an experimental (and 40+ years old) version of the Bacchae that looks as though it were filmed in black-and-white home video. Show that to the class that has trouble remembering that the Theogony is not called the Hymn to Zeus? Not so much.

The delightful Iphigenia is available (for a mere ninety-nine dollars).

So my plea to all of you Greek drama enthusiasts out there: please consider filming some of your stagings of these wonderful plays. Even if you just post them on Youtube, I promise you they will be gratefully received by classics-in-translation instructors everywhere. Pin It

I don't want to hear about your sniffles

I have received numerous emails recently explaining that a student missed class because he/she just didn't feel quite up to it. I'm with Arya Stark's fencing tutor on this one:

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Kermit the Frog as a college instructor

Watch as Cookie Monster tries to 'flirt his way to an A' at 2:09...

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Is Mythology a made-up subject?

via Wikimedia Commons

So, another semester of Mythology. It's an important class for my department, a great way to get students interested in the ancient world, etc. But ... what is it supposed to be about?

I just wonder every time I teach it, what is it other than a low-level survey of ancient literature? I throw in some mythological theory just to try to be somewhat true to the subject matter. But I feel like that's more relevant to the later works that use Greek mythology than it is to the original works themselves. Especially if that's all you're going to read.

Take Oedipus Rex, for example (Please :)). It's clearly compelling to interpret it from a psychological standpoint. So we read it and talk about the characters' psychology. I feel like I should then go and try to interpret it using one of the other theories of myth we've studied. The ideological approach, perhaps.

But most undergrads (especially those with a very firm idea of what a lower-level class should be like) won't go there with you, frankly. The idea that you explain a work one way and then turn around and explain it the other way is something they're not willing to entertain.

So you end up reading OR and then talking about psychology. Exactly like you would do in a lit. survey course.

Myth might be a more meaningful course if you could span time periods a bit more. Read Greek tragedy and then some of the neoclassical works by Racine, the Odyssey and then a bit of Joyce, maybe. But again, students are overwhelmingly likely (in my opinion) to see that as exceeding one's brief. And maybe they're right. Pin It

Reining in undergraduate paper topics

via Wikimedia Commons

Sorry I haven't been around lately, I've been working on a conference abstract and trying not to have it come straight from my dissertation. A surprisingly hard task.

Anyway, one of my colleagues received a paper this semester entitled something like "A Guide to .... [something an undergraduate can't possibly be an expert in.]" It made me wonder, what the heck is it with undergraduate paper topics?

At one of the schools where I used to work, every senior had to do an undergraduate thesis, a serious, rigorous research project, etc., etc. And the topics were just awful. Nearly every one had to do with material culture or nebulous cultural topics. (We did not have anything like the kind of library you need to research such subjects.) Nearly every one had problems with its thesis statement. I later found out that the students spent nearly half the semester developing a thesis statement. Good heavens, by that time you've invested so much time in the subject you're going to squeeze a thesis out of it however you can.

It was around this time I developed a theory about undergraduate research papers, which is that almost all their problems can be solved by 1) encouraging them to think small and 2) making sure their thesis statement asks a single question. By following these guidelines I have been able to get entire classes to hand in thesis statements that didn't have to be rewritten.

I continue to wonder why so many undergraduate research projects are hampered by vast topics and vague, 7-part thesis statements. As someone still fairly new to the profession, I'm willing to believe there's a good reason. I'd just like to know what it is before I sit down to read another senior thesis that claims to be the definitive work on ancient women or Greek science. Pin It

Latin teacher, pigeon benefactor: Carl Wingate

This obituary of a former Jesuit turned married (and apparently quite eccentric) Latin teacher caught my eye. Carl Wingate graduated from Notre Dame with a master's in biology, but spent 30+ years teaching Latin at a high school in Washington state. He translated 'Star Wars' into Latin and wore clothing he painted with religious and movie themed designs.

The first reason his extraordinary life interests me: it's a good example of how Classicists with varied backgrounds can make better teachers and colleagues. Have you been around a group of classicists lately? We can be a bit boring, not to mention neurotic. I understand why -- we've spent over a decade of our lives training for a job that, in many cases, can be taken away at any moment. We are afraid to think about anything besides classics, and sometimes we almost don't remember how to, because it's been so long. So maybe Carl can inspire us to chill a little.

The second reason he interests me is that I enjoy eccentric people and hope they are not a disappearing breed. Vexillum monstruosum tuum volet! (Let your freak flag fly!) Pin It

What's the matter with Athenaze?

My SO is teaching first year Greek from a text called Athenaze. We have both taught from it before with decent results. This semester it's a nightmare. Students don't learn vocabulary, are clueless about endings, and never do the readings.

I would have said before this semester that Athenaze is a 'good but not great' book. The problem is that there is a fairly small number of Classical Greek textbooks out there (discounting the self-study and reprint-from-the-nineteenth-century options). Hansen and Quinn's chapters are too long, and Mastronarde doesn't have long enough reading passages. 

Athenaze's major problem, I believe, is one that affects all reading-based Latin and Greek textbooks: it has too much faith in its own method. If you believe that students can learn the grammar and vocabulary through reading, you shouldn't be afraid to make the grammar explanations hard to find. Athenaze seems to take the approach that if you make it hard enough to locate an actual explanation of the grammar, the students will say to themselves, "gosh, I guess I should try to figure it out from this nice little story here." 

I kid, of course. I realize the grammar is probably not deliberately hard to find. But the readings getting completely out of control in terms of length does seem to be purposeful. Okay, it is likely that a reading-based approach helps students read Greek more naturally and therefore more quickly. But students are also conditioned (by evaluations, by RateMyProfessors and similar sites) to be constantly on the lookout for 'unfairness.' Readings that are suddenly twice as long as they were a few weeks ago certainly fall under that category.

So, what to do? Someone should revise Chase and Philips (a barebones 1960s textbook that makes up in clarity for what it lacks in reading practice). Or make a separate grammar handbook for Athenaze.

Or students could learn to memorize better. Right.

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Stephen Mitchell's Iliad and the college classroom

I enjoyed Maclean.ca's interview with Stephen Mitchell, author of a new and apparently very striking translation of the Iliad. The line he translates using "son of a bitch" has come up frequently in coverage of the volume's release. His explanation in this interview resonated with me:

via Wikimedia Commons

Q: In your translation Achilles responds, “Don’t talk to me of agreements, you son of a bitch,” whereas Fagles’s Achilles says, “Hector, stop! You unforgiveable, you . . . don’t talk to me of pacts.”

A: Here’s my attitude: the English has to be alive. It has to be something that someone could believably say, so it has to be part of a living language. And it has to have the kind of emotional power behind it that I feel when reading the Greek. Here is Achilles expressing his heartbreak and contempt and intense hatred at the enemy who has killed his beloved friend—if it doesn’t have the emotional power behind it, it means nothing. There are only a few expressions in English these days that convey that kind of intense contempt—“son of a bitch” is about as good as it gets.

This is something I'm always very aware of in the classroom. Conveying the emotional power and the liveliness of the classics has an urgency for me that it does not for my older and more secure colleagues. Oftentimes trying to convey this is a great pleasure. Other times, I feel that my lack of traditional professorial gravitas (gender, stuffiness, elbow patches) mean that I have to keep the excitement high all the time, and it's exhausting. A professor who doesn't look like the stereotypical thinker of deep thoughts must therefore be 'cool' and a buddy, right?

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The humanities enrich your imagination. Does that matter?

This morning I was letting my mind wander while I prepared my Latin 1 lesson. (Since this is a class I could teach, and probably taught better, in my second year of grad school, I need to be distracted in order to take 'preparing' at all seriously). A line from Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown ran through my head:

"She had courage enough but little imagination, or she would not have forgotten joy, whatever the weight on her, and heavy enough it truly was." (p. 136)

For a long time I've wanted to post about how the humanities enriches a person's imagination, but I haven't been able to articulate why I think anyone should care. The McKinley quote points towards a reason we should care. Studying literature and art so that we don't 'forget joy' is not money-driven or utilitarian, but it is also not elitist.

An imagination capable of lifting us up from our frequently crappy circumstances is hard to attain without the experience of immersing ourselves in the Other: another culture, or another person's artistic expression. This is the essence of good humanities education.


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I need to be tougher

So, I have been letting my Latin students do corrections on quizzes (for half their missing points) if their original grade is below a B. Self-correction can be a good learning experience, and I don't want this class to continue on to intermediate Latin in a state of cluelessness.

Despite the great generosity of this policy, today I started to see grade creep. People were handing in quizzes on which they originally received Bs, with their self-corrections attached.

Background: I tend to be afraid of ticking students off. As a woman I am keenly aware of the sexism of student evaluations. I also had my first job at a small liberal arts college where I went in unaware of the amount of hand-holding I was expected to do. I also had two aggressive older colleagues constantly breathing down my neck (to the point of quizzing students at department gatherings oh-so-subtly about the quality of my classes).

But. Self-corrections are supposed to be about learning, not grade-grubbing. So my new policy is that they may be done by anyone gets below a 60. And of course, test and exam grades are (and have always been) immutable.

The dance between "student-friendly" and ridiculous pushover is indeed a subtle one. Pin It