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

Good for them

Greek professors in border towns are moonlighting at Albanian schools:

The representatives from these seven universities that met with Albanis wanted to explore whether professors from Ioannina University -- and especially in the medical field -- would be interested in teaching in Tirana a few days a week. Other than a good supplementary salary, the offer also included travel expenses, a car service from the Greek-Albanian border into Tirana, as well as room and board.

Things are still wretched over there, but I'm still a little envious of a situation where professors are in actual demand. Pin It

Mary Beard on politicizing Latin

Beard's recent post on Latin as a political straw man is a handy summary of arguments for and against the study of Classics.

(Lots of great stuff in the comments as well -- LOL at the arguments over whether Marx's thesis is boring or not.)

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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

'Speed and Quantity of Production'

From "In Praise of Fallow Fields," in the most recent Utne Reader:

"An economy that measures success primarily in terms of speed and quantity of production will eventually become toxic."

Yes. Pin It