I love talking with freshmen about what the heck they’re in college for. That was the subject today, and as usual, Plato provided us a clear, theory-heavy model against which students could push. Without much effort at all I got both classes thinking about atoms and electrons and the fact that, even though none of [...]
I stayed away from my standard manner of teaching Thoreau’s anti-government essay, and my delivery suffered. In the past I’ve spent the whole period “playing Thoreau,” taking what I take to be his position and answering students’ questions in-character. This semester, because we’ve spent so much time with Plato, I decided instead to focus the [...]
Micah and Mom at the pony ride at the Statham fall festival (yes, it’s been a while since I uploaded pictures)?
HowManyOfMe.com There are: 2 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name? I’ve been Googling about, and I think the other one lives in Washington state.
No new Plato material until next Monday, so I get to ramble a bit. (I don’t think anyone would stop me were I to ramble anyway, but I need to give myself an excuse on occasion.) I’m genuinely pleased with what I’ve seen on this third paper. Last year I had my classes do some [...]
Just my luck–the day comes to teach Plato’s allegory of the cave, and my voice is failing because of a cold. Ah, well. I think that most famous bit of Plato will serve nicely to introduce paper 4, the most philosophical of the papers and thus the hardest. The assignment is to say what freedom [...]
Today I was far more articulate in 10:00 than in 9:00. I’m trying to use our class’s online discussion board to alleviate my ineptitude early, but I’m going to have to do some serious recovering in class Wednesday. The discussion was supposed to be about Plato’s critique of the sophists as moral empiricists, folks who [...]
My discussions over sex and child-rearing in Plato were less than satisfactory; I could not keep together the disparate elements and form them into coherent discussions. Plato’s jumps from new ways of marriage to child-rearing practices to the use of sex to motivate soldiers to the culture of hero-worship to the treatment of Greek captives [...]
The weather report this morning called for highs in the seventies and partly-cloudy skies, so I decided to take my classes outside. 10:00 really is just a quiet group of people; even outside of the tunnel that is Park 123, they didn’t talk much. I can deal with that; it just means that I’m going [...]
Amos 5:6-15: 6Seek the Lord and live, or he will break out against the house of Joseph like fire, and it will devour Bethel, with no one to quench it. 7Ah, you that turn justice to wormwood, and bring righteousness to the ground! 8The one who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness [...]
The last couple days’ discussion haven’t left a consistent impression upon my memory. In the afternoon I remember them going well, yet by evening, I can’t articulate whether or not I taught anything, much less what I might have taught. Monday we dug into the question of community size and common good in 9:00. Plato [...]
