The last sprint is on. I’ve taught my last class (we’re still meeting, but it’s all peer revision from here on out), Spenser class has seen its last meeting, and only four Latin and four Old English classes remain. I can’t remember a semester coming to a crashing halt as fast as this one is [...]
For the first semester in a long time, I’m only going to be working on one paper during the home stretch, and I’ve already got that half-written. I’m going to try to force myself through a Marxist history of early-modern pre-capital and use it in my analysis (just to pacify the professor), but I’m mainly [...]
We wrapped up the discussion part of the semester yesterday with a conversation about John Milton’s treatise “On Education.” As I usually do when I teach that fun little text, I started by having the class list all of the things Milton would have Englishmen learn by the time they’re 21 years old. One class [...]
It would be kind of cool if this blog post landed on some Star Wars fan’s google search. That aside, we actually finished up Monday with his bizarre section on reincarnation. I’m still not sure whether the story of Er is allegory or doctrine or some clever combination of the two, but I do think [...]
We finished what I would call the ethical part of Republic in class yesterday, and I’m pleased with the bulk of the semester’s discussions. Even if some (or most) of the folks in my classes never pick up a copy of Plato again (I hope they do), they’ve been exposed to and had to think [...]
We had some pretty good discussions yesterday in class. Plato finally got to the dictatorial personality and the dictatorial community. The contrast between the two is sharp: in a dictatorial society, the dictator is the most fearsome person Plato describes. In a dictatorial psyche, the picture is more like Beavis than like Stalin. The insight [...]
I’ve got my routine down for teaching academic writing, but teaching philosophy is still before me. I tried to teach the philosophical distinctions between positive freedom/freedom-for and negative freedom/freedom-from yesterday, and I’m not sure I was clear at all. The context for the conversation was Plato’s comparison between democracy on one hand and true aristocracy [...]
No, I’ve not become a Republican. At least not the kind that wears elephant pins. Yesterday in class I made up for my lost Thoreau time and took on the role of Plato, arguing with some force that for the really important things in life, people didn’t trust democracy. Nobody wants to admit and deny [...]
My lovely readers might have noticed yet another toy on the sidebar. I discovered LibraryThing.com on Julie Clawson’s blog, and I’ve been fiddling with it intermittently since. Right now I’ve got the blog gizmo set to random because I don’t particularly like the “most recently added” setting. Anyway, check out the site–it’s easy to use [...]
