Tag Archives: teaching

Iteration in the Classroom

So here’s my one small idea: I’d begin to teach iteration. Iteration as a subject, equivalent to math, science, history, language, art, music, etc. How do you make something better over time? How do you return to something that you’ve done and see it with fresh eyes? How do you apply new perspective to an old problem? Where do you find that new perspective? What trails do you follow and which do you ignore? How do you smash the familiar and reassemble something new from the same pieces?

Once you’re done with school, and cast out into the world, your job is likely to involve iteration. No matter what you’re doing, you’re probably going to have to do something over. And often times again and again. You rarely simply deliver something and move on. You’re asked to refactor, to build on it, to “make it better”.

Jason Fried

I’m not sure about teaching iteration as a subject in itself, but it should definitely be a part of every class. Speaking for myself, the main difficulty in teaching iteration is giving students specific, insightful feedback. In the real world, your work will be evaluated by your boss, your family, your customers, the world at large. If you don’t do a good job, you’re forced to try again and do better. In school, you’re lucky if your teacher looks at your work with anything more than a passing glance.

The Importance of Being Silly

The school asked me to write something about the Christian values reflected in our fall play, The Importance of Being Earnest. You can read it below. But first, behold this illustration of the play’s opening scene by one of the young actors.

Here’s the blurb:

Worn out by being a constant model of respectability at his country estate, young Mr. Jack Worthing occasionally pops up to London to visit his imaginary and very badly behaved brother Earnest. In London, Jack steps into the role of Earnest, entertaining himself and his ne’er-do-well friend Algernon Moncrieff. When the fun is over, Jack retires to the country, where he once more plays the part of role model.

Most of the social satire in The Importance of Being Earnest has leaked out since it was first performed in 1895, and what remains is almost pure farce. No one in the play has his head screwed on straight, and the plot is barely believable, but that is no doubt what has contributed to its ongoing popularity. It is ridiculous, yes, but life is often ridiculous. The characters are silly, but who among us has not been silly? The key is to recognize the fact. Jack Worthing tries to keep life and fun in separate boxes and consequently finds it almost impossible to laugh at himself. His constant seriousness is, as Algernon dryly remarks, a sign of “an absolutely trivial nature.” The graver Jack is, the fussier he gets over the smallest things in life.

Oscar Wilde subtitled his play “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People.” Perhaps the most important thing about The Importance of Being Earnest is its triviality. The wise man knows that not everything can be taken seriously, least of all himself, and the play reminds us of this truth.

Too much gravity flattens a man, but a little comedy will restore him to his natural shape.

An Argument Against Abridged Versions

In covering The Social Contract, we will do close reads of a few passages. Some of those passages will be easy and some will be hard. However, learning to speak philosophy requires not only the close work of interpretation but prolonged general exposure to it. Put another way, learning to read difficult books requires not only quality time but quantity time.

If there are long passages in today’s reading that you don’t get, don’t tell yourself, ‘I don’t get this book’ and give up. The truth is, you’re not going to get many parts the book, but this book is worth reading for the portions that you do get. If we didn’t cover the difficult parts, you would never get to a place that you could understand them.

Josh Gibbs

This is why, in my 7th grade Humanities class, I assign the entirety of the Odyssey.

Munro’s Law

An English* scholar of the late 19th century, David Munro, compared [the Iliad and the Odyssey] and discovered an interesting phenomenon (now known as Munro’s law), which is that there is no overlap in their contents: neither poem recounts any events that are told in the other. This discovery lends itself to several conclusions… but the most likely is that they were designed to complement one another. The Odyssey seems, in fact, to go out of its way to fill in the rest of the story of the Iliad. Not only does it give a comprehensive account of the “Returns” [nostoi] of the Greeks, but it finishes the story of the war itself, recounting events that are implicit but still untold at the end of the Iliad: the death and burial of Achilles and the taking of Troy.

Sheila Murnaghan in the introduction to Stanley Lombardo’s translation of the Odyssey

*Munro was born in Scotland, but spent his career at Oxford.

Gibbs on How to Save Classical Christian Ed

First, get tougher admissions standards. Start asking prospective parents: How do you discipline your children? Do your daughters have smartphones and social media accounts? Do your sons play video games? Do you go to church every Sunday? Do you eat dinner as a family most nights of the week? Do you want your children to change the world? Are your children special? Do a survey of your best teachers and ask them what common cultural attributes are shared by the worst students they have. Use a little common sense. Don’t let more families into your school which have a lot in common with the most vexing, worldly families already there.

Second, work on your faculty culture. If you can’t offer teachers a compelling salary, you have to offer them a compelling faculty culture. Hire substitutes, give your language department a couple bottles of good scotch, and tell them to just spend the day chatting. Culture revolves around food and drink and singing and dancing. If your faculty doesn’t do these things together regularly, you don’t actually have a faculty culture.

Third, make a concerted effort to not let board member’s kids, teacher’s kids, or rich kids get away with murder. You know which students ought to have been kicked out years ago. Kick them out. A classical Christian school is a bit of a ministry and a bit of a business, but bad administrators have a tendency of dicing up the ministry and business aspects of a school so that teachers always get the short end of the stick. Faculty salaries? It’s a ministry. Badly behaved board member’s kids? It’s a ministry. Massive sports program? It’s a business. No matter which way they turn, the business/ministry dichotomy leaves teachers with less: less money, less time, less freedom, less peace, less respect. If you don’t want a Great Tradition school to open in town and soak up all your best teachers, start asking yourself how’d you treat faculty differently if there was a Great Tradition school in town that could beat your salary offering by 5%.

Fourth, take a survey of where your families go to church, then take a survey of where your faculty go to church. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 means Sponge.TV Faith Café and 10 means St. Prude’s Catholic, if your average family is a 3 and your average teacher is a 7, mission drift is a huge problem at your school and the only way to fix it is to completely overhaul your admission’s process.

Finally, every teacher needs a hero, but every school needs a hero, as well. Every school ought to have a school in mind that it is striving to be like. At the moment, classical Christian schools too often compare themselves with the non-classical Christian schools in town and generally come away feeling quite pleased at their accomplishments. Quit comparing your school with schools that aren’t even trying to do the same thing. Find classical Christian schools (and colleges) that are better than yours and start making the painful changes necessary to become like them.

Source

Odyssey XIV

The part of Book XIV that always gives students pause is the poet’s sudden direct address: “And, you, Eumaeus, my noble swineherd,” etc. Peter Jones says that the figure of speech, apostrophe, is reserved for characters whom, for whatever reason, the poet has particular affection for. In the Iliad, it is used for Patroclus and Menelaus, while in the Odyssey, only Eumaeus is addressed that way.

Odysseus is, of course, the great hero of the Odyssey, and Telemachus and Penelope match his qualities in their own ways. But if you’re looking for a character who is truly good, Eumaeus is your man. He is courageous, hospitable, intelligent, and, most of all, loyal. I can imagine him being used allegorical as an example of a Christian: faithfully tending his Lord’s flocks until the day of return.

Odyssey XIII

I’ve decided to start sharing my notes and reading questions on the Odyssey. For context, I teach a 7th grade Ancient Humanities class, so I tried to write questions that can be answered at a middle school level and also function as springboards into more complex discussions.

(Btw, we are using Stanley Lombardo’s translation, even though it’s not my favorite. Someday I’ll take a leaf from this guy’s book and write a comparison between it, Fitzgerald, and Lattimore.)

What blessing does Odysseus give Arete right before he leaves?

Odysseus wishes that the Queen would be well “all of your days, until age / And death come to you, as they come to all” (XIII.61-62) He wishes her enjoyment of her house and family (ie, a good life). Ironically, Odysseus is the reason Poseidon turns one of the Phaeacian ships to stone (see below).

How does Poseidon punish the Phaeacians for helping Odysseus? How do they react to the punishment?

The Phaeacians take Odysseus home in one of their ships, and on their return, Poseidon turns the ship into stone in the middle of the harbor. Alcinous immediately recognizes this as the fulfillment of a prophecy* and resolves to never provide safe passage to any traveler ever again. Odysseus’s visit causes the Phaeacians to repudiate the law of hospitality. The last we see of them, they are huddled around Poseidon’s altar, begging him not to surround their city with a mountain, as the prophecy foretold.

Apparently, it’s unclear whether Poseidon actually fulfills this part of the prophecy. Lattimore translates Zeus’s response as, “But do not hide their city under a mountain,” which Lombardo has, “And then hem their city in with a mountain.” Obviously, it can’t be both. Peter Jones remarks that the first reading is based on the ancient commentator Aristophanes of Byzantium, while the second relies on the testimony of another ancient commentator, Aristarchos of Samothrace, both of whom wrote around the same time. So… we don’t know. Seventh graders love that kind of answer.

*This isn’t the first prophecy mentioned after its fulfillment. See Polyphemus’s lament in IX.505-519 (Lombardo).

Why does Athena prevent Odysseus from recognizing Ithaca?

My best guess is that she wanted to do the big reveal herself (XIII.197) and maybe mess with him a little. The two have that kind of relationship. As Athena says,

Here we are
The two shrewdest minds in the universe,
You far and away the best man on earth
In plotting strategies, and I famed among gods
For my clever schemes. (XIII.306-310)

Yep, two peas in a pod.

Jones also suggests that the whole scene is designed to maximize pathos by delaying Odysseus’s reunion with his home. We definitely see the same technique writ large throughout Books XIV-XXII.

Summarize Odysseus’s lie to Athena. Why does he make up a backstory?

See XIII.265ff. Odysseus claims to have killed a man who wanted to steal the gold he plundered from Troy. He mixes fact (he was at Troy, he knows Idomeneus, he came to Ithaca by ship and was left on the beach) and fiction (he is Cretan, he killed Idomeneus’s son, he traveled on a Phoenician ship). He lies to give himself an advantage, buying time and examining the stranger before revealing anything. He continues to hone this strategy as his encounters grow more and more dangerous, preparing himself for the final challenge of facing the suitors.

How does Athena disguise Odysseus? Be specific.

See XIII.447: “She shriveled the flesh on his gnarled limbs, / And withered his tawny hair. She wrinkled the skin / All over his body so he looked like an old man, / And she made his beautiful eyes bleary and dim. / Then she turned his clothes into tattered rags, / Dirty and smoke-grimed, and cast about him / A great deerskin cloak with the fur worn off. / And she gave him a staff and a ratty pouch / All full of holes, slung by a twisted cord.”

What reason does Athena give for not telling Telemachus that his father is still alive?

See XIII.437: “I wanted him / To make a name for himself by traveling there.” It’s interesting to consider what kind of reputation she expected him to earn. He still hasn’t done anything particularly heroic. Yet he has gained the respect of Nestor and Menelaus, if only for his politeness.

Lewis on English Majors

[English Literature as an academic discipline] directs to the study of literature a great many talented, ingenious, and diligent people whose real interests are not specifically literary at all. Forced to talk incessantly about books, what can they do but try to make books into the sort of things they can talk about? Hence literature becomes for them a religion, a philosophy, a school of ethics, a psychotherapy, a sociology—anything rather than a collection of works of art.

C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

Last fall I gave a talk on literary theory and in my research I discovered (or rather, I confirmed) that English Departments are an utter and complete sham. When I was in school, some of my professors and fellow graduate students loved stories and poetry—and at least one of my professors tried to bring that love into the classroom—but when it came to “serious” literary discussion (the kind that gets published in respectable journals), the conversation turned from the stories themselves to the religion, philosophy, sociology, history, or sex embedded within the story. I met a PhD student whose dissertation was not about literature but about the history of a particular book—the physical object, not the content. Nothing wrong with that, but doesn’t it seem like a task more suited to a budding historian than a lover of literature?

English majors pick projects like that because literature does not lend itself to the kind of scientific analysis required in the modern university. At some level, English departments are aware of this and it keeps the chair of the department up at night. Will his budget be assured come the morn? In his book on literary theory, Terry Eagleton describes the shaky identity of English departments when they first came into being in the 1920s:

The definition of an academic subject was what could be examined, and since English was no more than idle gossip about literary taste it was difficult to know how to make it unpleasant enough to qualify as a proper academic pursuit.

Eagleton goes on to say that English departments survived thanks to the rise of nationalism in the 1930s. When your nation goes toe-to-toe with another, you’re much less likely to dismiss even the least significant aspect of your culture. English people suddenly became much more loyal to their own literature than they were before and its place in the university was assured.

Still, the problem of how to make reading for fun an “unpleasant” academic subject persisted. Lewis says it was solved by literary criticism.

Everyone who sees the work of Honours students in English at a university has noticed with distress their increasing tendency to see books wholly through the spectacle of other books. On every play, poem, or novel, they produce the view of some eminent critic. An amazing knowledge of Chaucerian or Shakespearian criticism sometimes co-exists with a very inadequate knowledge of Chaucer or Shakespeare. Less and less do we meet the individual response. The all important conjunction (Reader Meets Text) never seems to have been allowed to occur of itself and develop spontaneously. Here, plainly, are young people drenched, dizzied, and bedevilled by criticism to a point at which primary literary experience is no longer possible. This state of affairs seems to me a far greater threat to our culture than any of those from which the Vigilants would protect us.

Academics love it when an eminent professor writes a new book about Shakespeare because it gives them something new to focus on and they can debate the accuracy of his judgment. It’s much easier to analyze someone’s claims about a book than to analyze the book itself. None of this nonsense about the “literary experience.” No more reading for “enjoyment” or “beauty,” whatever that is. Swaddled in criticism, the English major is free from such messy topics.

Lewis’s solution to this sorry state of affairs:

I suggest that a ten or twenty years’ abstinence both from the reading and from the writing of evaluative criticism might do us all a great deal of good.

I wholeheartedly agree.

What To Memorize

There is nothing that it is better to commit to memory than those kinds of words and phrases whose meaning we do not know, so that where we happen to meet either with a more learned man of whom we can inquire, or with a passage that shows, either by the preceding or succeeding context, or by both, the force and significance of the phrase we are ignorant of, we can easily by the help of our memory turn our attention to the matter and learn all about it.

St. Augustine, On Christian Teaching

A Different Way of Seeing

One day, on impulse, I asked the students to copy a Picasso drawing upside down. That small experiment, more than anything else I had tried, showed that something very different is going on during the act of drawing. To my surprise, and to the students’ surprise, the finished drawings were so extremely well done that I asked the class, “How come you can draw upside down when you can’t draw right-side up?” The students responded, “Upside down, we didn’t know what we were drawing.” This was the greatest puzzlement of all and left me simply baffled.

Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain