Back to School

Farewell, Summer, with your idyllic schedule of being able to write all day and all night! University classes begin on Tuesday, and I'm hardly prepared for the onslaught of new students, new emails, and new distractions. This semester, I'm a Graduate Student Instructor for Great Books, which is a required class for all incoming Honors students. There are a total of about 500 students in the class, nearly all freshmen, but I'll have 19 students in my own section (or precept, if you will ;) ), which meets twice a week. The course fulfills the University's First Year Writing Requirement as well, so I'll be in for a whole lot of grading.

The syllabus is great: Homer, Aeschylus, Thucydides, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, and Genesis and Exodus. I've taught nearly all the texts in translation in the past, except for the Hebrew Bible. This will be interesting! But even more interesting are the goals for the course. There are reading and writing goals for the students, which are to be expected, and then there are the "ethical goals." As distributed to the students:

• have broader empathy and cross-cultural understanding

• be persuasive while respecting other views, in both writing and in discussion, and maintain high standards of civility

• Understand Greek lit’s relevance to contemporary cultural and political issues and problems in order to supplement their experience in life when considering moral, political, and personal problems, and so become wiser and more resilient

After my long lament in the previous post, I was shocked to see such bold claims for the power of ancient literature made openly and officially. Of course we all believe this personally, but we often don't speak of it in public, as though the declaration that the Humanities can make us more humane is too naïve or unsophisticated for "real scholars." (Or maybe it's because most scholars of the Humanities are typically insufferable.) Moreover, university classes are ever-more-geared towards the measurable and the replicable, where rubrics rule and success is easily defined. Setting an unmeasurable goal for the course is courageous indeed.

I'm still unsure about how to integrate community engagement into my research, or how to engage with a community outside of the University at all. But it's refreshing to be reminded that my job as a teacher of the ancient Mediterranean can have positive, significant, and meaningful effects in the lives of my students. These "ethical goals" may be foolishly idealistic (how much can a student grow if he/she never even opens the reading?), and I'm sure I won't be nearly as optimistic come Fall Break time. Especially while grading a stack of papers. But I'll take whatever fleeting moments of inspiration I can get.