Revamping my University Course
It was like a death, almost--it was almost like coming going to the home of a friend to find him slumped over his kitchen table. Only if you imagine that scenario can you understand the horror that seized me last December when I discovered that I had crushed my flash drive in my bag. The casing had seemed like such a durable exoskeleton. I still am unsure how exactly the flash drive was jumbled into such a perilous position and then destroyed. I cried out when I saw it; I sent out a deep wail that startled Rheinberger out from his bedroom of our shared apartment to check on me as I was hunched in grief over the smashed little corpse lying on the coffee table. It represented nearly five years of work in editing this and that. So superior to a floppy disk, I thought, so much safer than living on that unpredictable strand we call the hard drive.
There were many things on there, from my transcriptions of Greek and Latin euchological materials to digital photographs of visits with family. But of the most immediate importance there had lain my PowerPoint lectures that I use the mythology courses I taught for the University. In fact, I had discovered the destroyed flash drive just minutes before leaving to go teach my final class for the fall semester. For this reason, Dido and Aeneas didn't make it onto the final exam.
More than three months later, however, I am not grieving so bitterly over the loss. The balm was not only the passage of time, but the reflection that I had before been sorely dissatisfied with much of the lecture material I had been using. You see, when I first received the assignment to teach this course, I cobbled together all sorts of things: I made Frankensteinish piecemeals of the lectures of other professors and even former fellow graduate students. Dr. Burton reveled in complex psychological interpretations of every story, doting especially on Freud and Jung. Dr. S-- (for I don't remember the pseudonym I made for her once before) mixed in quite a bit of knowledge drawn from Hellenic archeology, which--while interesting--was abstruse to me. Dr. Ming made rambling lectures which seemed to repeat the same basic premise, spiced willy-nilly with some pedantic point. Dr. Donovan's refined feminist critiques, which were so thought provoking when she inserted them, sounded tired when I delivered them. Narrotology, structuralism, ritualism were mingled into such a mess of empty lemmata and closed ended observations that I sometimes confused myself in class.
But I clung to all these tattered remnants of everyone else's material because I did not think that otherwise I could teach a class of some substance. I don't feel that way anymore. It is true that I still have only a clumsy, layman's notion of modern modes of criticism and interpretation, but I have read, and re-read, and heavily noted my primary texts. My philology and literary history is very firm. I feel comfortable with the Greek of Homer and the Latin of Virgil. I can give you copious genologies of the hemitheoi, the half-divine heroes. I can tell you the stories with as many details as you can handle, and--this is more important--I can tell you which details are early and which are late, and what the alternative endings to the stories are. It will be out of all these sources of knowlege that I will reconstruct my course from the ashes up.
My goal will be to give the students a working knowledge of major stories and characters in the form of a survey of the mythological literature from Homer to Hyginus (800 BCE-500 CE). I think this is a reasonable goal for a course which is supposed to be introductory. Let them pick up with Dr. Burton's upper level course on themes in myth, or Dr. S--'s class on Greek religion. I will not have my honest, straightforward knowledge choked out by any more pretensions.
I am looking forward to teaching the course again this summer, even though I do not look forward to the nasty commute half-way around the Beltway.
There were many things on there, from my transcriptions of Greek and Latin euchological materials to digital photographs of visits with family. But of the most immediate importance there had lain my PowerPoint lectures that I use the mythology courses I taught for the University. In fact, I had discovered the destroyed flash drive just minutes before leaving to go teach my final class for the fall semester. For this reason, Dido and Aeneas didn't make it onto the final exam.
More than three months later, however, I am not grieving so bitterly over the loss. The balm was not only the passage of time, but the reflection that I had before been sorely dissatisfied with much of the lecture material I had been using. You see, when I first received the assignment to teach this course, I cobbled together all sorts of things: I made Frankensteinish piecemeals of the lectures of other professors and even former fellow graduate students. Dr. Burton reveled in complex psychological interpretations of every story, doting especially on Freud and Jung. Dr. S-- (for I don't remember the pseudonym I made for her once before) mixed in quite a bit of knowledge drawn from Hellenic archeology, which--while interesting--was abstruse to me. Dr. Ming made rambling lectures which seemed to repeat the same basic premise, spiced willy-nilly with some pedantic point. Dr. Donovan's refined feminist critiques, which were so thought provoking when she inserted them, sounded tired when I delivered them. Narrotology, structuralism, ritualism were mingled into such a mess of empty lemmata and closed ended observations that I sometimes confused myself in class.
But I clung to all these tattered remnants of everyone else's material because I did not think that otherwise I could teach a class of some substance. I don't feel that way anymore. It is true that I still have only a clumsy, layman's notion of modern modes of criticism and interpretation, but I have read, and re-read, and heavily noted my primary texts. My philology and literary history is very firm. I feel comfortable with the Greek of Homer and the Latin of Virgil. I can give you copious genologies of the hemitheoi, the half-divine heroes. I can tell you the stories with as many details as you can handle, and--this is more important--I can tell you which details are early and which are late, and what the alternative endings to the stories are. It will be out of all these sources of knowlege that I will reconstruct my course from the ashes up.
My goal will be to give the students a working knowledge of major stories and characters in the form of a survey of the mythological literature from Homer to Hyginus (800 BCE-500 CE). I think this is a reasonable goal for a course which is supposed to be introductory. Let them pick up with Dr. Burton's upper level course on themes in myth, or Dr. S--'s class on Greek religion. I will not have my honest, straightforward knowledge choked out by any more pretensions.
I am looking forward to teaching the course again this summer, even though I do not look forward to the nasty commute half-way around the Beltway.