Tomorrow the business starts up again. I'm grateful for the month I get between classes, but in a lot of ways it has seemed eternal. I blame it all on the snow. Three preps (Intro, Ethics, critical reasoning) should be pretty exciting, and will manage to keep me honest. I like the challenge of the things I'm teaching, and the fact that I'm using all new textbooks all around will be pretty wild.
During a fabulous lunch on Friday, I was discussing with a friend of mine my desire to revamp the Intro class to integrate primary texts only -- and lose the "textbook" approach. The deal with primary texts is always scary. In the wrong hands, they can make philosophy seem impenetrable and/or ruin a class. In the right hands, though, they can keep a class interesting and/or make it a transformative experience for the students. My fear is the former, that my inexperience teaching might somehow screw up whatever I might bring to the texts. I fear I don't know the texts well enough to use them independently of any all-in-one anchor. When asked for advice, my friend says to choose a theme and work from there. I'm already thinking ahead to next Fall when my new-and-improved class will debut. I just can't think of a theme. It's funny, but the lack of an immediately-apparent theme for an intro to philosophy class goes directly to the unmoored nature of my own interests in philosophy. I'm not quite sure where I fit or what I want to study. Everything is interesting!
This week is about setting and getting acclimated to a routine. Absent a routine, things get weird. I sleep strange hours, I get headaches, I obsess about things that aren't as pressing as they seem at the moment (thanks a lot, Michael Pollan), I stop writing interesting blog posts, etc. The trick this time around is to integrate some of my long-term projects into the routine. Maybe once a typical day is established, I can overlay some thoughtful work in writing, thinking, and spiritually forming on the procedure.
I expect things to be slow (*gasp!*) around here for the next week or so, but I'll post from the trenches when I can.
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2 comments:
I am really interested in this idea of choosing a theme... will you blog about it once you decide on one? I'd love to hear, at that point, what kinds of things went into the final choosing and then how you arranged the syllabus accordingly! Great stuff!
I'll definitely be sharing the process! I have a ballpark of an idea, but nothing defined yet. It seems like a really long-term project...should be fun, though. And the true test of my philosophical mettle.
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