Making the old new ... again

In response to my earlier post on Will Okun's approach to the classics, regular reader and commenter SA makes the following observation: One might ask whether we read classic literature in order to affirm specific truths of some kind, or to discover something? If the former, it would make a great deal more sense to offer students some texts which contain the same truths as older texts but do so in language that is intelligible to them. I agree with SA's point that if the task is mere affirmation (i.e., we're trying to teach life lessons here), then the old text isn't necessarily necessary. I wonder though, in response to this point, if discovery and affirmation aren't two sides of the same coin, particularly when teaching older texts.

She continues with a nice turn of phrase: Perhaps, for those teachers finding sleeping students a problem, encouraging students to approach these supposedly "irrelevant" texts more like a sleuth than a slave would keep some students awake in class.

I like the "sleuth" idea a good deal, and find that when we're hunting and happen upon something it's pretty good. I'm trying this out in the first part of my introductory class by re-configuring the way we look at Descartes and Hume. Previously I taught Descartes and Hume in the context of epistemology only, but this semester I'm using a "span" approach to these thinkers, with the aim of talking about the connections between worldview, knowledge, God, and structure.

For example, I'm beginning with Part II of Descartes' Discourse on Method (1637) to try and divine the approach he'll take to the investigations in the Meditations (1641-42). The idea here is that we are able to understand - from the Discourse - more directly the kinds of values that Descartes thinks are important when it comes to the discovery of knowledge. Then we will examine the Meditations (1-3, 6) to see how well his stated values are honored. We'll look at portions of Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) - especially sections 2-7 - and see which values Hume emphasizes with respect to knowledge, and see how they emerge in Parts II and V of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (published posthumously in 1779), which is Hume's thoroughgoing attack on monotheism and Natural Theology.

The aim here is for students to see the texts in three ways: first, in terms of philosophical content - these texts form classic answers to the questions "What can we know?" and "What can we know about the existence of God?" Second, they should see and evaluate these texts in terms of their consistency by considering structural questions - are the stated approaches and positions of the earlier works honored and consistently expressed in the later work? Third, they must consider the models and structures offered by Descartes and Hume in terms of their own body of knowledge - what do they value when it comes to epistemological matters? This approach to the text should model the discovery - affirmation continuum that SA discusses above.

This disrupts the order of the textbook I'm using, but that doesn't bother me too much. It seems like at the beginning of every semester I'm thinking of new ways to approach the problem of teaching equivalent classics in my discipline. This is a funny thing, because my teaching (and probably life) mentor has been teaching literature for 35 years, and he starts over every time. I wonder if this problem changes when one is a minister/pastor. Probably not, but I'd be interested to find out.

Making the old new (?)

This morning I found a well-timed little reflection in the NYT. Will Okun (guest-blogging for Nicholas Kristof in the Times) gives an "on the ground" perspective of the usefulness of teaching classics in the urban high school classroom. I'd recommend reading the post, but I'll comment on a couple of points he makes. Here's his opening salvo:

Of course, it is my responsibility as a teacher to engage the students in these classics so they can understand, analyze and appreciate the writings of our greatest thinkers. But I cannot. I have tried strategy after strategy, sought advice upon advice, and still, I am unable to spark sustainable interest in the vast majority of my students. Few students do the readings and even fewer seriously consider the ideas or themes presented in these writings. The class discussions are disgracefully unanimated and the student essays are dull, tedious and impersonal. For most students in my class, the months dedicated to the canons of Western literature are a dreadful waste of time. And yes, I know, this failure is mostly my fault.

Okun continues by explaining that his students are moved by authors that speak more directly to their situation, which by all accounts is determined by ethnicity and economic standing - instead of, say, Hardy (sorry AV) they are motivated by Wright or Angelou. He seems to salvage the class discussions and sleeping students with authors generally marginalized by the canon (although he doesn't say how he makes this transformation ... a miracle!). He all but leaves the classics to the "miracle workers" and runs by a mantra of "if it doesn't motivate student discussion, then why are we teaching it?"

Okun concludes:

The books I hope will foster the students’ love of reading are well written, intelligent, thought-provoking and clearly relevant. If these books produce more response, thought, engagement, learning and other academic results from the students, shouldn’t these writings form the backbone of my literature class? Considering my abilities as a teacher and the personal and academic interests of my students, I believe I am better serving the present and future needs of my students by offering more accessible readings that will hopefully ignite a lifelong passion for reading. After all, isn’t it better to have read and learned, than never to have read at all?

I can sympathize with Okun here, because - believe it or not - making texts relevant to students is something that rings true with every philosophy teacher out there, unless they don't care.

I mean, how do you make epistemology interesting and accessible to the freshman intro student without sticking Descartes in the stove, or giving some discussion about Hume's turban, penchant for backgammon, Kant's precise 3:00 walk, etc. etc.? This may sound like a stupid lesson, but it's one I learned early on last semester - these little trifles are good for a chuckle, but they don't make philosophy any more accessible, and they don't make it any more substantively interesting, either (although we may all pause to wonder in amazement that these trifles remain really important to me).

Also, a lot of what's out there and "relevant" (at least by Okun's lights) in my discipline is potentially too difficult to hand to the introductory student without the requisite background. Part of what makes Franz Fanon or Simone deBeauvoir interesting is the context they're reacting against - to appropriate philosophy for your group or your gender is to say hey, Descartes was wrong and here's where he falls short. I don't get this sense of context from Okun, and missing context is a big problem when it comes to teaching out of books. I guess what I'm puzzled by is Okun's insistence that all one can do is read the classics and teach only old lessons from them. Isn't the fundamental challenge of teaching in the liberal arts and humanities (especially) taking the classics and seeing lessons that fit our world?

There's really no reason to bulldoze your students with the idea that the "seminal texts" are that for a reason and are not to be challenged, and must be taught no matter what. In other words, the CANON (at least in philosophy) might be a dang myth, perpetuated by people who are intimidated by - or can't teach - the "classics." That's a bold statement, but I think we'd do better to think and teach in terms of a continuum, rather than a canon, or an atomistic approach dictated solely by social factors. That's my training though - the teachers who I hope to emulate have approached books - philosophical, historical, literary, or otherwise - in this way.

Anyway, it was a provocative little article.

Back, Looking

I'm relieved to announce that all that is left is grading. I shouldn't say "all," I guess, because that is pretty much everything. In the last week I finished up an internship, finished up an article on lies and special effects (that I thought wasn't due until next week, but there's nothing like working under pressure, right?), and said goodbye to the 106 students who made it through to the end of the semester.

As a celebration, we saw I Am Legend this afternoon. Some individual decided it would be a good idea to bring his young children to see this film. There is a series of gut-wrenching scenes - even for adults - that made one of the kiddos cry. That poor kid continued whimpering for a little bit, and that little sound of despair set me crying. Fortunately, the family left shortly after that ... and a good thing too. The movie was a little more than intense. Exhibit A: I spent about 75 minutes with my hand over my mouth in an attempt to muffle a scream that I was certain would come out of my mouth at any second. Exhibit B: the woman two seats over who insisted on narrating the film for us at regular speaking volume: "Oh, he must need that specimen for scientific purposes."

Those who know me and tolerate my company know I'm a regular reader of Ken Jennings' blog. After last week's announcement that Alex Trebek suffered a minor heart attack, he wrote this post. Best wishes for a swift recovery, Trebek. Come back soon to continue putting the screws to folks in the studio audience asking you poorly-conceived questions!

There's a lot more in my mind than I can muster the typing strength for, but I hope that the next week or so will return this pasttime to a semi-regular status. I'm looking forward to a spring semester threatened, not by the grading required by 121 students, but by Husserl and Heidegger (and maybe even Levinas and Derrida ... but who knows), preparation for a Master's Thesis, and another go-round with Intro to Philosophy and Logic. At least in the interim, I'm looking forward to a break.

Great (?) Moments in Teaching

One thing I love about teaching philosophy is the occasional break it takes into narrative. In general, this can be dangerous and it is something I've tried to avoid. In my first semester of teaching, I received a comment on an evaluation that said "teacher tends to babble." After that evaluation, I consciously tried to remove myself and my stories (perhaps what I thought were useful illustrations) from my teaching. Lately - and motivated mainly by exhaustion - these stories have managed to creep back in. I'm not sure of their effectiveness in delivering content, but too bad! It's too late now!

Today I was discussing A.J. Ayer's "Freedom and Necessity." Ayer says that we are responsible for our actions (and have chosen freely) just in case (a) there were options from which we could choose (this elusive notion that "I could have chosen otherwise"), (b) we were not acting under pressure from some neruosis, and (c) we were not being compelled to act by any certain agent. While not all of us act compulsively - Ayer cites the kleptomaniac, who has no choice but to steal - we might be able to recognize points at which our agency (point (c) above) has been made forefit for some reason, and in such cases (c) we may not be held responsible for our actions. In order to illustrate what Ayer is after here, I told a story about my brother and sister.

When Patric(k) was a young feller, he thought once it would be a good idea to take a puff of our neighbor's smoldering cigarette. As he proceeded to take a drag, our sister Kerry walked in the room and caught him smoking the cigarette. For some unknown reason, Kerry determined she suddenly had some leverage. For the next many years anytime Kerry wanted something, she would ask Patrick to take care of it for her, "or else" ... generally under the threat of telling mom and dad that Patrick smoked that cigarette at Jo's. Many is in bold for a reason - I don't think it came to light until Patrick's early adulthood that Kerry had a cigarette over his head for fifteen or so years. In any case, this is an effective demonstration of constraint because Patrick's actions were - at least on Ayer's account - never free, as long as they were motivated by Kerry and the threat of telling. My students got a chuckle out of this story, and so they will be writing a quiz on Friday about Kerry, Patrick, and constrained actions.

Stories are also highly effective when I teach Kant's second articulation of the Categorical Imperative ("act as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end in itself, never only as means"). I always take a survey of how many students have waited tables or worked in retail - these are prime areas where an individual, a rational being with plans, projects, and goals have been used as mere means to someone else's end. In one of my ethics classes on Tuesday, this took a hilarious and unbelievably raucous turn into "what's the worst job you've ever had?" and/or "what's the worst interaction you've had with someone at work?" Some of my students who wait tables for a living educated their peers about their hourly wage ($3.64 an hour) and the consequences of not being tipped and receiving voided salary checks. Another student discussed the day in her job at the airport when a woman whose flight from Aspen was delayed threw her bags over the counter at my student's head.

Besides an extended version of the "what's worse" game ("Being Electrocuted"), Tuesday's class had an interesting unintended consequence of demonstrating why individuals should be respected - why servers should be given tips, why gate agents should be treated kindly, why you should be patient with retail employees, etc. In fact, one of my students said they would never stiff a server again, because now they have a face with the plight. Even if they didn't learn anything about Kant, at least they learned some common decency for folks in the service industry.

I refrained, I should say, from giving the "You treat your professor as mere means when ... " lecture, although I was sorely tempted. Alas, I refrained. We'll see if I can corral the conversation tomorrow.

Week Seven

I am counting weeks.

This weekend I attended a departmental gathering (perhaps one of the most enjoyable of these sorts of things, ever) with my former professors and now colleagues. In particular, it was funny to hear Tom Duggan (the Grand Ole Opry of R's philosophy department) relate a story from one of his first outings as a Jesuit Scholastic, which involved scaring the living crap out of a study hall full of freshman boys. And one of the freshman boys in this story is the father of one of my former classmates and acquaintances. This acquaintance of mine won the venerable "Mr. Regis" competition by stuffing 78 grapes in his mouth, which I - in my co-hosting Vanna White get up (an old prom dress) - had to catch as they came out of his mouth in a hail of spit and grape juice. Memories. Pretty entertaining, if I do say so myself.

Speaking of memories, AV and I are s-l-o-w-l-y making our way through The War. We just finished the second episode last night, and one thing I found myself enjoying immensely was the color photographs and color film, particularly of Tunisia. It's a habit of students of history to imagine things in black and white (or in bland half-color, thank you Steven Spielberg*), thanks to newsreel images. It's a surprise and a kind of visual shock to see events of WWII recorded in color. We are still with last week's observations about all the foley work (Crash! Bang! Boom! Explode three times for effect!). But, the stories are still good and riveting, and I even teared up a little bit when I saw Rosie burning holes in airplane parts. Women's lib, man!

*The notable exception is Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1998), which is in full color and features a pre-JC Jim Caveziel in a heartbreaking role. It's Malick, so it's poetry and amazing, but I'm not sure if it aspires to be the historical document that Saving Private Ryan (also 1998) does.

In other news, I had "the talk" with one of my classes about the persistent text messaging. One of our class meetings last week was an absolute zoo - people were talking, texting (you know, as if I can't see what you're doing), sleeping, the whole works. It's exhausting to try and teach in those conditions, because it's so damned distracting. I told my students as much this afternoon, and as I was giving the talk I'm pretty sure that one of the students was sending a text message. AV and I had an enjoyable conversation with another teacher this weekend, and she suggested a kind of in-school scrambler for cell phone signals. It's like the TV-B-Gone but for beleaguered teachers. A battle I'll never win, I guess.

I'm planning to spend at least part of the evening watching the ROCKIES hopefully pull out one of the most exciting playoff chases in recent memory. I need something to distract me from the a-miserable Mets' catastrophic collapse yesterday. This picture, which was on the front of this morning's NY Times, really is worth a thousand words:

PHOTO: JOHN DUNN - NEW YORK TIMES

More Misc. Mental Content

Unnerving: I've suddenly entered a phase of my life where I'm forgetting things and losing things. Neither of these two events are new when applied to wallet and keys, but books and student papers are a whole other animal. There's no "What to do when you start forgetting things" section in the Adjunct Manual.

Update: The chuckling students chuckle no longer. I do have some incessant text messagers, though. My patience with that is nearing its limit.

Result of Excogitation: Last week I was enjoying Hume. Now, after a record three weeks in a row of dealing with his high-Turbanness, I am exhausted of his meager vision of the world. Hume's favored methods of recovery from a long day of philosophizing include a pint and backgammon with friends. I might take his advice on the pint, but never on backgammon. (Right, AV?)

The Week in Review

My Moleskine, my mind:













Five down, ten to go.

Misc. Mental Content

Unnerving: a pair of students who sit in the back of the class and snicker the entire time. What? Do I have something on my pants? I'm frantically checking my zipper in order to avoid an episode similar to one last semester when I went three quarters of a class with my fly open. Talk about neurosis.

Result of Excogitation: teaching Hume is fun and educational. Probably just for me, but I have such a hard time with a guy in a turban telling me that rational theism isn't epistemologically warranted.

Fifteen to Go

This week it began in earnest. I'm teaching six classes between three institutions, and so far can't quite keep my head straight. I'm plagued with questions like,"How am I going to remember all their names?" and "What did I tell them I would do for the next class?" and "Where am I? What day is it?" I'm expecting things to settle into a rhythm, which will be good. There seem to be a lot of lists around the internets about what everyone is reading. Here's what I'm teaching:

For Intro to Philosophy (3 courses): Ruth Sample, et als, Philosophy: the Big Questions (Blackwell, 2003). This book is a collection of primary sources which I have enjoyed using so far. It's well organized, and covers a lot of ground so I'm looking forward to using it again next semester.

For Language, Logic & Persuasion (1 course): Patrick Hurley's A Concise Introduction to Logic, which isn't all that concise. But it's a good text with a lot of resources for students and instructors. I don't teach a full-on logic course - this is more of a critical thinking/critical reasoning class, so NO PROOFS.

For Ethics (2 courses): I'm back to the trusty old standbys of James Rachels' Elements of Moral Philosophy and Lawrence Hinman's Contemporary Moral Issues: Diversity and Consensus. My students are also reading primary source materials (excerpts only) in metaethics and normative theory.

Fortunately, my Ethics and LLP courses are not new preps - I have the notes already, but the new intro course is proving to be time consuming, although very interesting. It's worthwhile to teach the primary sources (since the students can get it "from the horse's mouth," as it were), and it's a good exercise for me because I have to explain Descartes' ontological argument. There's a whole post somewhere - which I've tentatively titled "Sympathy for the Devil" - about my finally "getting" Descartes. He deserves more credit than I have ever given him, but it's still too bad he was just sitting by the oven and not in the oven.

The downside of this carnage is that I had to drop the course I was taking on movies and history, but I was able to (sort of) replace it with a one-credit internship at the Starz Film Center. I'm doing research (which means I get to watch some films) and writing program notes. It may be that I get to introduce a film or two down the line, but for now I'm content to see all of what the programming end of a film studies degree is like.

This weekend I'm planning to spend cozied up with David Hume, which may prove to make my outlook on life less-than-stellar. There's a reason he played a lot of backgammon and drank his fair share of pints - it's the Enquiry. When there are no metaphysical certainties, the best thing you can do is have a Guinness (or the 18th century Scottish equivalent).

So ... probably no coffee.

I'm a mere seventeen minutes from teaching an intro to philosophy class at my alma mater. I didn't think I would be nervous, but darn it if I don't have the most raucous butterflies at this very moment. About an hour ago I was casually thinking I would need coffee. Right now, I might throw up.

More to come.

Updates and General Disgust

Update: Regular readers of this blog remember a couple of weeks ago when my computer failed while on vacation. The saga concluded this week, and happily. The lesson? Buy the extended warranty.

When we arrived back to Denver on Thursday, we took old Holmes (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. - all my electronics are philosophers) to the Apple store to drop off and see what happens. The person AV talked with over the phone was enthusiastic about the possibility of Holmes being replaced as a brand new MacBook. I was excited about this. The fellow at the Apple store was more cautious in his promises, and so Holmes went to pasture in Cupertino. On Tuesday this week, the doorbell rang and a computer showed up. I opened it to find the shell that once housed Holmes, but with brand new hard-drive, logic board, battery AND keyboard! A new computer! Maurice is up and working fine (yes, Maurice Merleau-Ponty). This is all very fortuitous, especially since this week I'm teaching Descartes and we're coming to the point where he's going to (try to) put his mind back in his body.

Update: This first week of teaching was pretty gruelling. I'm especially looking forward to next week, once all 141 of my students are in my face. The tough thing about this week is that I'm only kind of half in my work life - next week I should be able to figure out the rhythm of things.

General Disgust: The producers and geniuses at Top Chef have really done it this time. Last night, they booted off Tre, the most capable - seeming cook of them all. This is totally bunk, especially since Howie remains. The talent pool seems a little less than in previous seasons, and I suppose I'd better be steeling myself for the win by Hung, the over-confident, dangerous-with-his-knife Vegas chef (although, he did break down those chickens quickly, cleanly, and impressively last night ... he's still a jerk, though). Frank Bruni has already dismantled this challenge and all its pitfalls in his blog over at the New York Times. I agree categorically with everything he's said.

I received a funny e-mail from a former student this week, and of course it has to do with Jughead Petrelli. In MARCH last year, my student totally called the way last season of Heroes ended. He wrote me an e-mail this week to tell me that he totally called it. He wished me a nice semester. I can't WAIT for crappy television to begin again. I'm so tired of being amazed by Les Stroud and laughing at Mike Rowe. Dang.

Imagine my disappointment.

"There is no need to allege that Descartes sat in or on a stove. A poele is simply a room heated by an earthenware stove. Cf. E. Gilson, Discours de la methode: texte et commentaire, 4th edition (Paris: Vrin, 1967), p. 157." (translator's note) Donald A. Cress, n3 in the Hackett edition of Descartes' Discourse on Method.

Kent = Vindicated

Here she comes ...

She's going to be a doozy.

Been There, Done That

Papers Are Due: Scot McKnight has a nice little post about an interaction with a student the day before a term paper is due. The student's response (“A couple pots of coffee and maybe a Coke or two and I’ll be fine. I’ve got all night") brings up VERY accurate memories of my college days, and in particular the days I was writing my senior honors thesis - I was subsisting on balance bars and Blue Ox energy drink, writing well from 11pm to 2am. Doesn't that sound disgusting? Pretty gross to me. In fact, I'm certain whatever nutritional value I was getting by way of the balance bar was immediately canceled out by the "taurine" in the drink. Ewww.

For the record, the last true all-nighter I pulled was for Dr. Bill Klein's summer intensive course on the Gospels and Acts. I also wrote a very good paper writing in one (very desperate, as I recall - I was negotiating with myself throughout) nine-hour shot in May of 2005. In both cases, such intensive writing was necessitated by other commitments. In the summer of 2003, I was roped into the summer conference program at Regis and was working far many more hours than I was paid for. In May of 2005, I had a very jammed finals week, and so wrote the roots of what would later become my major writing project at the Seminary in nine hours (Kant, Berkeley and Phenomenalism). There is something satisfying about being able to write something well in such a small space. This does not happen often (I can say that my paper on The Kingdom of God for Klein was okay, but my paper on Berkeley and Kant was a labor of love - does that say something about me? Probably just that I was more successful as a PR major than I was as a Biblical Studies student), but when it does, it's the height of intellectual satisfaction.

Speaking of intellectual satisfaction, I taught my last lectures for Spring semester yesterday. As a kind of wrap-up exercise in my Intro course, I asked the students to revisit the worldview diagnosis they did on the first day of class. When I asked them to respond to some of the same questions, there was a lot of chuckling - particularly of the "I had no idea that things would get so complicated" variety. I talked with a couple of my students after class, and one student said that she was initially intimidated by philosophy, but in the end she had no idea she could "be so philosophical." This comment struck me so positively, simply because a student was able to see that philosophy is accessible and might mean something on a level they didn't expect. Her friend - who launched a full scale campaign in favor of Descartes (really? Descartes?) - said that he gained so much satisfaction by seeing the way Descartes' ideas locked together. I told him that there's a lot of intellectual satisfaction to be had in reading and working through a difficult text. He enthusiastically agreed.

There's some controversy in one of the departments I teach at regarding a move to include and emphasize primary sources , as well as a three-period historical requirement in the Intro and Ethics courses. Some of the other part-time professors are frustrated because they find that students have so much difficulty understanding the primary source material that it somehow neutralizes any learning that may go on in the class. While I understand (and am readily on board with) their observations about their students, it occurs to me that teaching philosophy is *really* about teaching people how to read and how to write all over again - using things that many - if not all - of the students have never seen, in a genre of writing that is not as straightforward as the chemistry textbook they're looking at. This problem is compounded by the idea that aside from our own work in reading philosophy and writing analyses on these lines, we've learned essentially "by feel" how to teach it. It's not like there's a student teaching program in philosophy. Anyway, I don't imagine there will be much compromise on this point, and that's fine - either the department tells us what to teach, or the college (who doesn't have the same "on the ground" sensibility as other philosophy professors) will tell us what to teach, and possibly how to teach it.

This summer I'm focusing on exactly how to do this. I'm teaching an intensive 8-week ethics course that will rely mainly on primary sources (although not to the precise specifications and requirements of the department - the new program doesn't launch until Fall 2008, so we've got some time to acquiesce), and my aim and goal is to learn how to teach people to read closely. I can read closely - in fact, about half of what I do for a living involves this - but can I teach people how to do this? That's a project. In addition, I'm working on an independent study in phenomenology. I'm so fascinated by what I've been reading that my professor from the course has graciously agreed to oversee my work in this area. It's very relevant to my overall project w/r/t film and philosophy, but I need to put down some foundation first. I'm also helping to plan my 10 year high school reunion. Plus, I've chosen a new, source-heavy book for two of my intro courses, so I have to figure that out. Some outdoor volleyball marathons will no doubt make their way in as well. There are just a few projects kicking around, but I like my summers busy, I guess.

Some Problems with Philosophy: Post Script

Today we effectively concluded the first "unit" in my intro class, which had as its central focus an exploration of the attitude of philosophy. Paraphrasing Bertrand Russell, we decided that philosophy done well (and rightly oriented) does four things: (1) it adds to our store of knowledge and fills out our education, (2) it examines familiar things in an unfamiliar light, (3) it questions and challenges tradition, and (4) it provides -- somehow -- ways of coping with our everyday experience. I've asked them to write a short paper indicating which of the following thinkers they think best exemplifies the philosophical attitude: Thales, Socrates, Plato, Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche. The conversation over the last two weeks has been really exceptional in this class -- at 7:00am! -- so we've really been able to explore these ideas using the Pojman text. I'm really looking forward to their written responses.

At the end of our discussion today I broached the topic of preparedness, talking with them a little bit about why they think "now" (being in college, growing as a young adult, etc) is the right time to read philosophy. They really surprised me with their answers, which were all along the lines of their minds being ready to accept the abstract nature of these ideas, their force and the lens philosophy provides to reorganize their experience. What struck me was first of all, how frank they were in recognizing the way philosophy fits with and for them. I couldn't help but think of the poverty of my assessment below, in the sense that the way I've viewed this "unpreparedness" is a half-empty proposition. They come at the class feeling intellectually prepared -- like now is the time when philosophy will make sense. I've made an inverted assumption about my students, and today I'm pleasantly surprised.

Some Problems with Philosophy

In a comment to my post below on Retooling, Ted makes the following point:

I wonder why some Christians lose their faith when they take philosophical courses. I knew a very intelligent guy, who was a very committed Christian, who took philosophy (I think he majored in it) at a well known Christian school. It seemed to throw him for a loop, and he dropped out of attending church for some time (years, I believe), before coming back. An aside question, so forgive me. I do remember that Francis Schaeffer told his students that when reading philosophy, they needed to be reading twice as much in Scripture (or something to that effect).

If I had faced this important point about three years or so ago, I would say immediately because in general, the church doesn't teach people to think. Now, though, I think it is a bit more complicated in the sense that no college student is adequately prepared for their first philosophy class, except in very rare cases. Reading primary-source philosophy is so challenging to students because it's not at all clear why these thinkers are asking the questions they are. We live in a culture where other kinds of inquiry are prized, and the insularity of discipline and specialization are encouraged. Science, math, philosophy, and theology or religious studies are not integrated the way they were in earlier periods of Western history. Somehow in our contemporary mind, these issues are either already settled or not worth thinking about (because they don't quite make a buck).

Certainly the contemporary Christian life requires balance and integration of rational inquiry and spiritual examination (although they are in no way opposed to one another), but our experiences as young Christians are heavy on the spiritual side. We fail to recognize the integrated nature of our intellectual heritage, and in doing so fail to prepare for the different ways in which individuals have answered questions that we've already answered in certain ways. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but my recent experience as a teacher indicates a general unpreparedness for the problems philosophy is concerned to answer.

In my intro class this semester, I've let the book do the leading in the sense that Pojman begins by discussing the proper attitude that philosophy requires. I'm hoping that by challenging students on an attitudinal level, the ground might be prepared for accepting philosophical problems and criticizing their proposed solutions. The perpetual challenge for the individual teaching philosophy is to train people to take philosophy out of the classroom, instead of engendering an hour and fifteen minute period twice a week where we suspend our regular lives and questions in favor of these more speculative issues. How does philosophy become influential for living and not a mere thought experiment?

Retooling (2): Extended Version

Yesterday I made some choices w/r/t the primary source texts I'm considering for my new and improved Intro to Philosophy course. I'm probably going to narrow down this list, but I won't be able to tell until I read them.

• Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy (Hackett)
• Plato, Five Dialogues (Hackett) -- I'm looking to this especially for the Euthyphro and the Phaedo
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Hackett)
• Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations (Cambridge)
• Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hackett)
• Mill, On Liberty (again, Hackett)
• Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (and finally, Hackett)

Notice what's missing...I had to suppress a very strong urge to include George of Cloyne's Principles Concerning Human Understanding (Me: yes kids, there is no such thing as matter...it's all in your head! Students: thanks for nothing!) and Kant's Groundwork. I want them to learn, not run from philosophy screaming.

On another note, this process started an interesting conversation between another early-morning colleague and I. I mentioned my interest in changing my course to employ all primary source material, and I asked him about his thoughts on the subject. He uses two of the books I propose above (and several more, I would guess), and he mentioned that using these makes the teacher/lecturer necessary and useful. While I'm not entirely sure he meant it this way, I took this comment to be an attempt at helping the students understand what the role of the teacher is in a philosophy class.

I guess I have always thought it a little unfair -- and hence my reticence to use the primary texts -- to give students walking into a field with which they have had little or no interaction (what, you didn't have a philosophy class in high school?) a set of texts that are by nature difficult and oblique. There was an occasion in college when, in a medieval philosophy class, we were given quite possibly some of the most challenging (and in some cases, almost unreadable to the undergraduate eye) texts possible, with the expectation that we would rely on the wisdom of the professor to navigate us through these difficult waters. The idea of professor-as-sage is something that is generally unwarranted...especially for a lowly MA like myself. My fear has always been that I would be selling my students a false bill of goods, and that I wouldn't be able to get them through the texts at all, much less do it wisely or with any sagacity (whoa).

On the other hand, the thing that leaves me so dissatisfied with the textbook approach is that the professor becomes virtually useless to the average student who pays attention while s/he reads and "gets it." I, and subsequently the time spent in class, end up being redundant for these students, and that troubles me a little. Of course, I make what effort I can to extend the text as far as I can but I'm not actually sure whether my students are -- on this approach -- learning philosophy or learning about philosophy. There's a difference.

On Karen's advice I've been trying to consider a question or an aspect of philosophy that motivates me in order to develop a theme for my class. It occurred to me this week while teaching about relativism and moral nihilism (I'm really digging the metaethics right now) that one thing of importance to me is progress. How is it that we change, and change for the better? Like we always said at the Seminary, philosophy is at the lower-layer of most things, and I think it it can -- in most of its forms -- inspire change and transformation. I hear the voice of the wisest person I've ever had the privilege of learning from mumbling in the back of my head, "thou requirest a little lower layer..."

Anyway, I'm curious what you think of my central question and my selected texts. What has been your experience (or recollection for all you Platonists out there) with primary sources and primary texts in introductory classes of any sort? Any words of wisdom, my friends?Also, thanks to some prodding from Keith, anyone can comment. Just keep it clean here, people. Leave the swearing to me.

On Philosophy, Common Sense, Transformation

I'm really excited about one of the textbooks I'm using this semester (Louis Pojman's, Philosophy: The Pursuit of Wisdom, 5/e). In his first chapter he tackles the question, "What is Philosophy?" No small potatoes there. On the second page of the chapter, he quotes Bertrand Russell, who says:

The [person] who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason...While diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, [philosophy] greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive the sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar light.

This passage perfectly captures what it is to teach philosophy and be transformed by it. However, the transformee must be open and willing to -- as Dr. Gordon Lewis is famous for saying -- follow the truth wherever it leads. It wasn't clear how much of a prima facie risk this "following the truth is" for those just walking in to a philosophy class. It's easy for me to champion that cause and talk about it during the first week of class, but it is another thing to draw students through that process and do so continuously over sixteen weeks. Furthermore, being enthusiastic about the ideas and helpful dispositions of philosophy is only good if people are willing to go along. Yet another reason why sometimes teaching philosophy is like selling something. It's still hard to tell who is buying.

There's an interesting move occurring now that I am a moderately-established adjunct that involves groups of us turning into groups of colleagues, and my group includes one full-time faculty member (the one who happened to evaluate me last semester) as well. We visit in the morning, sharing our woes and frustrations about early-morning students, the bookstore somehow managing to screw up a crucial book order, and the overall ridiculousness of text-messagers and sleeping students. (If you're tired and have difficulty getting out of bed, why -- pray tell -- did you sign up for a 7:00am class?)

Restart, Retool, Routine

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.