I chose to take the Classics program knowing full well that it would be suffering.
Suffering is one thing, but I did not expect to see such a beautifully conceived program so… manhandled. A really intense education is one thing, but a program which depreciates its own mission is another. Like the ouroboros that eats itself, except not. The ouroboros is symbolic of regeneration and cyclic wholeness. This is more like being strangled while asked to speak clearly.
This week, we are to read 115 pages of Will Durant, Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays, 60 pages or so in Fantham et al.’s Women in the Classical World, Plato’s Symposium, and a chapter of Stokstad’s Art History text.
Intense? Yes. Unreasonable? No. (Piece of cake when compared to the Illiad week.)
Now let’s talk about the workbook.
The workbook is the weekly writing assignments that we get in order to “document” our learning. For me, writing about something I am studying helps me to connect concepts and to solidify them so that I will remember them tomorrow. It is a very important aspect of the learning process.
How could writing possibly be harmful? Let me count the ways.
This week, our workbook calls for a five to seven page paper on the role of the chorus in Greek drama (with citations from the text); three pages on Antigone and her function, what she represents, and how the Greeks might have received the idea of her; essay/reflection questions on the two Oedipus works and Durant’s summation of Athenian Society during the Golden Age; summaries of the various arguments on the nature of love as journeyed with Plato in the Symposium, and a few questions on the forms of women’s power in Classical Athens from the Fantham reading.
My last narrative from Ancient Civilizations suggested that I work to clarify my ideas in my written essays. Clarify my ideas? As if I had time to read what I had written even once!
I am not sure how an individual can do this justice in a week. I am not sure a scholar can do this justice in a week.
Scrambling, some reach for Cliff notes, some scan the internet for clues or look into summaries by authors outside the purview of our readings. All of us fight the tempation- um… compulsion re: sheer neccesity- to read for the questions instead of for the experience; to ditch the rest of the reading when you think you have enough content to roll out an answer.
I can’t help but to see the workbooks– even the carefully crafted ones– as an obstacle to real comprehension. I look back at my past workbooks, and I see that I will soon have a year and a half worth of unformed, uncultivated and undigested ideas punched into three ring binders gathering dust.
How can I “swim” in this material when my fingers must be at the keyboard constantly? How can I work with these concepts and themes in my mind when I have to explain and illustrate them in the moment of the very encounter? My professors eloquently call for “profundity.” I can deliver profundity– on one of those assignments in a given week.
We seem to be valuing documentation over assimilation. Let us read, let us discuss, let us take in the information and then, when we have had a moment to eek out some nutritive value, only then expect us to tell you all about it with scholarly insight. Let us give you twenty pages of original thought on a particular theme every two weeks. Let us do the program, and ourselves, justice.
Otherwise it is generativity, choked.
