Gosh, how is he so cute?
I am preparing my syllabus and introduction for the discussion section tomorrow and am vaguely sick to my stomach. I'm going to read to the kids from Oakeshott's "The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind" (I'm playing with the idea of starting each class with a poem, which would probably destroy all of my credibility...Myrrh thinks I probably shouldn't do it, but I think if not now, when? Thoughts on this [and any other] point welcome).
Oakeshott: "As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. ... It is the ability to participate in this conversation, and not the ability to reason cogently, to make discoveries about the world, or to contrive a better world, which distinguishes the human being from the animal and the civilized man from the barbarian. Indeed, it seems probable that it was the engagement in this conversation (where talk is without a conclusion) that gave us our present appearance, man being descended from a race of apes who sat in talk so long and so late that they wore out their tails."
4 comments:
It sounds like a good idea. My advisor last week recommended to me beginning each class with something related to, but different from, the assigned reading--the sort of thing any student could, in principle, talk about. If you frame it well, it could lead to some very interesting discussions. If not, well, teachers are rarely judged by how they do their first time out.
You make me sound like such a killjoy!
"Myrrh thinks I probably shouldn't do it"... while twirling in circles and standing on my head...
(you're clearly allowed to look like the reasonable one of us when I propose something silly...)
One of my teachers always began class with a Deep Thought by Jack Handey, so clearly you should be allowed to begin class with a poem. (OK, it was high school history, but still.)
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