Your step-father was correct, of course, although before the 2nd Law of
Thermodynamics you should teach an even more fundamental concept, Copernican
non-specialization. (Occam's Razor even before that.) Newton would have been
just another bad-tempered alchemist without THOSE tools.   ;-)
 
Seriously, your population is far from ideal, and your instinct is
appropriate for an ideal group of students. Your colleague is perhaps too
conciliatory, but given the realities of who your students are and what
they, their parents, the Administrators, and the local job market wants, a
whirlwind panorama of Western Civ. might be more appropriate. If you bend
the textbook toward letting them know that such things WERE, and that they
are different, rich, and interesting, you might have more of a chance of
reaching them than if you try to get a budding highschool football coach or
future CPA or data input clerk wannabe to understand that we read Chaucer in
Middle English because its *wonderful*. The converted to whom you preach
will be reached, the others will shut out the light if you shine it on them
too brightly.
 
Adopt the other guy's approch, then subvert it mildly.
 
Actually, the other approach sucks, but its a single-semester non-major
introductory, required course; your way is how their entire four years
should be structured. Alas!
 
Chris Booth's two cents--although worth much less than that.
 
> ----------
> From:         Robert Kibler
> Reply To:     Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
> Sent:         Wednesday, September 1, 1999 9:29 AM
> To:   [log in to unmask]
> Subject:      Pedagogical Question
>
> Here at VCSU, a colleague and I are at odds over how to teach a 200 level
> Humanities course. He thinks that the course ought to be based on a book
> that provides an overview of events, so that it can quickly pass through
> literary and philosophical events from the Mesopotamians to present day. I
> say that it is impossible to teach everything, and that such an approach
> leaves students with very little access to the past. For my part, I
> further suggest that they are better off reading key bits of
> primary-if-translated texts that are conceptually rather than
> chronologically dependent. My feeling is that if you take these primary
> texts and treat them according to overarching themes--ones that are vital
> in all cultures in time and space--themes such as the gods, love,
> leadership, and philosophy--then the students get both a sense of the past
> that delivers not only the Humanities, but does so in a way that gives
> them individual access to ancient and classical Greece, imperial Rome, the
> anglo-saxon and then the norman influenced middle ages, and then the
> renaissance.  My colleague argues that I omit too much important cultural
> information, and I argue that his approach does not admit enough students
> to the Humanities--that it just gives them a sense of what somebody else
> says about a lot of events. Under my thematic approach, we read bits from
> the following, and ask what it says about the four themes:
> Homeric Hymns, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Sappho, Pindar, The Pre-Socratics,
> The Republic, Parmenides, Thucydide's Melian Dialogue, and all of
> Antigone, to get a sense of the Greeks. I also lecture on Greek
> architecture and politics. For the Romans, we read from the Aeneid, the
> Roman Elegists--Catullus, Propertius, Sulpicia, Caesar's Gallic Wars, and
> Tacitus' Germania. For the anglo-saxons, we read Widsith, Deor, Seafarer,
> Battle of Maldon, the Dream of the Cross, and all of Beowulf. We read and
> translate a dozen Middle English lyrics, and read Chaucer's Prologue, and
> his Miller's Tale in Middle English. We read a Shakespeare play, and we
> read bits from Machiavelli.
>    My colleague uses a book by a man named Bishop, which has lots of
> illustrations and gives very small snippets from many great works--but
> mostly, it is a telling of the tale of Western Civilization (the bent of
> the course) by one expert to the uninitiated. The other expert--my
> collegue, fills in the gaps. Between the two of them, they cover a lot of
> territory, and bring students up to the present. Yet for all of that, as
> my step-father says--neither my colleague's course or my own introduce the
> 2nd Law of Thermodynamics--essential, in his opinion.
>    I might also mention that there is a required second Humanities course
> that emphasizes music and art. These courses are taught by faculty who
> kind of begin their approach to music and art in the 17 and 18th
> centuries--and one of them veers off into North American Indian
> culture--the sort of veering that a thematic approach, I think, would
> allow.
>     This is a 200 level course, has 40 students in a section, and very few
> of them English or History majors. If you had to choose between my
> approach and my colleagues, which would you choose and why? Further, what
> is your own general sense about how such a course ought to be taught, to
> such a population?
>