One teaching assignment which the new Ph.D. in Classics is very likely to encounter is the request to teach a classical civilization course of some type; that is, a course in which students will read a selection of ancient texts and authors in English translation. The parameters of such a course may be wide, as may its particular departmental constraints. At one end of the spectrum, the new teacher may be asked to assume a pre-established course in which everything from title to texts has already been specified (and cannot be altered); at the other extreme, the neophyte may have the freedom to design an entirely new course with little or no departmental constraint (or guidance). The remarks which follow are addressed mainly to this latter, open-ended situation. My first strong recommendation, however, is that the prospective teacher make every imaginative effort to convert conceptually even the former type of assignment into the latter.
Even in cases where the shape of the course has been substantially pre-determined for you, concentrate (before the term begins!) on imparting to the course your own personal perspective, aiming particularly to achieve a synthesis of the materials, rather than a lifeless, "handbook"-style agglomeration of readings and lectures. Achieving such a synthesis, providing a rationale for the term's work more satisfying than the label "Great Books," may take various forms: perhaps identifying for yourself and your students particular topics or questions which you will track throughout the term, or focussing on recurrent methodological questions, or constructing a thematic unity via your lectures. Within the constraints of the given, it is still possible to "define" a course which will express intellectual passions and puzzles which are your own. I think of a law school colleague who, assigned the ostensibly cut-and-dried Property Law course, began it by examining the "Song Lines" mythology of Australian aborigines. Find a way to make your course your own!
In each of the sections which follow, I will be trying to stress one major point, which is so easy to forget, and that is: try to put yourself in the place of the student, at least to some extent, to remember what it's like not to know your field and to identify priorities of what may be most important for your students to learn. In planning a "classical civ." course, this effort is particularly important at three major junctures:
Perhaps putting yourself in the place of the students is most important at this initial planning stage. It involves (especially for the new teacher) finding a balance between what you know and what they need or want to know.
For your dissertation, you will have spent the last several years of your life working on a quite specialized, perhaps even esoteric, topic. Now you really are expert in, say, the textual transmission of Propertius. But you need to ask yourself, with some objectivity and distance, whether this is what your undergraduates really want -- or need -- to know. Let me be clear -- I am not suggesting that you: a) abandon your own hard-won expertise, b) pander to some perceived notion of student demand or c) fall back on the most traditional, pre-fabricated pattern of "intro. to classical civ." Rather, I am suggesting something far more salutary, I think, for your own life as a scholar and teacher as well as for your students (who should, after all, be able to benefit from your particular expertise).
Here, I draw on E.M. Forster's "Only connect." In attempting to define a course or course-topic, step back and consider (or recall) ways in which your field of specialization connects to larger human and cultural questions. Surely you became fascinated by Classics in the first place because the study responded to some such questions in you. During the increasingly specialized training of the graduate years, however -- and even more so during the intensive concentration on dissertational research and writing -- it is easy to become immersed in professionalism and correspondingly detached from and forgetful of the larger issues beyond professional boundaries. Teaching an introductory classics course is a wonderful opportunity to re-connect your studies and your knowledge to those larger issues. Take advantage of the opportunity.
Let me provide two examples from my own experience. My own major research interest is in the history of the epic genre. Now one could simply offer a course called, "History of the Epic Genre." To do so, however, is to limit your potential audience to those like-minded individuals who have already made a particular intellectual investment which convinces them that the somewhat limited concept of "genre" and its history are topics of interest to them. Why not attempt to reach out beyond this self-delimited group to those (unfortunate) students who don't yet know that epic poems have something important and meaningful to say to them, that epic may matter to their lives? (Again, I stress the salutary effects of such a teaching strategy helping you to get in touch again with why what you have chosen to study does matter.)
Currently, I offer a popular course organized around epic called "The Hero: Athlete vs. Intellectual." In 1985, when I designed the course, I chose this focus because my previous experience teaching students at Ivy League colleges had shown me that many of these students, who often have impressive skills in both academic subjects and sports, encountered real difficulties balancing those two realms of their lives to their own satisfaction. They must make serious decisions at this stage in their lives about the relative roles and significance of the intellectual and the physical in their self-conceptions, both in day-to-day and in long-range allocations of their time and energy. It occurred to me that these potentially conflicting human excellences may find their representatives in the Iliadic prowess of Achilles and the Odyssean craftiness of Odysseus. Certainly, one does not want to reduce the complexity of epic heroism to a simplistic opposition of brains and brawn. Yet asking questions about the relative evaluation and integration of such human capacities through the course of the epic tradition can provide a meaningful focus around which to organize the students' encounter with that tradition. Implicit in this view is my belief that we really can ask many different questions of our classical texts and receive from them fruitful and thought-provoking answers.
If I were designing a new course on epic today, I would ask a different question, focussing rather on the issue of diversity and the encounter with the other, which is of such great concern both on college campuses today and in our larger society. In fact, I did recently design but have not yet taught such a course, examining the construction of Roman identity -- how the Romans conceptualized their encounters with others (whom, often, they would assimilate into Rome) and how they attempted, with great difficulty, to define what it was to be Roman.
As a second example: in my dissertation, I had put forward a thesis that when medieval personification allegory mobilized Virtues and Vices and charted the interactions among them, it was performing a function in its cultural context analogous to that which, in modern scientific culture, is performed by various modes of scientific modelling. It seems to me unlikely that any significant number of undergraduates would -- or indeed should -- be interested in a course devoted to this rather recherche topic. Yet the interactions between scientific and non-scientific sectors in our society certainly remain at least as significant and troubling today as they were when C.P. Snow coined the term, "The Two Cultures."
Consequently, I decided to design a course which would examine the almost chiastic exchange between scientific and literary discourse today, an exchange in which, for example, we find scientists discussing modes of multiple, random, or elusive causality which would once have found a place only in metaphysical or poetic discourse, while certain literary critical schools such as narratology generate charts, graphs, and "data" which would once have seemed appropriate only to scientific methodologies. The course, which I had originally conceived as a small seminar for 15, enrolled 50 students and became for all of us a tremendously challenging and exciting intellectual adventure. Beginning with classical texts in which our later separate categorizations of "science," "literature," and "philosophy" seem irrelevant, such as those of the pre-Socratics, Plato's Timaeus, or Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, we moved on to read later works in the history and philosophy of science as well as modern scientific and literary authors who, in various ways, address the interaction between the two fields. Although the conception originated in a quite specialized research program, it moved beyond that base to address issues of a much larger order and in doing so both attracted considerable student interest and compelled me to stretch my own intellectual horizons.
Having determined the topic on which you want to focus, now you must construct a syllabus, bringing together a selection of texts (except in the unlikely instance that an acceptable textbook is available) that will provide a reasonably broad range of the field as well as cohering around your central focus.
Here, I must confess that I have strongly-held views which might well be challenged today, as the issue of canonicity is being constructively debated and re-examined. My feeling, however, is that, in considering your students' needs, it's important again to seek balance, here between the canonical and the more arcane. An introductory course -- which may well provide your students' only sustained and serious encounter with the classical world -- should, in my opinion, introduce them to at least some major canonical texts, as well as perhaps including more neglected documents of which your specialized training makes you aware.
If part of one's mission is educating students to take part in the larger cultural conversation of the Western tradition, I am sceptical that this responsibility has been well discharged if all the students have read is, e.g., Semonides, the Gortynian Code, Gorgias, and Soranus. These may be wonderfully instructive texts; you may feel that your students should read them. But let them be read in a context which will provide a somewhat less circumscribed glimpse of antiquity. If your topic for the above authors, for example, is "The Origins of Western Misogyny," let your students also read the Oresteia, Medea, Pericles' Funeral Oration, the Symposium.... In short, provide them with some possibility of engaging in a common discourse with non-expert others. Such canonical texts may be self-evident or old-hat to you; they may be both fascinating and necessary for your students.
In choosing the readings for your syllabus, there are also of course some purely practical ways in which your students should be kept in mind. Obviously, availability of materials will constrain your choices; an out-of-print book is not an option. Cost per student will also be a factor. The cost of materials you require your students to have will be influenced by the particular institutional culture in which you are teaching. Typically, there will be an informal ceiling on what the community considers appropriate expenses per course, per semester. Make it a point to discover and abide by this self-regulation.
One final, probably idiosyncratic point on your students' actual, physical encounter with the readings you have selected: I would urge you to give attention also to the format in which readings are presented. Personally, I remain a big fan of The Book (or its approximation) and have some bias against The Fragmentary (often in the form of a collection of handouts or duplicated materials). When students find that what they are to read begins in the middle of page 16, ends in the middle of page 34, and is bound together apparently randomly with yet other fragments from yet other sources whose provenance is entirely unclear to them, they are very hard-pressed to grasp a sense of unity and coherence. Intellectual control of a Whole (whether a book, a chapter, even an epic poem) has an inherently satisfying dimension for the learner, which is much more difficult to attain from the Fragmentary. At the very least, if a collection of fragmentary texts seems the most appropriate or indeed the only way in which to present your course materials -- and there are of course many reasons why this might be true -- then you have a great responsibility to provide coherence, to construct a sense of integration in guiding your students through those materials. Remember that the obvious relations you can perceive among a body of texts may be entirely elusive to your students, for whom Homer, Nero and Apuleius may easily seem contemporaneous if they have been presented to them in close proximity, while Jesus and Vergil may seem entirely unrelated chronologically.
Once again, my continuing refrain here is to try to keep your students in mind. Particularly in our earliest teaching experiences, it is so easy to be focussed upon our own interests, abilities, efforts, gaffs, fears, that what is actually being received and experienced by the student may almost altogether escape our notice.
One technique which I use consistently and highly recommend (in large courses, i.e., over 50) is the Lecture Outline. At the beginning of every lecture, I distribute a page outlining in some detail the series of topics and the shape of the argument I will address that day. Included, of course, are any relevant bibliographical entries and hard-to-spell or unfamiliar names or terms which will be of significance. Such a sheet serves a number of interests simultaneously.
First, I like to think of it as a contract between me and my students. They have some sense of what I am going to cover and how I am going to do it, and I have a set of structuring constraints on my discourse. Not that I feel bound to avoid any digression or elaboration whatsoever, but that I feel encouraged to remain within or return to certain parameters and to reach a recognizable end-point. (Closure, like wholeness, is vastly under-appreciated by teachers and too often sadly lacking.) Second, the outline proves a helpful device in encouraging students to take well-organized notes and assists them in judging the relative significance of the individual points and topics broached in the lecture. Many of my students over the years have taken time to thank me for these outlines, explaining how helpful they have proved in note-taking. An additional benefit for the lecturer is that having such a visible structure in front of them frees your students for more attentive and receptive listing. Finally, the growing collection of outlines over the term provides an important resource for students to consolidate and review their learning. By reviewing the outline, they can easily reconstruct the lecture, check on any gaps in their own understanding of the topics, and be sure that they have an accurate source, not a cryptic note which has become garbled in transmission.
Along the previous lines of keeping your students and their learning needs in mind, I return again to a point related to that of canonicity. That is, I believe lecturers in introductory courses (by far the most common type of classics-in-translation or classical civ. course) have a responsibility to provide some general knowledge of the topic at hand rather than plunging students directly into the highly specialized discourse of current debate among experts. Again, this is not an encouragement to "dumb it down" (as the secondary school teachers have lamented of certain textbooks). Rather, ground the student first in the context, background, standard interpretive understandings of the text, even if only to subsequently add: "And here's why I disagree." Having given your student some grounding first in the basics, you will have provided her both an entree into the larger, non-specialized, cultural conversation of which I spoke earlier and some footing on which to intelligently receive and evaluate your own, more specialized views. Gerald Graff has called this "teaching the conflicts." Such a dialectical method of teaching might be traced back of course to our own classical rhetoric or the later "sic et non" of the scholastics and can provide our students not only with a broader understanding of the field and its current quandaries but also with an important encouragement toward developing their own skills in the framing and evaluation of arguments. And finally, perhaps this is the most significant way in which we can keep our students in mind: by continually striving to teach them, not what to think, but how to think.