Teaching

War is War

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, Teaching, The Search for Values Comments Off on War is War

Several weeks ago, when my class was still reading Homer’s Iliad, I tried to goad my students into making comparisons between the Trojan War and our current war in Iraq. That didn’t go over so well, and at the time I wasn’t sure why. I suspected that it was still early in the semester and…

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Might and Right

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, Teaching 4 Comments

I’ve been invited to speak as one of the panelists in a colloquium entitled “Violence: The American Tradition?” coming up in a little more than a week. I am still working out what it is that I want to say. My co-panelists are a historian and an artist, and we are each expected to address…

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Why the ocean is sublime (and why it isn’t)

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, Teaching 6 Comments

I went to a roundtable the other night on “The Aesthetic” hosted by our English department. As you might expect, much of the discussion was guided by Kant’s Critique of Judgment, supplemented with the requisite considerations of Baumgarten and Burke. At one point, the discussion turned to the “sublime” and, of course, to the ready-to-hand…

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Studenting Redux

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, Teaching 9 Comments

I was very pleased to see all of the interest in the To Student, or not to student post! The discussion, much of which was sparked by an initial distinction between a student-who-learns and a student-who-students (a la Sartre’s garçon de café) seemed to concentrate on the “inauthenticity” of the latter. I thought it might…

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To student, or not to student.

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, Teaching 8 Comments

A colleague of mine recently alerted me to an interesting passage in Garry D. Fenstermacher’s essay, “Rediscovering the Student in Democracy and Education,” in John Dewey and Our Educational Prospects: A Critical Engagement with Dewey’s Democracy and Education. Fenstermacher suggests imagining that the word “student” might function as a verb or a noun. He writes,…

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Promesse d’honneur

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Teaching Comments Off on Promesse d’honneur

I’ve been immersed in the long “orientation” process for the past week. Although much of that process is tedious and mind-numbing, I found at least one part particularly interesting. My new academic home operates on an Honor System, something that used to be de rigeur for liberal arts colleges, but is unfortunately not so much…

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Man Love

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Teaching, The Search for Values 2 Comments

As I mentioned a little while ago, I am in the process of teaching The Epic of Gilgamesh. One of the themes we are concentrating on in my seminar this semester is “friendhip,” so the relationship between the epic’s two protagonists, Gilgamesh and Enkidu (pictured above), is a wonderful example with which to begin. Our…

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A Little Gift from the Professor’s Bag of Tricks

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Teaching, The Search for Values 2 Comments

I always appreciate it when colleagues of mine share from their bags of pedagogical tricks, so I thought I might pass on a recent experiment that generated an eminently “teachable moment” for me. I’ve just begin teaching the Iliad in my course, which is a small seminar-tpye class. Yesterday, I decided to utilize an exercise…

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Revisionist Etiology

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Teaching, The Search for Values 5 Comments

[Note to readers: Please keep reading. I promise there is a payoff at the end of this entry!] Now that I’ve finished up the Iliad, we’re moving on to a three-week study of the Bible. Although I actually began college as a theology student (and I am a preacher’s kid), I’ve never actually taught the…

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No, you CAN’T just watch the movie!

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, Teaching, The Search for Values 6 Comments

I am, again, inadvertantly competing with a couple of (bad) film versions of texts that I am teaching in my classes this semester. First, there’s the mega-blockbuster Troy, starring Brad Pitt as Achilles. Now, I haven’t seen Troy (though I have recently resolved to do so ASAP), but my understanding of it was that the…

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