This ain't about love. It's about my Philosophy of Love and Sex class. This week they proved to me that most of them are not reading the assigned material. Sigh.
I could give them a pop quiz every Wednesday night. But what would be the point? This is class they don't have to take. I don't want to turn them off the material by making them actually read it, for goodness sake. Now, I wasn't all that surprised when I found out that only seven out of 43 admitted that they'd read the online chapters of La Vita Nuova by Dante. But when most of them had not read On Love by Andreas Capellanus (selections of which are in our textbook, The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love) well, that made me kinda sad. I want them to be interested so don't want to punish them. Nevertheless, it's hard to talk about the material or play with it if they haven't read it.
Last week we had a terrific time comparing sections of the New Testament, especially Mark 10 and Matthew 19, about Jesus' comments on divorce. We also looked at a few different translations of 1 Corinthians 7, from the King James to The Message. In that class we also looked at love and gameplaying, checking out bits of Ovid's Art of Love. I also read about Roman Empire marriage customs from Diane Ackerman's book, A Natural History of Love.
Well, next week is the midterm. Gotta write that today.
2 comments:
Love the new profile pic.
Think of in class quizzes (they can be EASY quizzes) as encouraging reading rather than punishing students....though I can't imagine what students would sign up for your class and NOT want to read an article with "erotic" in the title. Jeez.
Yeah, you'd think. Oh well.
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