Reflections Near Semester’s End

We have nearly completed week 15 of the 16 week semester. What can I say about this semester? How was it different? This is the third semester I have completed as a full-time philosophy instructor, and on January 11 I will celebrate my one-year anniversary. Usually at the end of the semester, my mind is saturated with stress and I am so desperate to finish the semester that I am literally panicked. I become obsessed with the relief of break and have difficulty thinking about anything else.

This semester is very different. I am calm. Yes, I have a tremendous amount of work, and most of my time is devoted to that or taking short, necessary breaks. But it is not an anxiety-ridden work. It is diligent, calm work, and it feels good. Yes, I am still eternally behind in some of my work, but I do not feel guilty about it because I am giving it my all. If I have made a mistake, it is because I have taken on too many responsibilities and not prioritized as well as I could have. But even with these charges, I know that recognizing what I am capable of accomplishing and the ability to prioritize are both skills, and they are skills that I have been practicing and slowly improving.

What is the reason for this relative calmness? Well, last Spring was my semester first as a full-timer. I was overwhelmed by the higher expectations, and the beginning of the semester was filled with such optimism and over-confidence that I did not get my organizational machine in order, which I paid for in the end. For the summer semester, I put a lot of energy into creating a better organizational engine. It worked very smoothly, despite the fact that my life kind of fell apart temporarily in July due to tenure-portfolio demands and a battery of events I had to attend. But I understood what worked and what didn’t, and I put them into affect this Fall. I complained at the beginning of this semester that I was not given enough time to modify and plan for my courses, thanks to Faculty Development Week and Registration (both massive wastes of time) . But in the end, it actually worked in my favor. Because I did not have time to change anything at the beginning, I did not go through my usual stress of learning how to use a slightly different system of teaching.

I am overall satisfied with the improvements made in my Logic class. I learned some basic explanatory techniques at the end of last Spring that seemed to “catch” some students that were not getting caught before. They are subtle. I tried to weave them into my normal routine and I believe it helped. I know that I have fewer lost students than normal, and the radical split between those who “get it” and those who “do not” is not really present this semester. Instead, it looks like a normal bell-curve. Although I am sure there are students who still do not get it, at this point I know that it is because they are not doing their homework, they are not trying to understand  on their own, or are not showing up to class: all things that I warned them were necessary in order to prevail in logic.

I have grown dissatisfied with the book we are using in Logic: David Kelley’s The Art of Reasoning. I like it, and I like Kelley’s explanations, his approach, and the no-nonsense approach. The book is also relatively inexpensive, especially for Logic books. But my students need more practice problems. And given my approach, I like the history of the art’s development that is found in the Copi book. But damn you Copi publisher, why do you need another $100 edition every two years? Logic is almost unchanged since Aristotle you mother f*ckers, with the marked exception of Frege, a relative newbie who revolutionized logic…over a century ago.  Maybe I will just write my own stupid book.

The “Philosophy of Religion” is a tough nut to crack. I usually use anthologies. In the anthologized essays’ ability to captivate my students’ minds, however, they seem spotty. Sometimes it works well, sometimes an essay is universally despised to no good affect (Hello, Rathner!). Now, there could be a few reasons for this: first, due to the contentious nature of the subject and the complexity of the essays, the strong emotions that sprout from my students regarding different topics are harder to predict. Sometimes they lead to great discussion, and other times very difficult deadlocks. Second, because of the much more vast collection of authors and subjects, it happens that I am not an expert on each and every essay like I am in my “Ethics” or “Enlightenment to the Present” class. As a result, I find myself struggling to understand points that I did not anticipate during the class itself. Now, this is kind of bad and kind of cool. It certainly provides the potential for unique learning experiences. Philosophy is, after all, a field of wonder, and what mortal is a legitimate master on this subject? No one: and even the relative masters need to deal with their lack. And this can be a tool for a more important lesson than understanding the essay. But did I use these opportunities well? I am not sure I did, especially this semester. Third, the quality of these essays are just spotty. In “Ethics,” I only deal with proven giants: Confucius, Plato, Nietzsche, and Aristotle. Even when I am having an off day, Plato is still brilliant and can save the day. But when I am having an off day with a thinker who will be forgotten in 50 years? Yeah, then the whole day is bad and I want nothing more than to forget.

I believe that in the future, I will switch to a more pure Great Books model. Pascal’s Pensees, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, James’ Will to Believe, Humes’ Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, excerpts from Augustine, Maimonides, Aquinas, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, and so on. That would make for excellent material. But while the European male “model” (“fall out” is a better term) has largely worked so far in Ethics, it would, I believe, fail in Religion. And I will not include Lao Tzu’s Dao te Ching or the Upanishads: they are great books, but they are not philosophy.

Anyway, because of scheduling, I am taking at least a semester break from both of these courses, so I will have time to think about this.

Ethics, ah, Ethics. My flagship. My beloved. My slow work of art. “Ethics” and “Introduction to Philosophy” were the first courses I taught, but whereas I have gone long expanses without teaching Intro, I have taught Ethics every single semester, usually two sections, with the exception of one or two summer semesters. It is also the subject that brought me into philosophy. And the books that captured me the most: Plato’s Republic, Spinoza’s Ethics, Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, and Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, are all ethical books (duh). And so I have invested more time, more heart, and more thought, and have had the greatest opportunity to experiment and observe, than with any other subject.

For the first few years, this course relied on a single anthology, and it worked well. But for the Spring of 2010, I switched to four classics: Confucius’ Analects, Plato’s Republic, Aristotle‘s Ethics, and Nietzsche’s Genealogy. This worked well in the Spring. I switched it up a bit this fall so that the order went Confucius-Plato-Nietzsche-Aristotle. Obviously counter-intuitive, because it went from the obvious chronological approach to something that didn’t seem to make sense. But there was something about how my students’ minds were shifting from Plato to Aristotle to Nietzsche that made me feel like an important revolution was not occurring. Also, there are enough students who get kind of lost in the despair of Nietzsche (without the accompanying recovery) that ending a semester with him can make many students feel a loss walking out. There is actually much more to say about this, but I will leave it be for now. Aristotle, on the other hand, does not really contradict or overwhelm Nietzsche, and in fact is in many ways an early version of Nietzsche. So if a student loves Nietzsche, Aristotle will not really persuade them to reject Nietzsche, but will instead give them new things to think about to add on to Nietzsche. Also, Aristotle is practical and straightforward in ways that Plato and Nietzsche are not. He is down to earth, and he provides something to work toward. From the many awesome conversations I have had with some of my brightest students lately, I am convinced that my plan is working well: my students are engaged, thinking, creating their own morality, and getting excited in intelligent and creative ways. I did not see this as much last Spring.

So, I’m just going to say it: the book order is kind of brilliant right now. The interplay that the ideas and writing styles on my students’ psyche has worke-d just as I hoped. When you’re dealing with a large number of students, obviously it will not be the best for everyone, but it worked better than it did in the Spring.

But it was still far from perfect. I had many class sessions that were not as exciting as they could have been. Sometimes I lectured too much, sometimes I let students’ input go to far afield without appropriate feedback from me. The timing of the writing assignments is still off, and students still did not use Plato sufficiently in the Athens game. I am still underestimating how much preparation I need to do for Aristotle since I switched translations: I am an expert on my old edition, and a neophyte on my current one. Pieces of the text that I could find and understand with ease before, I struggle to find and explain now. I love my new translator, but I do not know him like I knew my previous one.

In some ways, I am quite happy with the “faults.” In one of my Ethics classes, I have a couple of excellent, hard working students who have opposite criticisms of the way class is being done. One student wants far more discussion, where I sit on the sideline and only gently guide the conversation. Another student wants lecture, and gets frustrated when we spend too much time letting everyone talk. Who do I serve? This is Charybdis and Scylla, except in this case they are overlapping. No matter what I do, if I am trying to please one side, I am necessarily frustrating the other. I take comfort in knowing that I am frustrating them both fairly equally.

If there is one thing I’m worried about, it is that I am perhaps not thinking about teaching and the content as much as I once did. Thanks to the greater involvement in administrative duties that the full-time gig brings along, somewhat less of my mind is devoted to the heart of my job. In the past, when I am very frustrated in how a class went, I am driven, almost obsessively, to think about how I can improve the class. This has often led to revolutions of varying degree in how and what I teach. But I simply have not felt that frustration like I have in previous semesters. Yes, I have walked away from a class frustrated, many times, this semester. But I shake it off, and I don’t think about it obsessively. This has been great for my mental health. But is it great for my growth as a teacher? And if not, and if I realize this down the road, it may not be great for my mental health in the future.

Speaking of mental health: now that I am in my “career job,” or at least a job that I could happily make my career, I really need to think about my non-professional life. Ironically, I have become more focused on work now than I ever was before. Fewer things distract me, and I am more likely to read philosophy because I love it than I have since I started teaching…maybe even since I was a freshman in college. And yet somehow, I have made more time for friends than I have in previous semesters. Sure, my dating life is in a coma right now, but that can wait a bit longer. I do not even want to date.nIt’s time to read some Nietzsche, after all.

I suppose I am done. I suppose I have  now at least recorded everything that I need to recall to review for future semesters.

Well, one last thing. I love teaching Aristotle. I love teaching all four of these guys, actually. They remind me, and they force me to review my life in alternative ways every semester: precisely the goal that Nietzsche and Aristotle believe is necessary for the best life. And despite all the philosophers exciting  me, especially Nietzsche, my life is always best when reading Aristotle.

Hmm…but has the pursuit of excellent habits actually served to slowly mute my heart? Well, that’s a question for another time.