You are teaching an upper-level ancient Greek class on Homer’s Odyssey and you reach the ninth book of the poem and Odysseus’ re-telling of his wanderings to at the court of the Phaeacians. You start the class by telling the small group of students that even though this part of the poem is devoted to […]
You are in a meeting with all the Faculty of your department and the representatives from the Graduate Students Advisory Committee during a particularly tense time, when there are several disputes and challenges facing the departmental community. You have included a topic called Masks on the agenda (following an update on the budget by the […]
You are filling in for a colleague’s class on Ancient Roman Religion and you are teaching the topic of the 186 BCE ban on the Bacchanalia by the Roman senate. In addition to the students enrolled in the class, you invite any other Classics students, both undergraduates and graduates, to participate, as well as opening […]
You are team-teaching a class with an artist, in which both you and your fellow teacher received full credit, called Free Us from the Western Canon and you are currently working on a project in which the students recreate Plato’s Symposium along the model of MoMA’s first “Supposium”, held in March 2014 under the title Beyond Default […]
You are teaching a General Education (GE) course at a large research university (during a period of the overhaul of the GE requirements). In the classroom you have constructed a maze from a grid of wire, suspended 12 feet above the floor; heavy cord is attached to eyelets in the floor for verticals and walls […]
You are teaching a Graduate Seminar (topic variable) with both Art MFAs and Classics Grad students. Artists and Classicists are invited into the same space and sit in chairs. The Artists, however, occupy the room ahead of time, had chairs which they had altered, and are dressed in costumes that they have chosen. Each Artist […]
You are leading a Study Abroad program to a significant ancient city (e.g. Athens, Rome, Alexandria) and one morning, midway through the trip, you usher your students onto a small platform at one end of the room where you have breakfast in the hotel where you are all staying. In the room are chairs arranged […]
You are teaching an elementary Latin course using the so-called “Reading Method”. You gather your class (of between 6-10 students) on the floor in a small room and brief them on whether they want to participate in this “ordeal”. If they agree, the students enter the classroom one at a time. The walls and floors […]
You are teaching a Classical Mythology class and you have reached the topic of “Creation Stories” (either this is early in the course or later, after “Epic Myths”). In today’s class you want to compare and contrast ancient Greek, Roman and Near-Eastern myths about the origins of the universe. You will discuss (and the students […]
I first encountered the work of choreographer Anna Halprin at documenta 14 this summer when I was stopped in my tracks by a diagram showing one of her Myth performances from 1967 in at Documenta-Halle in Kassel. Halprin describes the Myths as follows: Myths are experimental…What unfolds is a spontaneous exploration of ideas. Myths are meant to […]