Skip to main content

Academic Platypus: The Humanities Safety Valve

I teach a course called "Humanities" at a classical school.  Humanities is a rather amorphous course that's something like a combination of History, Ethics, and Literature (you might think of it as "History and Moral Philosophy"  Oops!)  It can be a little difficult to teach since you're always caught on the horns of a dilemma: do I focus on the Literature end or do I focus on the History end; there isn't enough time for both.

That said, I have found one thing that Humanities excels at: serving as a safety valve for other courses.  Have an argument break out in Anatomy and Physiology about cannibalism in survival situations?  Shift it to Humanities.  Have a rash of questions about Satan in Bible class?  Shift it to Humanities.  Kids want to talk about the decline of pop-music as copyright laws gets ever tighter? You guessed it: bring it up in Humanities.  What I'm saying is the very amorphous nature of the Humanities course becomes a huge asset when seen in context with the other classes.  Knowledge produces questions, but not all questions fit in with a given class' agenda.  Rather than allow students "pregnant with the Logos" to stifle in frustration, Humanities acts as a safety valve where questions that don't fit in anywhere else can be brought up and dealt with.  It's a sort of catch-all class where the various disciplines can be brought together and addressed as a unified whole; a place where students can unwind and work out their intellectual problems apart from the tyranny of compartmentalized knowledge.

Humanities is a safety valve, but it can be even more than that.  It can be a place where students are allowed to experience knowledge as a whole; a place where things come together and make sense.  Under such circumstances, Humanities would cease being the ugly duckling of the upper school and become a beautiful swan.  As our culture continues to fragment, students crave unity and stability.  They want a chance to see "the big picture."  My class is where they do that.    

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...

Tolkien's Dark Tower: The Platypus Reads Part CLXXXVI

Tom Shippey points out in his Road to Middle Earth that the germ of Barad Dur, Sauron's Stronghold, comes from a scrap of Chaucer where the poet makes an offhand reference to a knight and his approach to "the dark tower."  Chaucer expected that everyone knew that story, but somehow in the intervening centuries it has become lost.  Using his imagination, Tolkien tried to delve back into the mine of story and imagine what this Dark Tower might have been.  We see several tries at this image, or several "accounts" in Tolkien's corpus.  The first is Thangorodrim, Morgoth's "dark tower," where he sits "on hate enthroned."  The second, and like unto it, is Sauron's original keep at Tol Sirion.  This is the dark tower before which Luthien, in all her frailty, stands and lays the deepest pits bare with her song (an image oddly reminiscent of protestant poets like Spenser, Bunyan, and Wesley).  Building on these two images, Tolkien constru...

SNES as Money Well Spent: Platypus Nostalgia

I got my Super Nintendo Entertainment System when I was eleven years old.  That's a couple years after it first came out.  The occasion was a little dramatic: to celebrate the end of a two-and-a-half year course of treatment for cancer.  I had no idea that it would be waiting for me at home after the final doctors visit.  It was a nice spring day, the trees were waving gently in the breeze outside the bay windows.  With a cup of tea resting on the coffee table, I set down to play.  What was that first game?  It was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past .  Around twenty years later, my SNES still works as does that Zelda cartridge.  It's been a long way from boyhood in Southern Connecticut to manhood in North Houston, but I'm still playing. Why am I still playing?  There were stretches when I didn't.  Many times, I've just been too busy.  There were also seasons when it felt embarrassing to still be playing video games....