Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Syllabic Cycles"
 |
| [a] Columbus...day...time RF |
We ended yesterday's post with an admission that there really is a great deal of reading on my syllabuses. So what, exactly, is "a lot" or "a great deal?" Does that mean, well, what does it mean? Recently, a colleague, when answering a question about what a new instructor might expect to be the norms at our little college, replied that s/he typically assigned an article (twenty to forty pages) for every class session, no matter how many complaints it elicited. Two students—also in the room, and veterans of many of my classes—just looked at me for what seemed like several minutes. More on that later.
 |
| [b] A lot RF |
So what is "a lot?" Well, let me tell you a story.
Let's draw lots, so to speak.
You have already heard about Professor Marshall Sahlins handing out syllabuses at the beginning of a course called "Structure and History" in the autumn of 1989. Let's flash back two more years, to the very first days of my very first term of graduate school at the University of Chicago. Even before the term started, I had sought out Sahlins, seeking permission to take the core sequence in anthropological theory that served as a key experience for every single person seeking a doctorate in anthropology at UC. I was in a program known as the Committee on Social Thought, but wanted to do all of the work in anthropology at Chicago that I could while studying Plato, Shakespeare, 司馬遷, Michelet, and Kant (to name a few).
Professor Sahlins gave me a big stack of stapled papers (I thought inwardly that he was handing me the course syllabus, even though he never spoke the word). I noticed two things, and each has played an enormously important role in my teaching life ever since, even though they are almost completely unrelated. The first has to do with how I learned, from that day onward, to think about the history of anthropology. The course began in earnest with readings from Hobbes and Locke. "That's early" I thought to myself, especially when I considered Robert Redfield (1897-1958)—one of the founders of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought—to be "early." Hobbes and Locke? Hell, they were history, it seemed to me. I was intrigued by the idea of starting an anthropological theory course with them, and more fascinated, still, when I saw Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Hegel before I entered my relative comfort zone of August Comte, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber. I had thought about the prehistory of my discipline, but I had never considered that it started much earlier than the Crimean War...give or take a half-century.
 |
| [c] North shore RF |
Something else started to ease its way into my consciousness as I sat in Professor Sahlins's office, looking over the syllabus and listening to the formidable anthropologist's whap-thwap verbal volleys. I was already entranced by the command he had over the field, at least as he saw it, and this was even before he uttered the most memorable line I ever heard from him (it's about kinship charts, but I'm saving it for another time—sorry). I listened to Sahlins and turned the pages. Even after page two (when we reached the nineteenth century), it began to seep into my thinking that we had already covered almost two-dozen books.
Yes, two-dozen. Twenty-four. A book a month for two years. Whatever helps you comprehend the enormity of it all. Twenty-four.
At the end of page two.
Slowly, I turned the pages, even as the professor's words took hold. In my only remaining period of careful analysis during this forty-five minute session, I did a little bit of rapid arithmetic. The term had not yet begun, but the course would commence the next Tuesday. What Chicago still calls "quarters" would end for fall term in a little more than ten weeks, and that included "finals." In terms of the course as a whole, from the first day students gathered to the day of the final paper, there would be seventy days. Seventy. Ten weeks of seven days, including classes, other classes, sleep, eating, getting to know Chicago (or not), family intrusions, and trying to understand how all of this work fit into a long-term plan to be a professor someday. Seventy days. 7-0.
Later that evening, I actually counted the books on what I called the syllabus. From Locke through Rousseau, on to Marx, climbing to Weber, and then bit-by-bit through the rest of the early history of anthropological theory (the course would continue the next ten-week quarter, covering most of the twentieth century), they kept on accumulating, page-after-page. When it was all done (on page nine, as I remember it), I had my tally, recounted as thoroughly as any county in Florida should have been during the 2000 election. And there it was, barely within two digits.
 |
| [d] Central RF |
九十. Neunzig. Quatre-vingt-dix.
девяносто. Ninety.
That's right. There were ninety books on Marshall Sahlins's syllabus. As he later told us, we needed to read "about a book and a third a day." This is where it gets difficult. Unless I am missing something in my memory, neither he nor any other professor ever walked us through just how we were supposed to do that—how we were expected to handle too much stuff in a much smaller chunk of time. Heck, if we read slowly and carefully through all ninety books, we would probably not have time for much of anything besides a little Harold's chicken on Saturday night and maybe (this was inconvenient, but exhilarating) watching the Minnesota Twins win their first World Series in franchise history.
Short of some baseball and chicken, it was all Hobbes-and-Locke, Hegel-and-Marx, Durkheim-and-Weber. It was all "anthro" theory, all of the time.
So, without going too far into the story of that autumn's readings—this I have also saved for another set of posts in another Round and Square forum—let's consider the question most central to our "Syllabic Cycles." How on earth is it possible to manage a reading load of ninety books in seventy days? Why would a professor be so mean (and this could be taken in two or more meanings of the term) as to punish students with that sort of iron(ic) cage? What kind of cruel-spirited professorial villain would ever do such a thing to new students about to enter a program, like little hatchlings entering the world where their very futures depend upon success in negotiating the choppy waters of the syllabus? What kind of teacher would do that to a student?
 |
| [e] Long lots friends RF |
Either a nasty S.O.B. or a very caring one.
Huh? I don't get it (I hear you cry). And on that note, we have reached the Round and Square internal word-count limit of "about" 1200 words. We'll need to stretch this introduction one more day. The Sahlins tale was worth it, if you ask me. We will bring this home tomorrow, with a story about how The Marshall's elaborate syllabus led, in turn, to my own long, involved, and sinuous syllabuses...and to the opening readings in my own history of anthropology courses.
Hint: It's about two thousand years before Hobbes, and the paired readings are from Greece and China.
See you tomorrow. Who would have thought that "syllabi" could "cycle" so? そう.
This is a multi-part introduction to the series "Syllabic Cycles." Click here for the other posts:
 |
| [f] Cycle so...RF |
No comments:
Post a Comment