Teaching Thursday: Reading Difficult Books

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been thinking a good bit about student reading lately. Much of this is prompted by various critiques of student reading habits, post-literate society, and my encounters with the Cornerstone program here at University of North Dakota. 

The proximate trigger to this was the recent article in the Atlantic by Walt Hunter titled “Stop Meeting Students Where They Are: What I learned when I finally started assigning the hard reading again.” The gist of the article is that students are willing to read more and harder works, if we assign them and support them. This has been my experience as well and led to me to gradually increase the amount and intensity of reading in my classes. This past semester, for example, I’ve not only assigned book length works in my Roman History course (Sallust Catiline, Apuleius, Augustine’s Confessions and Corippus), but also started a 1-credit student reading group based on Syme’s Roman Revolution.

Over the past week or so, I’ve started to contemplate a new approach to my Greek History class. Right now, the class is expansive starting with the Bronze Age and continuing to the Modern period. This is very fun to teach because is spares me from having to know anything at any real level of detail while still giving the students a context for our understanding of antiquity grounded in the Modern period. I don’t particularly want to abandon it forever, but I’m itching to experiment a bit. 

Here’s my experiment. What if I just assigned Herodotus and Thucydides. Each week, we’d discuss one book (with a few weeks where we’d have to double up to keep on track). Tuesday class would be focused on comprehension and review of the book. Thursday class would be about using the book as evidence for various arguments about Greek culture. There are good, contemporary, and affordable translations of these books. 

As for assessment, there would be a journaling component to the class where students would have to work both to summarize the book that they read, but also use the book to pose some hypotheses — about the author, about Greek society, about the writing of history, and about the past — that they would test in the subsequent books. These would help frame a midterm and a final paper based on Herodotus (at the midterm) and Thucydides (at the final). 

The advantages to this approach is that it would allow students to immerse themselves in two works fundamental to our understanding of Greek (and ancient history). It would liberate them from the what may sometimes feel like conflicting responsibilities in the classroom (managing lectures, secondary readings, content, writing assignments, and in-class discussions) and allow them to focus on a pretty straightforward schedule of reading, review, reflection, and discussion.  

The disadvantages are that the course would become rather narrow. It would assume a student could grasp these complex texts with a minimum of contextual framework. I could, of course, assign something like the Very Short Introductions to both Herodotus and Thucydides (which I’ve skimmed, but not thought about very deeply) or even offer students some secondary readings and supplemental lectures over the course of the semester. The risk with this, however, is decentering the primary sources.

The goals of a course like this are broad and even simplistic. First, I want students to know that they can read long, difficult texts. Second, I want students to gain experience reading, reflecting, and posing questions these texts. Finally, I want to support students as they work to write about these texts. 

There are a few risks for me. It is possible that the students struggle so much with these texts that it impairs our ability to discuss them. I’m not sure that this is likely, but I do know that when students struggle a bit, they can often lose confidence and then a snowball effect takes over. In particular, I will have to find ways to incentivize reading for students who are not comfortable speaking in the classroom. I will also have to guard against students getting bored with classroom discussion, by having a range of in-class activities that aren’t just loosely Socratic discussion. Finally, I have to determine whether I want to spend an entire semester with Herodotus and Thucydides. I enjoy both (well, the former more than the latter), but there are reasons why I didn’t become a historian of Classical Greece.