Teaching British Romanticism in China
17 Oct 2009 Leave a Comment
in Teaching Tags: alchemy, education, Hermes, Luddites, poetry, revolution, Romanticism
I’ve been procrastinating. A recent trip to Montana left me in a swoon. Now it was just a Movable Feast. But I needed to get back on track and prepare a lecture on American Romanticism & New England Transcendentalism. As I wrote this students were reading excerpts from The Scarlet Letter, The Raven, Song of Myself, &, Moby Dick. Each excerpt consisted of just 4-10 pages because that was all to their anthology. Luckily I was here to remedy the situation with my “traveling library”: 3 Norton anthologies, and several paperback novels.
So this unit on Romanticism wrapped up the first half the semester. We started with Thoreau’s “Reading” to frame the semester. Then we read The Alchemist. It was a simple allegorical novel written in 1988, but as I read it again and discussed it with the class it fit perfectly into the curriculum as a warm-up exercise. The story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd on a road trip to fulfill his dream, practically introduced Romanticism. Clever readers saw that it was a very Romantic text, building on the ideas of Thoreau and Transcendentalism.
Understanding Thoreau
01 Oct 2009 Leave a Comment
in Podcasts Tags: adventure, alchemy, close reading, critical thinking, education, journey, liberal arts, Literature, nature, self-reliance, Thoreau
In this literature class I help Chinese university students decipher passages in Thoreau’s essay, “Reading,” pointing out that it may take multiple visits to his works — a journey over a span of years — to gain more understanding. I also answer a student’s question into why Thoreau thought reading the classics, preferably in the original Greek and Roman, was so important.
Traditional Chinese Medicine & Elizabethan Theatre
24 Sep 2009 1 Comment
in Teaching Tags: alchemy, Bartleby, Bee-Bee, chi, death, Drama, education, fate, freedom, Gee, Julius Caesar, life, Literature, madness, magic, Project Gutenberg, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare, TCM, The Congo, theatre, Traditional Chinese Medicine, tragedy, troll, undead, Vachal Lindsay, yin and yang
With 16 teaching hours per week and a four day weekend it seemed that I had an abundance of free time. There were no office hours required, but I provided nine hours during evenings throughout the week for students wanting to talk about literature, culture, or life. It had to be evenings because the studentry were in classes all day long, day after day. But despite this I was practically on sabbatical.
I had the free time to get literary, practice yoga, explore grimy Chenzhou, and plan my upcoming Tibet expedition. I contacted the Xiangnan University medicine school faculty to meet with them for a tour of their facilities, and learn about the Chinese health care system. It would make for another podcast. And I researched online. Research was the first step to finding out what I wanted to learn and explore.
Before I contacted the medicine school, I acquainted myself with Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The internet enabled me to consult the starry forest of the night, and find homeostatic balance between yin and yang, anima and animus. The stars aligned and those who had the sight could decipher them and see the interrelationship between the macrocosmos and the microcosmos. I felt chi flow around me, through me. But I was not a Jedi yet.
