Wednesday, April 15, 2009

2,400 year old dirty jokes

Here is my pattern for teaching Lysistrata:

1. Before the semester, make a syllabus including Lysistrata.  It seems like a good idea at the time.

2. A few weeks before Lysistrata is scheduled, look at the syllabus and think "How are we supposed to talk about that?"

3. During the time that Lysistrata is scheduled, spend my free moments fretting up ways to get through class.

4. After we're finished with Lysistrata, and our coverage of it in class goes reasonably well (it usually does), think "Well, that went well: we actually raised some good, important issues that are extremely relevant to this class."

5. Lose all notes taken for this preparation, and forget everything that I did that seemed to work well.*

6. Prepare a lit syllabus for the next semester including Lysistrata: it seems like a good idea at the time.

*I'm working on eliminating this step.

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