Looking ahead to the fall semester

Collaboration in the classroom experiment, Fall 2011

This fall semester in my History 103 class I am going to try out group work again, but this time I would like to initiate better collaboration. History 103 is ambitiously titled "World History, from the Beginning to 1500" and trying to cover millennia of history in one semester is daunting. The first step in this experiment I'm going to take is to show the following 10-minute clip in class on the first day.

What should step #2 be?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU

17 students to Budapest

All the worries proved minor and the benefits were greater than expected. In short, going with 17 students to Hungary was wholly worth it.

Here we are checking under the hood of a Trabi (Trabant) at Memento Park, where nearly all the communist statues have been relegated, just outside Budapest.

All three of my classes are full now.

As of today, all three of my spring semester classes are full.
History 353 is the seminar that is going to Budapest during spring break.
History 354 is History of the Holocaust (which filled a long time ago).
History 391 is History of the Crusades.

Looking ahead to the spring semester

Here's my weekly schedule for spring 2010. I plan on working on my own research on Thursdays and/or Fridays.

Satire, the most honest form of writing

In History 351 we read an excerpt from Homo Sovieticus by Zinoviev and a student asked what exactly was satirical about it. In my explanation, I let slip that satires were the most honest genre. I was thinking that satires don't pretend to be anything they're not, that is, they acknolwedge that aren't accurately portraying or relating the ideas contained within them.

moral relativism and amoralism

Give me amoralism every time.

We had an interesting, if too brief, discussion in the capstone course about why historical context is important. As one student put it, "if you take anything out of its context, you aren't gonna understand it right." True, so true.

The question was presented in a chapter, from a book useful for getting such discussions started, in such a way as if there is ever any historical utility in making moral judgment about a historical context. To make a moral judgment indicates to me that the historian is not well enough aware of his/her own context. Amoralism is the more logical approach than moral relativism because moral relativism is simply another moral judgment.