Changing of the Winds

I haven't posted since before the summer started. It's been a long time and there have been a number of changes in my life over the past few months. A massive one is that I've changed disciplines from classics to philosophy, taking and MA in classics and essentially starting over from square one on the way to getting a philosophy degree.

This was a particularly difficult decision. There were many different considerations on either side of the question. I will not go over them here. The main thing, is that I wanted to teach the actual philosophy in Plato, rather than only getting to teach the Apology or the Symposium as a second year Greek text. With the ever shrinking classics departments, very few positions exist for ancient philosophers and many of those have gone, in recent years, to people who work on ancient science.

I'll have some updates on my adventures in the new department and working as a research assistant for one of the big deal professors in my department. Stay tuned.

And the best part is, I just got an email that my MA diploma is ready for pickup!

Stage Fright

On Tuesday, I have to give my presentation to my research seminar. I'm really nervous. However, my nerves do not come from a lack of speaking skills (I was a nationally ranked debater) or a lack of preparation (my research is done, my talk will be done soon). So why the nerves? Well, it's the people.

When I gave parts of my thesis at conferences my senior year in college, I knew that some of the people in the audience would know my topic thoroughly, while others may have only had a passing acquaintance. In those circumstances, I tried to aim my talk directly at the middle; I included enough details to sound well-researched while providing enough background to make it interesting for everyone else. Here, I'm not so lucky. The audience is only about 15 people. They are all fellow students in various arenas of classics, but I have no idea what to expect in terms of their knowledge about Plato. If I assume too much knowledge, my Q&A will be embarrassingly silent. This is what happened when I gave a totally unrelated presentation in my Sallust class a few weeks ago [1]. Conversely, if I try to go to broad, my topic will look like a wild generalization rather than a careful and nuanced interpretation.

I'm just ranting, really. My topic is set...nothing I can do now except hope it goes well. And, at least, I get to run an interpretation of a couple of geometric art pieces past a couple of specialists (there are two girls who work on early Greek art in the seminar). And who knows, maybe I'll get lucky and someone will passionately disagree with my reading and we'll have a nice discussion.

I've got my fingers crossed...

Endnotes

1. I gave a presentation on an article by R. Sklenár called "La République des Signes: Caesar, Cato, and the Language of Sallustian Morality" (JSTOR). The people in my class had read the article, and I assumed they had a passing familiarity with Saussure (I didn't want to talk down to anyone). Anyway, most of the class had been confused by the article so even when I dissected it more thoroughly (after asking if people had understood the portion about Cato to which I got a resounding "no"), my discussion questions still elicited silence from almost everyone except my professor. As everyone in the class is intelligent, I worked really hard to come up with complex and interesting perspectives so that I would bring something interesting to the table, but I didn't consider my audiences' lack of sleep, etc and it backfired.

Over the Past Weeks

I have been incredibly busy starting school and returning to teaching after a few weeks of break. I thought I would catch everyone up on some general updates.

School: I am only taking three classes at the moment, but it is a full course load in terms of units. I am taking Sallust's Bellum Catelinae, Greek Prose Composition, and a seminar on classical research. It is a reasonable amount of work, although the vast amount of work in prose composition makes up the majority of my load. I am also planning on reading little bits of Homer with Properitus II once we finish the Crito. I also am going to attempt to work on my thesis revisions and start on my term paper for my classical research seminar.

Teaching: I am teaching a new class. It is an interesting group because I teaching in a different geographical area than usual (near school rather than near home).

Bread: I made another loaf of my newest sourdough recently. It was also fantastic, but I forgot to take photos. I am going to try to make Francis Olive's City Bread this weekend because it looks fantastic and I should have a little bit of time.

Circumnavegating the Wall #2: Calculus

By the time I took calculus in high school, I was quite a good math student. I loved calculus and I could not wait to take more math in college. As I mentioned in "Cicumnavegating the Wall" in multivariable calculus I hit a wall and had to drop the course. It just did not make any sense. Consequently I pursued my other great passion, classics, and graduated with a BA. Math was no longer in the direct path to my future.

Being out of school made me realize that while institutions may organize education in order to place their students on particular paths, there is no reason that self-education must follow those same paths. So there was noting barring me from taking more math. As I promised in "New Year, New Possibilities," I registered at my local community college. Realizing that I needed a math refresher (and because of timing commitments) I decided to take Calculus I and I will move up through the math classes from there (they offer three semesters of calculus followed by linear algebra and differential equations). I took a big step and went to my first class today.

The past week, I have been nervous and annoyed about my decision to start the classes. There was no need. Calculus (at least the evening class I am taking) is a decently paced introduction taught by a middle aged man with a thick Indian accent and an efficient, clipped style. The class is entirely lecture, although after every few sentences he asks "is this ok?" which seems to translate to "understand?" and then he moves on without waiting for a reply. If a hand is raised he will eventually call on the person and he seems happy enough to answer genuine questions, but my best guess would be that he has taught this class for many years and simply wants to get the material to the students in the most expedient manner possible.

The students also surprised me. In the discussion before class, I ascertained that most of the students were at the college with the hopes of transferring into the local university. Many were in the class because they want to pursue degrees in engineering. I found them to be engaged with the class and intelligent. Although first impression are often misleading, I believe that these students will probably continue to be good classmates. I was really nervous about fitting in, but a few students asked me questions about the nature of the class during the break so I guess I must have looked like just another student. Luckily I fit the profile of the typical girl in the class (interestingly the class is a 50-50 gender split): skinny jeans, t-shirt, and boots (although I had knee-high instead of the ankle-height boots sported by the rest of the women).

Any of you who read my new year post noticed that I was also supposed to be taking German because it is one of the classes necessary to pursue a more advanced degree in classics. As it turned out, the class was based on conversational German and used a textbook reputed for avoiding tricky things like grammar. As much as it would be nice to be able to talk to people, what I need is academic German, and specifically German for reading. I realized that the money that I would be spending on the class itself could be spent instead on approximately 34 nonfat lattes which, if I could find a coffee shop, could allow me to spend that time more effectively trying to teach myself reading German. So my thought is that I will compare a few different textbooks. At the moment I am leaning toward Jannach's German for Reading Knowledge, which I have put on hold at the local library. If anyone has a recommendation, I would greatly appreciate it.

New Year, New Possibilities

I decided to take more math. It is a New Year and I think that means that it is time for me to start something new.

One thing that I hear a lot from college and post-college female friends is that they miss science or math. This seems to break stereotype. Going to an all-girls high school, I had always heard that single-gender education and tailoring classes to "the way that girls learn best" allows girls to feel comfortable in math or science (or any field) and should help confidence and begin to rectify the gender gap in the sciences. Yet, there seems to be something wrong with that theory. A number of girls who enjoyed science in high school but went into humanities, art, or social sciences instead.

Some of them probably had issues in their math or science classes like I did (as I mentioned in "Circumnavigating the Wall"). Some of them just decided another path was better, and now have changed their minds, or wish they could reincorporate math and science back into their life. The real problem seems to be that the sciences require constant devotion. To finish as a physics major in four years at my alma mater, you had to start immediately as a freshman, otherwise you could not graduate in time. However, students often changed their majors to the humanities or social sciences after the first year. The problem was not that there were less requirements-- it was that classes in the humanities and social sciences can be taken concurrently. For example, one could take a 200-level Shakespeare class, a 300-level Chaucer class and a 400-level Literary theory class all at the same time, provided instructor consent and student devotion to the subject. With math and science, there is much more of an order of things; each level builds on the previous one and requires a rigid line throughout. Most of my female friends have a large variety of interests [1], and either did not want to sacrifice most of their other interests to science or were not sure that was the path they wanted to venture down.

So what should this group of girls do, who like science but have BAs or are working toward BAs in other fields? Taking science classes after a BA is regarded by other people as "useless," "inefficiant," or "a waste of time and money." I decided that I don't care. Today I registered at a local college and when my registration is processed I am going to sign up for a calculus class. I will probably never need advanced mathematics in my life, just as I will probably never need to know the philosophical standpoint of Pierre Bourdieu, which I studied in my Lit Theory class, but I think that it will enrich me as a person.

I picked the college because it was nearby, but also because it decided to offer German. None of the programs in my area had been offering it. I guess it's because German is primarily useful for classicists and students of philosophy, neither of which really exist at the local colleges [2]. German will help me get into graduate school and will also allow me (hopefully) to eventually read the German philosophers and writer's I like in their original language.

I hope the classes are not so full that I cannot get into them. Wish me luck!

Endnotes

1. There are probably males in this position as well, I just do not know any of them. Most of the guys I know who have varied interests seem to have varied interests within the humanities, or are science majors who take a few classes in other disciplines but have never wavered in their devotion to science.
2. There is a big university near me (which has great programs in both classics and philosophy), but unfortunately one cannot take many classes there unless one is an actual student at the university.

Illuminated Manuscript: Updating the Classics for a Medieval Audience

The lecture that I attended tonight was "How the French Made History: Manuscripts and Images of the Pas in Medieval France" given by Anne D. Hedeman. Andy (or Anne D.), as she was called by the person who introduced her, is a professor of art history at the University of Illinois. She seemed extremely friendly and accessible, while still communicating the scholarly tone of her work. Her lecture was also extremely well-organized and easy to follow.

Her lecture focused on the phenomenon of re-imagining the modern relevance of the past as seen in French illuminated manuscripts. She asked two questions at the beginning to focus her lecture:

1. What role do images play in updating the texts for a contemporary medieval audience?
2. What visual language is used in order to communicate messages to the audience.

She explained that to answer these questions scholars must look at the physical objects of the books, as well as the process of creation of the book and its intended audience. The books in which these images were presented were a large-scale collaborative effort. For these highly-decorated aristocratic volumes, the patron would hire a book-maker/book-seller who would, in turn, employ scribes and artists to make the physical volume. There are three ways that the collaboration created this visual language:

1. Inter-visual and inter-textual references that demonstrate links between texts.
2. Structuring the visual cycle of images in the texts themselves.
3. A unified visual rhetoric in a self-controlled and self-conscious references to past images.

The texts that she used were generally Roman histories which had been translated into French for French royalty in order to create roll-models for virtuous kingship. The images that illustrated the text updated the garments, palaces, and tombs of the Roman parallels into medieval equivalents. This brought political equivalents for kingship, reapplying the lesson to contemporary situations.

The catalog from the exhibit [1]

Endnotes

1. The lecture went on with the Getty exhibit "Imagining the Past in France."

Liminal Characters: A Group of Friendly, Intellectual Eccentrics

Indo-European Linguistics is a small, and not particularly popular, field. I once heard from a grad student in a history department that the historians thought the classicists were intense and intellectual in a way that was impressive, unnerving, and furthered their image as social misfits. She said that the classicists felt that the Indo-European studies students were impressive and unnerving in a similar way and never came out in the light of day [1]. In stereotypical fashion, I made the assumption that the IE people were going to be unattractive, socially-deficient, overly-technical misfits. I was pleasantly surprised at what I discovered.

Over the two days, there must have been about 70 people who were at the conference, although there were never more than 40 people in the conference room at any one time, and most of the lectures drew about 25. The group of professors in the room was diverse in specific interest, but they were primarily men over the age of 60 of European descent. In general, they were also sweet, although I think that they were a little suspicious of me [2]. The professors were split between those who were smartly dressed in suits, and those in shorts and t-shirts, which was amusing to me.

The rest of the room was made up largely of (I presume) graduate students in the field. Those of the students who were presenting could be divided into generative linguists and non-generative linguists and this correlated to hipster [3] and non-hipster (respectively). Even though I did not necessarily understand (or like) the methodology of the generativist hipsters, I found some of them charming and some of their presentations to be interesting. There was one by a particularly hipster student which used some kind of a crazy Apple-based web function that actually made me seasick because it was moving and changing sizes as he spoke, and he spoke very quickly. However, I found him moderately charming and I think I would have found his presentation interesting if he had not been speeding through it. Aside from the hipsters, there were a pretty diverse group of attendees from girls in tight suit-dresses to girls in hippie-style floor-length skirts to guys dressed like trendy business men to guys who looked as though they had hardly noticed their attires as they put it on. I noticed, oddly, that among the attendees and moderators, the gender split was about 50%-50% (surprising for an old-boys-club-style field), but the presenters were only about 20% female.

Overall, the conference was enjoyable and the people were eccentric and friendly.

Endnotes

1. At my alma mater, there were majors that were ranked in a similar fashion (although many majors such as chem, biochem, physics, classics, and history-lit seemed to all but themselves at the top of the "crazy" pyramid). There was also the opposite side of this chain, which were the majors that everyone made fun of for neither being difficult nor academically rigorous. Psychology (excepting the neuropsychology people who most people spoke of with respect) usually landed at the bottom of the heap as the most disparagingly-spoken-of major. However, above psych it depended on the person that you were talking to as to which way they ranked the departments.
2. They had some right to be suspicious. Not that I meant any harm, obviously. Rather, I overheard some one of the graduate students say that someone in the department had proposed the idea of having name-tags for the conference, but the proposal was roundly rejected on the grounds that "we all knew each other." The conference was free and open to the public, but I guess they expected no one new would show up. 
3. I find it pretty hilarious that my spell-check does not accept "Indo-European" or "neuropsychology," but it is perfectly happy with "hipster." What does that say?

The Joys and Pitfalls of Self-Directed Education

In May, I graduated from college with my BA in Classics. I decided to strike out on my own for a year (and looking increasingly like two years) in order to solidify my education, gain some work and teaching experience, and choose my path forward into academia. Exploring education on my own, and teaching my own classes, continues to provide me with a new perspectives on the benefits and drawbacks to institutionalized learning and also on educational resources.

Here are some of the great things I have found while learning on my own:

• Skype is awesome. 
• Although Cerinthus is away, I can still ask him questions and get answers from the experts he has access to in Greece and Italy (see Cerinthus Reports on both Fragments of Sulpicia and Platonic Psychology).
• Propertius II and I work on Horace together over skype as well and we can share screen, send information, and interact.
• On a broader educational level, Sugata Mitra's work which he explained in his TED Talk (which I highly recommend if you have not seen it) employs Skype through a method known as the Granny Cloud. This employs British grandmothers to watch over and encourage students using internet resources for the purpose of education and has proved to be an effective tool
• I can read and research whatever I want, which leads me to exciting new areas of research.
• As I was doing some more in-depth research on grave monuments to solidify work on my thesis, I stumbled across Ian Morris' Burial and Ancient Society: The Rise of the Greek City-State (which can be downloaded for free if you have access to ACLS and some minimal computer skills). The book is awesome so far, but I realized I have almost no background whatsoever in archaeology. This lead me to find another book, An Archaeology of Greece, by Anthony Snodgrass, which is currently public from University of California Press.
• There are a number of websites and blogs that provide immense amounts of information and there are even more under construction.
• The UC Berkeley Webcast website has some fabulous classes by incredible professors that one can listen to via podcast. They also have campus events and speakers. A truly phenomenal resource.
• I have a whole list of classics resources under "Interesting Links" on the left-hand side of Platonic Psychology.
• Wikimedia Commons provides images for people to use. I employed these to find examples of for myself and then to provide examples to me readers for Proto-Corinthian pottery.
• There are also some unfinished resources which may still be valuable:
• Wikiversity (and its Classic Department) attempts to provide class outlines and resources to individuals who want to learn from the teachers who are willing to make them. Wikiversity says on its main page: "Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning. We invite teachers, students, and researchers to join us in creating open educational resources and collaborative learning communities."
• The Homer Multitext is an incredible resource put together by the Center for Hellenic Studies, which, according to the website, "seeks to present the textual transmission of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey in a historical framework. Such a framework is needed to account for the full reality of a complex medium of oral performance that underwent many changes over a long period of time. These changes, as reflected in the many texts of Homer, need to be understood in their many different historical contexts. The Homer Multitext provides ways to view these contexts both synchronically and diachronically." This is an incredible resource for Homer scholars.
• Everything you do is directed toward your needs (or the needs of those with whom you study).
• Something I really need to work on is my Greek and Latin reading fluidity and pronunciation, as well as building my vocabulary. Although all of my classes in college attempted to do a little of this, none of them focused on it. After ascertaining from those who I considered experts in each area what resources I should be using, I have been able to at least begin to work on these areas.
• Furthermore, I can use old syllabi to review precisely those assignments I did not quite understand (or wanted to look into further).

 

However, there are also inevitable problems with learning on my own:

• There are no teachers and no deadlines. I have to be ready to set firm deadlines as well as find resources among friends, books, and the internet to provide instruction. It is incredibly easy to slip up or procrastinate. I have slipped up a number of times, but I remind myself that cheating only hurts me, which motivates me to work harder.
• I have to create my own evidence of my efforts. Unforuntately, I cannot get a degree from Sulpicia University and I am not graded in my endeavors, even when I use resources like UC Berkeley Webcast, so I have to demonstrate my knowledge effective and produce something. Blogging has been one thing that provides a certain amount of accountability and shows some amount of my effort, but I need to also work on getting something published so that I can show it to a graduate school.
• There are no school facilities. Although I can drive to my local university library to check out books or search for information (and I do), I do not have the same incredible facilities that I had in college, e.g. I cannot use an inter-library loan program nor do I have campus visiting lecturers nor easily-accessible students and professors in other disciplines. However, Skype, email, and access to my parents has helped ameliorate this, because I can contact scholars and peers as well as having greater access to cars and trips to concerts, lectures, conferences, museums, and even out of town to find wonderful opportunities.

But for Want of a Good Coffee Shop...

I love working in coffee shops. In my mind, they provide the perfect environment because:

1. You're not disturbed, but you're also not alone (which can impede work because all you want to do is go and find people to avoid it).
2. There is coffee which increases both comfort and productivity
3. If you are hungry, there is usually food. The food costs money, so it dissuades you from eating to avoid your work, but you also know it's there if you need it so you cannot use the excuse about needing to go get food.
4. The white noise of music or conversation is there for you, but you can easily drown it out with your own music.
5. You look super cool sitting there with a scholarly book, math/science problem sets, classical poetry and a dictionary, etc
6. There might be interesting people there to notice if you need a moment of a distraction before you get back to work, and you don't look like you're paying attention to them, because you're working
7. Every good coffee shop has its own unique appeal.

I rarely went to the campus coffee shops when I was at school. The coffee was pretty great, but unfortunately I knew a lot of people who went there and worked there, which caused it to violate my first benefit of coffee shops (listed above). So instead, I used to walk about 0.8mi to my favorite coffee shop.

The shop had one long window that face the street so that the light came in and a person sitting in the chairs could see people walking by. For people-watchers like me, this was an ideal place. The coffee was generally of good quality and their multi-grain bagels were phenomenal. I used to just sit their for hours, working on my thesis or reading for one of my other classes.

The best thing about the coffee shop was the people. The baristas were lovely; they had nice senses of humor,  and they were young, friendly, and liberal. The population of the coffee shop was mostly made up of senior citizens-- most of whom had a strong christian background. The coffee shop was located in a predominantly christian neighborhood; there were seven churches in all within a three block radius of the shop. They had coffee every day. Because of the routine, they knew each other well and spent long hours drinking coffee and talking about their various childhoods as each were raised in different christian sects. There were even a christian quilting group that met there. There was also another group. There was a young web-designer, also a regular, with her dreadlocked-hair, her vulcan eyebrows, her homemade clothes, and her energetic seven-year old son. On the weekends, there were also a number of fathers with daughters and sons, often giving the children's mothers and hour or so of quiet time. And, of course, there were college students from my school and others the area. What was pleasantly surprising was the friendly ease with which the two groups interacted: the young liberal quasi-hippies and the old, christian conservatives. I do not think I have ever seen opposed groups at such peace and so pleasantly enjoying the company of one another.

I felt so at home there. I remember coming in with my laurels-- a display that I had fninished my thesis-- and one of the barristas asked what the occasion was. When I told them I had finished my thesis, the whole coffee shop applauded. It was so lovely. Then I enjoyed my coffee and bagel while reading for one of my last classes.

Unfortunately, since I moved, I do not have a new coffee shop in which I can translate. I really miss that atmosphere. There are three in the area that I have thus far discovered: one is too noisy, one is too sketchy, and one has these horrible aluminum tables that make a loud banging noise every time someone sitting at them moves. The search continues.

Updates: Kindle and Free Books

I wrote two blogposts of the last few weeks which I feel are in need of updating: A Bibliophile's Review of the Kindle DX and Problems With Free Books. (I also recently updated the Blog on the Minoan Octopus Jar.)

Kindle for Cooks

One of the things that I did not mention in my original review is my use of the kindle for cooking. I use it in two ways. One is to download and put recipes on my kindle and stand it up on my counter-top. This only works, obviously if one downloads a cookbook or creates a PDF or MOBI document. I used a particular case, a platform kindle case, that allowed me to stand the kindle upright so that I could read the recipes easily. The other way that I used the kindle was to have it read to me while I was cooking. I downloaded a free version of The History of the Peloponnesian War and had the Kindle read to me while I was cooking so that I did not waste time [1]. It was pretty helpful, except for the pronunciation of the Greek names. For example, Themistocles (the-mist-oo-cleez) was pronounced (the-mis-do-cls). Although the humanoid voices can be kind of annoying, it gets the information across and entertainment can be found by poking fun at it.

As a random technological sidenote, I have had my phone for 6 years and it is finally beginning to break down (people cannot hear me when I answer the phone and I have to shout, etc). Does anyone have a good recommendation?

A Clarification and More Amazing Free Books

I realized that I never explained the meaning of the title "The Problems of Free Books." The idea is that Google Books provides some downloadable free books as well as providing essentially an enormous, no-membership-required digital library that allows the reader to browse through editions of books online for the purposes of research, as well as for the ability to preview books online. For any other book, there is the difficulty of finding the book in the first place, making sure that it is the correct edition, etc. Speaking of free ebooks, there is another Amazing Site (referred to me by Propertius II) that has a bunch of academic books marked "public" which can be read online.

Endnotes

1. At the time when I was doing this, I was taking a class on Thucydides: Book 1 in Greek, I was attempting to read the rest of Thucydies' History of the Peloponnesian War for context. Usually I would read the beautiful Landmark Edition, which was a wonderful gift from my parents, but I ended up just trying to breeze through the kindle edition, and look at the Landmark for reference.