Posts Tagged ‘lit hum’
[UPDATED] Lit Hum instructor gave passage ID info to students before final exam
Updated, 7:51 p.m.: Ivan Lupic, the Lit Hum professor who distributed information on the passage IDs before the exam, is defending his actions. In an email to Spec’s Jeremy Budd and Bwog’s Conor Skelding, Lupic writes, “I did not disclose any part of the exam to my students. As instructed, I informed them about the structure of the exam, and handed out a sheet I prepared as a prompt for our discussion of the enormous amount of literature we have read this semester.” Read the full email:
Dear Conor, dear Jeremy,
I am surprised by your inquiries. As you probably know, the Lit Hum instructors received an email from Gareth Williams around 3:30 today informing them that the ID section of the exam should not be graded since information about it has been leaked. The email explained that the sheet that is apparently in circulation does not contain the passages included in the exam but passages coming from neighboring pages. Nonetheless, the Core Office decided to take immediate action. More »
Sing, O Muse, of some sappy story
This week, The Eye’s Marlee Fox discusses Nicholas Sparks movies, their commercial viability, and why we even bother hating on this genre of romantic comedy in the first place since we’re probably still going to see all the movies anyway. We started wondering about why it is that the things that entertain us just seem to have less substance than they used to, which got us thinking… What if the things we read in the Core were more like those novels that Sparks seems to bang out every two months or so? Here are some of your favorite Lit Hum books, reimagined as rom-coms. Which sure would be a whole lot easier to get through at 3 a.m. the night before class. Especially if Ryan Gosling was playing Odysseus.
How I (almost) ruined my liberal arts education by not so much as opening The Iliad
August 2011.
School was set to start in only a few days, so I finally sat down to read the Iliad. I got through the first page before I dozed off, but chalked it up to not sleeping enough the night before and tried again the next day.
This time, I got distracted by the Weather Channel.
“It’s okay,” I convinced myself upon realizing that move-in was the next day and I still hadn’t gotten past Book Two, “I’ll have all of NSOP to catch up before classes start.”
A week later, I was sitting in my bed twenty minutes before my first Lit Hum class, desperately reading the Wikipedia article on the Iliad because I’d run out of time to read the Sparknotes. More »
The Question Asker
Last week you learned about the I’m-not-a-hipster Hipster, the friend (or enemy) you’ve never seen without a fedora, weird scarf, or obnoxious apathetic spirit. Today we discuss the person practically everyone hates, the Question Asker.
You know who I’m talking about. We all know that person in class who makes you want to say, “Oh, I didn’t know we got a new professor. I bet nobody ever thought about the similarities between The Aeneid and The Inferno, maybe you should teach the class…LOL NOT.”
What you’ll hear them say
The Statement Question (said at random, not in response to anything): “Correct me if I’m wrong, but…[insert useless statement here that somehow uses the term 'heteronormative' or 'social construct'].”
The Personal Anecdote That is Obviously Not a Question: “You know, Don Quixote’s independent spirit really reminds me of this time when my sister and I were on the playground and…” Okay who am I kidding, it’s always the GS students, “You know, this scene with Aeneas really reminds me of the day in 1985 when Ronald Reagan and I were playing shuffleboard…” More »
How my liberal arts education ruined reading
Look out every Wednesday for a new installment of The Eye’s recurring series: How my liberal arts education ruined… This week: Reading.
It’s official. Lit Hum has ruined reading for me. The class that’s supposed to be all about celebrating the greatest works of writing ever produced by Western society, Lit Hum was supposed to be a literature lover’s dream come true, but it has killed my love of reading. Destroyed it. Annihilated it. Well, not really, but it’s made it pretty damn hard to keep up. More »
On Delbanco and the Core
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Andrew Delbanco’s words the other night at the Italian Academy, and I can’t help but feel that he’s sort of right in addressing what he sees as threats to the Core—actually, he’s totally right. Underclassmen, particularly, would do well to heed his warnings.
On Monday evening, the Mendelson Family Professor of American Studies addressed an audience of roughly one hundred people, and he let it be known at the outset of his speech that his words would not be gentle. Talking specifically about the Core, Delbanco said that “bloated class size … threatens to erode the distinction between the discussion and the lecture.” More broadly, the college runs the risk of losing relevance if we fail to recognize this. More »
Does Orlando Bloom have better abs than Achilles? The first Lit Hum lecture has the answer
Hahn Chang, CC ’15, was at yesterday’s first Lit Hum lecture of the year. His reflection is below.
Over 1100 students, spanning 49 states (except poor old…whichever state isn’t represented) entered carrying 1099 copies of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Iliad. Being the one person who had put all his notes in the incorrect version of The Iliad (Robert Fagles’ version), I felt a tad embarrassed as I sat alongside my fellow 2015 CC’ers. Professor Christia Mercer, chair of Lit Hum, introduced us to our Lit Hum journey—the paradoxes we would untangle, and the questions we would answer in our search for wisdom in an examined life. After reviewing the sexual innuendo in the theatrical poster for Troy and setting up the five big questions for our year of Lit Hum, Professor Mercer divided us into groups to answer some of these questions based on Iliad excerpts we (were supposed to have) read this summer. More »
Academic dishonesty in Lit Hum?
All Literature Humanities students received an email from Chair Christia Mercer today warning against plagiarism and academic dishonesty in the class. According to the message, “there have been a number of cases of academic dishonesty in the past few weeks.” The email continues, “I have asked Lit Hum instructors to be attentive to these matters.” So watch out first-years, SEAS sophomores, and transfers, and make sure that essay on Montaigne’s use of impotency doesn’t look too much like your friend’s from John Jay.
Full email after the jump. More »