So, I admit I am a little skeptical about the Socratic Seminar process. I'm all for Socratic Method in pedagogy--but I'm always hesitant to buy into a teaching method that has this many rules involved. Good teaching is about flexibility and responding to the class--this method seems more like winding a key and letting the class go. It is open-ended, which I like, and relies on the students' responses--but still seems weirdly claustrophobic to me.
I also think that the point of a teacher in a seminar of any sort is to give input and act as a leader in a discussion, so stepping out of it entirely seems counter-intuitive. If the author of the article (whose name I cannot, unfortunately, remember) was asked to step out of the discussion by her students, maybe she just wasn't that good at teaching? Or, at least, choosing the wrong questions? I got the impression she was sticking to a list rather than responding to her students' discussion. But maybe I'm just remembering the bad stuff. I'm definitely looking forward to trying out this style of discussion today, since it's totally new to me.
On the books: Almost every single story in my book club is about death. And every one of them is hilarious, charming, sweet, or thought-provoking on the subject. Not one (in my opinion) is morbid or unnecessarily depressing. I started reading them on the way home from ASB, immediately after finishing a big fat book of Victorian Things... and at first it was so nice just to be reading fiction again that I was overcome with delight. And then the delight changed, and was actually at the stories themselves, rather than their genre. And then the headache from reading on a tiny screen in a dark car started, and I kept reading.
Note: This was written before the Book Club class, but is being posted afterwards.
I'm curious ... did it become a kind of thematic book club?
ReplyDeleteYou forgot about the Federalist Papers! Although I guess they can be about death... Death of local government, maybe?
ReplyDeleteKristin: Surprisingly, there wasn't all that much intertextual discussion... but I imagine if we'd had an infinite amount of time there would have been.
ReplyDeleteMary: I know, I was trying to think of a clever way to fit those in! I think you've nailed it, though.
I'm really interested to hear more about how your "death[ly]" conversations went! It sounds like every story had some really cool elements within it, and I think that that's the key to a great book club. While the topics may be really disparate (or in your case, really similar), there are common threads that link them, threads that have everything to do with our emotions, perceptions of reality, and opinions.
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