The Fall Classes

The semester began yesterday. I’m teaching "Introduction to Political Theory" and "Media and Politics".

This is the first time for Political Theory and I’m quite excited about it. I have a packed classroom with lots of students from last semester. The class fulfills a college requirement, so I have some biology and nursing students, along with a lot of political science majors. I have to find some middle road between them. We’re using a reader, which takes the best bits of Plato and Hobbes. Next Monday we’re going to start off slow. Just some Greek and Roman history and Pericles’ Funeral oration. Theory is the sort of class that can be dreadfully slow or great. It really depends on the students doing the readings. I hope they do the readings. I hope.

The second is class is a repeat, but I’m blowing up the syllabus from last semester and starting over. Last semester, I tried to do several weeks just on New Media. But the readings were of questionable quality. Everything before 2006 is dated.

Last semester, I had the students create a blog. It could be on any topic. They had to write 20 posts with links to other online sources. But it was too difficult to grade blogs on different topics, and students had to quickly learn about another topic that wasn’t related to the class. This time, all blogs will be on the topic of media, and I will assign them very specific topics for their posts. Example, "Describe and respond to one op-ed article in a mainstream paper. Or evaluate and compare two blogs."

I’m very excited about the coming semester.