The Classical Origins of Western Culture, popularly known as the "Core 1 Study Guide," was created to be utilised by students in Core Studies 1 at Brooklyn College. The text is keyed to distinct selections from ancient Greek and Roman literature in translation as chosen by the Classics Department, which staffs the sections of this course. The most important purpose of the Study Guide is to support students read the assigned texts with greater understanding and enable them to be much better ready for classroom discussions. The introductory material in every unit is intended to allow more class time to be spent on the analysis of the texts by lowering the want for lectures on background information and facts.
One issue that student faces when reading Greco-Roman literature for the first time is the lack of literary and historical context. This text in every of its chapters (every on a unique literary work) delivers information and facts about genre and where proper, historical and intellectual background. Some chapters (e.g., on the Iliad and the Aeneid) incorporate suggestions on the best way to read a specific work and explain basic terms and principles of interpretation.
One more function of this text is to aid the student develop the skill of reading a literary work closely. Every single chapter contains a section referred to as "Exercise for Reading Comprehension and Interpretation", which contains really specific questions about the text with numerical references for straightforward location of specific passages.1 Most of the questions just direct students to take into consideration carefully what exactly is going on in a little section of the text, while others ask them to create an interpretational judgment.
It should really also be noted that over the past thirteen years this text has also proved valuable to instructors inexperienced in teaching classics in translation by supplying an indication of some fundamental problems of interpretation in every work. The Study Guide, nevertheless, just isn't meant to be a collection of restrictive lesson plans; at most it is actually a point of embarkation for both teacher and student.
The initial impulse for putting an electronic version of the Core 1 Study Guide on the net was a desire to make this text, already available in a printed version, even more accessible to students and to call students' attention to other on line resources once they visited our departmental internet site. In recent years, even so, the Study Guide has begun to play a role inside the department's virtual Core experiment, in which 1 class meeting per week is replaced by on the web non-synchronous discussion by means of Caucus conferencing software.2 The benefit of this approach is that the twenty students registered in one of these unique sections are necessary to express their ideas on a given topic, whereas in a normal section of forty it can be incredibly tricky to have all students participate in the discussion. An additional benefit is the capability to deliver images to improve the discussion of texts without having the cumbersome and time-consuming medium of slides. For the reason that you can find fewer class meetings, the students in these experimental sections need to depend even much more on supplementary resources like the Study Guide.