I can read your minds right now... "Who's the genius in charge of scheduling over there on the West Coast?!?!" Haha, nope, no slip-ups in the scheduling...all Saint Mary's faculty are required to teach in the Collegiate Seminar program, which is one of the unique aspects to the SMC curriculum. ALL undergraduate students are required to take four "Seminar" classes in which they read and discuss the great books. I'm actually really impressed with the students' ability to discuss these texts. The idea is they need to stick to the text - no bringing in their own experiences, lives, etc. That is the hardest part about it for me because I always tend to relate things to something I know about or something that has happened to me.
As you can imagine by my degree, I've never read any of these "great books" before (I only took one philosophy class in college, and that seems to be most similar to the type of things I'm reading for this course), so I have been devoting a LOT of out-of-class time to reading and trying to understand the texts so that I'm prepared for each class session. If I'm not writing as many blogs these days, it's probably because I've got my nose stuck in a book about evolution.
Here's a sampling of what I've read so far:
With that, I'm off to read 40 more pages of Darwin! Toodle-doo!
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