One of the new courses I’m doing this year – new to me, rather than to the curriculum – is the big survey course on Greek History: 160 first-and second-year students, forty hours of lectures (plus seminars, which are delegated to minions – I’m equally glad not to be doing an extra six hours every fortnight or even every week and sad not to see this side of the students’ development), starting in the Bronze Age and finishing somewhere yet-to-be-precisely-determined around the expansion of Rome into the eastern Mediterranean. No, the title of this post isn’t actually commenting on my knowledge of archaic Greece and the rise of the hoplite, to pick one of many possible examples – but it could be; I have been learning a lot over the last couple of months, refreshing some very out-of-date knowledge, and this is certainly one of the major reasons why this blog has been quiet of late…
The tricky thing about this course is that the forty hours of lectures are delivered in two-hour chunks. Why anyone has ever thought this is a good idea, I’m really not sure, but it’s the way things are usually done round here, and it’s…interesting. Now, I am entirely capable of talking non-stop for two hours, even about the rise of hoplite warfare and its relation to early constitutional development, and mid-term student feedback indicated that at least one person would be entirely happy if I actually did this – but from every pedagogical point of view, it’s a terrible idea. No one can concentrate continuously for that amount of time, let alone at half nine on a Friday morning; we could probably run an interesting experiment to see whether anyone at all retained any information whatsoever between minutes 12 and 97. And so we break up the information stream with breaks for discussion of key source material in small groups, which works as well as you’d expect in a group this size – a fair amount of talk, which may or may not actually be focused on what it’s supposed to be focused on, and then a fair amount of silence when we move to more general discussion.
Which could become very dull after a while. And so I find myself spending increasing amounts of time thinking of Silly Things To Do to give them – finding the sweet spot between gratuitous silliness and pedagogic validity. Initially I thought I could make use of the Poll Anywhere thing, mucking about with surveys and word clouds – but as yet I can’t persuade the university system to talk to it, which is not what you really want in the first lecture of term. And so I’ve fallen back on things that I know – so far, the Twine tool for creating interactive texts, and Survey Monkey for surveys – as there’s a better chance of me getting them to do what I want rather than being forced into their parameters.
There is of course another sweet spot to be found, between the amount of work needed to make something more or less acceptable (including learning how to use the whatever it is) and the amount of time needed to make it good (and the amount of time and energy I actually have available). So, for example, my ‘What kind of Spartan are you?’ quiz would be enormously improved with a load of appropriate images and a proper Buzzfeed vibe – but that is not something that can be easily done on the train on a Thursday evening with erratic WiFi; the hope is that the questions are sufficiently fun/silly/baffling to get people thinking about what’s involved – and emphasise the basic point that more or less everything we think we know about Sparta may be completely fictional.
Similarly with the ‘How to Become a Greek Tyrant’ game; it’s about setting out the range of different factors which might have been involved, with a limited number of choices (are you Solon? do you then abuse Solon’s authority?), rather than a remotely realistic reconstruction of the actual chances of success (the game offers slightly over 50% chance of becoming a tyrant, if that’s what you decide to do, which is probably not historically accurate. But hey, who knows?).
Anyway, I may update this post with whatever else I come up with for future classes (yes, let’s think about how an assembly of thousands of people might have worked without any sort of party organisation or formal procedure…), or write further updates in future. For the moment, here are the Silly Things To Do from the last two classes, for anyone who wants to use them or mess about with them…
Sphinx 
I know that Stanford’s Josiah Ober uses a polis-modeling game to draw students into the issues of Greek uniqueness and exceptionalism. You might look into it.