Posted by Braden
I'm normally not one to enjoy learning about dead people and old wars. My History of Creativity class, however, is pretty painless as far as history classes go. We skip over all of the boring aspects of ancient civilizations, as far as I am concerned, and learn instead about what creative innovations each of those leaders or civilizations made!
We recently had our first exam. The first section listed five ancient people/places/things, and we had to uniquely identify them in terms of something creative that they had done. The second section involved matching terms--not too difficult. The third section was a take home portion with the instructions "Write a fable of your invention, in the style of Aesop, in which the subject of the fable is life at BYU." And the fourth portion was my favorite: the essay section--but not a typical essay. Instead, we were told, "Oedipus has just found out that he married his mother and killed his father. Your assignment is to write down the advice that the following four people would give to him, were they there with him at that moment in time." And the four people were Confucius, Buddha, Aristotle, and a fourth whom we got to choose--I chose Alexander the Great.
I laughed as soon as I saw the prompt...and then again throughout the rest of that section of the exam. It just felt too much like the setup for a joke--"What did Confucius say to Oedipus?" And then right after that should be some pun or play on history to make everyone listening laugh. I did well on the exam, and wrote what I believe was some very profound Confucian, Buddhist, Aristotelian, and Alexandrian advice--but what a class, to ask such things! The variety of classes and information available here at BYU is truly incredible.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
3 comments:
Man, I would have loved that test. I don't know if I would have been able to choose between those philosophers! Out of curiosity, what did you put as Alexander the Great's advice? He had quite the interesting family life too...
Alexander's advice went something along the lines of:
"Come on, Oedipus--suck it up! I killed my father too, and look at how well I turned out! But you mustn't let the people lose confidence in you now--power is all about having the illusion of invincibility. Now go convince the people that you were led to do what you did by a divine influence, that heaven smiles upon you even now, and then DO something with your kingship that will leave a legacy of your leadership for years to come! I highly recommend conquering the known world, for example. :)"
There's my answer plus or minus a few ideas--I don't remember whether or not I added the smiley at the end though...? :)
As a former classical civilization major who has spent SEMESTERS studying Alexander...I must say. GREAT JOB! And frankly, he was led by divine influence to do that in some way, wasn't he? Oh Delphi...how the fates torture the ancient Greeks...
Post a Comment