This was a very valuable experience, and honestly, one that I will brag about for a while. Reading and hearing these texts in their original language was so interesting, and I’m really glad it could be in a small class setting. I’ve always liked small class sizes, and this group was great to work with. Moreover, taking this class with friends made it something I discussed and thought about a lot more than my other classes and I really enjoyed the variety of texts, people, and activities that we did to enhance our comprehension of these texts.
The Apodeixis presentation is one of my favorite assignments I’ve had through college so far. It was really interesting to see how different people chose their topic and how it reflected their individual interests. I really appreciate my classmates for sitting through my ramble about Dungeons and Dragons and how it connects to the class content, especially since it led to my favorite Erga. The other two Apodeixis presentations that really stood out to me were Audrey and Simone’s. Audrey and I are good friends out of class so I knew from hanging out with them how excited they were to do it, especially since it fell on Halloween (which I’m told is the most important holiday, behind world goth day). It was really cool to see how the goth music subculture connected back to the ancient world, and I learned a lot. The fragmented piece that they showed was so interesting and led me to further research on this new and exciting piece of history. Simone’s as well caught my interest because I love science-fiction. Most people consider Mary Shelley to be the first science fiction author, but I believe a case can be made for Lucian. One of my favorite parts of science fiction are the fantastic metaphors that form a thought-provoking commentary on society. I was really intrigued by the social commentary theory of True History’s lamp city and moon physiology. Particularly, the latter reminded me a lot of The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin and the ambisexual nature of the aliens.
As for my erga, I definitely let myself be creative in the assignments. I really appreciated the amount of choices we got to make in what we did and how we did it. Even given those choices, I ended up doing an Ergon Kainon, and making up my own activities. That one was my favorite because I got to engage with the course material while also having fun with my friends in my free time. I’m really thankful that we got that opportunity.
