153

There are many documented problems with student evaluations, but it is also clear that they are not going away any time soon. For me, the question is what use can I make of these when my goal is not tenure or promotion, but improvements for the next time I teach this course in a semester or a year. In my situation (as for others) the key is encouraging written responses. In this presentation I discuss presenting the evaluation goal to students through an articulation of course components, particularly readings, in-class activities, formal and informal assessments.

In this paper we want to probe the meaning of “Tough Love” in the classroom. We start with an attempt to define it and how it affects the instructor who uses this approach in the classroom. We ask what happens to our teaching evaluations and does this affect our own desire to pursue this approach or to give up using it? Then we examine the dynamic of using this approach in the classroom and talk about the students’ point of view as they respond to the instructor’s position.

Many of us may slightly dread the end of semester when we know that students are being encouraged to rate us as…what? Teachers, parents, entertainers, psychiatrists, fashion models, human beings? When the completed ratings reach our inboxes, we are perhaps nervous, and then hurt or even angry at some of what we read. One unfavourable comment can obscure twenty favourable ones, and a preponderance of unflattering comments can be crushing, whether we are new or grizzled veterans.

(Prof. Chrol apologizes for the earlier version of the title, which has now been updated. The title change will be addressed in the session)

This paper will serve as a defensive complement and bridge between the papers on working with administration to create an assessment narrative and on how to improve pedagogy. It will also highlight some of the issues raised in the past, present and future of Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) that heads the panel that relate to protecting instructors in relation administration, students as well as themselves. 

“Non autores, sed artes,” writes Gabriel Harvey in the margins of his copy of Lodovico Guicciardini’s Detti et Fatti (Venice, 1571, p. 18). Taking a cue from the imagined library in a contemporary satirical engraving of Harvey, which shows the Cambridge tutor among both classical texts (Cato, Cicero) and modern reference books (Calepinus’s Dictionarium, Nizolius’s Thesaurus, a floripoetae), this paper examines how quotations from ancient authors were similarly used to adorn their Early Modern hosts, serving the ends of both “art” and “authority.”

It may seem surprising, but Biblical translations into vernacular languages in the Reformation were deeply influenced by classical rhetoric. In William Tyndale’s case, his translations of the New Testament drew extensively on his knowledge of classical rhetorical techniques and frameworks, both in matters of style and interpretation. Tyndale framed his translation as a rhetorical composition in the simple style, hoping it would reach and resonate with as many English speakers as possible.

As scholars like Heinrich Plett (2012) have shown, the ancient concept of enargeia has a long and varied history, in part because of its conflation with Aristotelian energeia (Caloboli Montefusco 2005) and allied terms for visualization and description, like phantasia and ekphrasis (Goldhill 2007). There is, perhaps, a fruitful quality to the vagueness of “vividness” as a concept, as when the author of the treatise On Style (Περὶ Ἑρμηνείας) states simply that enargeia “arises from precise narration and leaving out or cuttin

The study of political communities in Archaic and Classical Crete is no longer a neglected field within ancient history and classical archaeology. Several monographs, archaeological (Wallace 2010), epigraphic (Gagarin and Perlman 2016) and historical (Seelentag 2015) attest to its relevance to wider interdisciplinary debates in the study of the ancient Mediterranean. The study of Cretan poleis now provides a useful counter-narrative to the excessive concentration on Athens and Sparta as the only political communities worthy of study.

A recent study of “East Greek” pottery of the archaic and Classical periods from coastal sites in southern Turkey, the Levant, Cyprus, and Egypt demonstrates that a significant portion of this pottery (almost 10%) was produced in central Crete (Gilboa et al. 2017). These vases provide for the first time archaeological evidence for commercial relations between Cretan communities and communities of the eastern Mediterranean in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.

After the Late Bronze Age settlement on the islet of Mochlos is abandoned in the middle of the 13th century B.C., there is no evidence of activity there until the early 7th century B.C.  (The islet was then still connected to the shore by a narrow peninsula.)  These nascent steps include acts of ancestral veneration in Late Minoan III tombs and in the abandoned houses of the Bronze Age settlement. The latter activity on the south side of the island is echoed by new occupation on the summit of the islet (Upper Mochlos) at about the same time or slightly later.