1.5 – Course Assignments (6 min video)

Transcript

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Well, finally today we’ll take a look at some of the nuts and bolts, some of the practicum stuff for this actual class. So you’ve probably already noted there are five lectures for each lesson. Those are intended that you actually watch those over the course of five school days in a given week, taking notes on each of those.

But I’d also encourage you to review your notes, not just prepare for the exams that I give you each week, but also to know this stuff, to become acquainted with it, to begin seeing things that you wanna read up on more, that you actually wanna pursue, because like everything else in this class, we’re just scratching the surface. There’s so much more. One of the ways we’ll actually dive a little bit more deeply is you’ll notice there are readings for each and every day. Often the readings that I give you are primary source readings, meaning they’re things from the time period we’re looking to, or at the very least, they’re related to the time period we’re looking to. These are often accompanied by a single question or two, but the point is that you actually read these deeply and that you think on them.

In fact, I would encourage you even to journal on them and give your responses to what you’re reading. That’s the whole purpose, to engage these things, to be thinking through them, not to come back and ask you test questions about them. One of the other assignments that you’ll be doing is called the portfolio. The portfolio is really simple. I want you to think of it as being like a visual scrapbook for this class. After all, the readings don’t have any pictures or illustrations with them, which perhaps you’ve been wanting. But for the scrapbook, that is something that actually is entirely visual. It’s an illustration of what we’re actually studying throughout the year. And so you’ll want to get something like a scrapbook or perhaps a drawing pad or maybe an online journal to use. And every week you should make an entry for that week’s lesson. It can include things like paintings or pictures of sculptures that connect to that time period or from that time period. It may include maps. It may include modern day photographs of ruins from that culture, from that place in the world. They may include things like quotes from someone who lived back then, like Confucius or perhaps Caesar Augustus. It might include a poem from the time or from a later time that talks about that era. It might include something else, maybe even song lyrics you’ve heard that somehow connect to the ideas or the culture that we talked about. Whatever the case may be, you should be looking for five different items that you can artistically arrange on a page for an entry. One thing to keep in mind, you do have another option, and that is something that my students often do. You can actually create an original artwork for each week. Students will often create a portrait of someone, some character from that week’s lesson. When they do that, I always tell them just make one item. But for however many items you have, you want to make sure each one has a caption that gives a basic explanation for what’s going on. You also want to make sure there’s a quote, at least, per each entry, so there’s some liveliness to the entry. Finally, there should be a title. You can use that week’s title if you want, or you can make up your own that fits whatever we talked about. All this should be done on good quality paper. It should be done with an attention to detail, with good craftsmanship. You should have a concern for the design of this. You should put together in a way that’s visually pleasing. If that means cutting things out and carefully pacing them, or if that means doing everything in a graphic design program, either way is fine.

It’s whatever you actually prefer. If you wanna do your own photographs, that’s fine too. But that’s one of the primary assignments be doing throughout the year. We’ll also have projects for each and every quarter, and I’ll go ahead and tell you today about the first quarter project. The first quarter project is to make an artistic rendering of the seven days of creation, which actually will be talked about in our second full lesson.

So you’ll want to watch that lesson before you actually begin this project. But the purpose of this project is to show what happened on each of the seven days in some artistic form or medium. So if you want to make seven drawings, that’s fine. You want to do seven different paintings or create seven photographs or perhaps a photograph collage of some kind. If you want to do a graphic design project, maybe with seven different images, I’ve had students do things like seven different wood carvings for this. I’ve had students make a song or some kind of composition with seven different movements to it. I’ve had students write seven different poems for this. I’ve had a student create an illustrated children’s book showing what happened on the seven days of creation with her own narration designed for young children. In other words, there’s a lot of ways you can actually tackle this project. The point is, you want to be accurate in showing what happened on each of the seven days And like every other project you’ll do for this class, you want to focus on it being something of high quality, something that has been well-crafted, something that shows you really put effort into it and you had some ambition to it.

That’s why I always tell my students the motto of Ramses the Great, who said, “Reward excellent failures, punish mediocre successes.” In other words, choose something that you think is interesting, something you actually want to pursue, something that is actually a little bit ambitious for you, and just go for it.

Don’t just go for the mediocre success. Anyway, take some time to think about it, watch those videos, and be thinking about what you might do for this first project.