Here's a bit of fun stuff.
In my film class we're watching Groundhog day, and using it as a springboard to the philosophies of the world. Our students (sadly) are getting no philosophy in their history classes (I asked, and apparently there is a review chapter in the beginning of the book, but the history teachers choose not to cover it). So my kids are a blank slate.
We covered all of philosophy (in a greatly abbreviated form) in about 20 minutes. Then we watched Groundhog day and traced Murray's character's evolution from rationalist (like the early Greeks, before they discovered irrational numbers), through Hedonism (Epicurus and the like), and a crisis of faith (could be Kierkegaard or an existentialist crisis- we discussed both- and nihilism- in the context of Phil's repeated suicides - and as luck would have it I have a Russian transfer student who has read Turgenev in Russian and who is willing to talk to my students about Nihilism !!!)
Then we move on to the resolution of the crisis, (at one point he says "I don't even exist anymore"- an entre to "I think therefore I am"), and his passage into being a full blown existentialist, and finally, I think we almost find him, at the end, a creature akin to the enlightened Buddha- which gave us a nice chance to talk about how existentialism and Buddhism differ, even though both accept that life is struggle.
It was an absolutely fantastic day. And at the end of it the kids decided whether they were absolutists or relativists. That was interesting- and before today they had never heard those terms. Next week we exchange trading cards of the great philosophers, and the week after that we create our own philosophy. One of my students suggested that we give the philosophers power numbers, just like pokemon have. I'm thinking we base the numbers on the google hits they get!!! Jesus will probably end up being the most powerful card :-) Damn it. |
